Ed Clark, the Libertarian Party's (L.P.) 1980 candidate for president, has died at age 95.
Clark, a Harvard Law graduate who for much of his career practiced corporate law for Arco in Los Angeles, brought a calm normalcy to his libertarian messaging in his two prominent runs, famously trying to define this then-clandestine political philosophy as "low-tax liberalism" to explain his combination of fiscal prudence, foreign policy restraint, and mostly letting people make their own personal choices.
His first unprecedented political success for the ideology came with his 1978 run for governor of California. Because of ballot access complications, he was not on the ballot as a labeled Libertarian but ran a Libertarian-branded campaign of libertarian ideas. (Clark had already been the first chair of New York state's Free Libertarian Party in 1972 and state chair of the California L.P.) David Boaz, later executive vice president of the Cato Institute, worked on that campaign, and recalled about it that:
