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Libertarian Presidential candidate is getting exposure

Bob Barr is looking more and more to have been an excellent choice to carry our banner this year. He is getting the sort of serious media coverage we have only dreamed of despite us working towards it for decades. Ron Paul’s run for the Republican ticket earlier this year has probably had a great deal to do with it.

On Sunday Bob appeared on CNN’s Newsroom and ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos

That is a lot of media impressions so I really have to congratulate him on a sterling start to the Libertarian Presidential Campaign. His job is not to win. That is just not possible yet. He is an educator who is out there to introduce our ideas to a mass audience for which a message of individual liberty is a novel experience. Bob is delivering in spades.

It is a good thing too: this is a message the general public will certainly will never hear from ‘the other guys’.

14 comments to Libertarian Presidential candidate is getting exposure

  • Nick F

    CNN and ABC are not giving Bob Barr exposure because he is a good carrier of the libertarian message, but rather because the MSM needs him to siphon off of few more percentage points from John McCain to ensure an Obama victory. The five point spread that Obama has over McCain is just too close for their comfort.

  • Dale Amon

    It is no skin off my back if they help us grow. If that is indeed their intent rather than delivering news, then they are making a serious mistake in the long run by making us bigger.

    Also, our votes have to come from somewhere and mostly they are going to be votes McCain (the anti-Bill Of Rights and particularly anti-First Amendment candidate and father of McCain-Feingold) would not see anyway. Like mine, as I stated clearly several years ago. I wouldn’t vote for McCain if he were running against Cthulu. I intend to campaign for his defeat right up through when I get to cheer his concession speech.

    I suspect the Dems are in for a surprise though. We’re going to pick up a lot of the Paul crowd and they would have been Democrat voters in a previous election. There is a huge disaffectation with the status quo and this is our opportunity to make a move.

    Hell, I don’t care if we break the Republican party up. That would be fine: we’d pick up the pieces that are libertarian-like.

    We can never become a major party without kicking someone’s butt in the election… so let the arse-kicking begin!

    Who knows? Maybe they’ll actually give our State by State totals on election night this year so I can join the fun watching the network TV instead of hanging out on the Party web site.

    I am starting to look forward to this November.

  • jk

    I could not disagree more. Rep. Barr is a good man, but he comes off as an opportunist LP candidate after a very un-libertarian House career. He lacks the charisma to educate.

    What the LP needs is not more exposure, they need to clean a few of the crazies out and present a comprehensive governable plan.

  • jk

    And yeah McCain vs. Cthulu is close. McCain vs. Obama, I’ll pull the ‘R.’

  • Remember, the media pumping up Bob Barr to hurt McCain at the margins, is a double edged sword for them. Yes, 9 out of 10 votes for Barr come directly out of the GOP column.

    However, Barr also works to expand the political spectrum. The more the libertarian message is heard by the masses, the more of an extreme Communist/Fascist Barack Hussein will appear to be.

    McCain will look like the reasonable Centrist that he is, with Barr to his Right and Obama to his Far Left.

    It’s a devil’s game the liberal media is playing. They may end up causing more damage to their candidate then they bargained for.

  • makenshin

    Yes, Barr is getting a lot of coverage as of late. Many of us on Digg have been trying to work the Libertarian candidate there as well (Barr’s campaign even has a staffer running his account there).

    I have to say that the media will be surprised where Barr’s support comes from. If the Libertarian party didn’t have a candidate in this, I would have been voting for Obama, as I could never bring myself to vote for McCain and in many ways the other Republican candidates who were running. Many of us who support Barr do not expect him to win, but we can hope. Especially with Zogby’s latest poll putting Barr at 6% nationally, with Nader only at 2%.

    If nothing else, at least the Libertarian party has a good chance to more than double it’s non-sustaining members (the fee can be a bit of a turn off for many) and help many others to see the libertarian light.

    And on a closing note; what is with the HTML usage message to Mozilla, Mac and Linux users below? Good to spread HTML knowledge, but the push-buttons work just fine on Mozilla Firefox. Unless of course it’s just sarcasm, hard to tell from the ‘who are we?’ description, since it appears the people here at least have a sense of humor.

  • Laird

    My hope is that Barr’s polling numbers are high enough that he gets invitated to participate in at least some of the presidential “debates”.* That would really expose the electorate to the libertarian message!

    * In quotes because they aren’t true debates by any reasonable definition.

  • Kim du Toit

    Barr will pull a few hundred thousand votes, maximum. Just like all the other Libertarian candidates have pulled, since time immemorial.

    Barr’s only benefit will be to increase the likelihood of a President Obama, just as Nader’s runs increased likelihoods of President Bush and will do the same (in 2008) of President McCain, and as Perot did for a President Clinton.

    If Barr was that attractive a candidate, he should have declared early in the primaries, so everyone could have judged him and his positions on their merits. He may even have been a more compelling Libertarian candidate than everyone’s favorite crank, Ron Paul.

    But to support him now “because he’s the only Libertarian candidate” is about as thin and superficial a rationale as any I’ve ever seen.

    He’s just a shallow little opportunist, and he’ll end up as a flyspeck on the electoral windshield.

    Just like all the Libertarian candidates have ended up.

    You guys need to get a clue. Libertarianism is not a valid philosophy for social or political governance. It is a marvellous apparatus of conscience, and a mirror to hold up to the statists as they whittle away at the principles of freedom.

    But it’s no more than that. Never has been, never will.

  • Dale Amon

    If you believe we are only going to pull a few hundred thousand votes (votes which would certainly have stayed home or that are core LP voters anyway) then you can’t possibly believe we are a threat to Republicans. In that case we would have absolutely zero effect on the election.

    On the other hand, if we are a threat to Republicans, it will only be because we are pulling votes from them and that will imply they have picked a bad candidate and people simply do not want to vote for him.

    Not that I really care what the Republican leadership thinks, mind you. Or the Democrats. I think we’ll be pulling a fair number of votes off them this election as well.

  • Ian B

    Well done Kim Du Toit! It’s not often I see a comment so badly argued and threadbare of logic as yours here on Samizdata, so thanks for bringing a bit of variety to the monotony of high quality debate we have to suffer normally. I was particularly impressed by the way you just thrust that dismissal of liberty in there, as if it followed logically from a carefully built argument- quite a technique, I must try it!

    Indeed, milk is repellent and should be banned.

  • FreeStater

    Remember, the media pumping up Bob Barr to hurt McCain at the margins, is a double edged sword for them. Yes, 9 out of 10 votes for Barr come directly out of the GOP column.

    Well, as a former Democrat (I became a Libertarian in 1992), I can say that not all Libertarians come from the right.

    If we can educate Democrats about economics, we can probably convert them more easily than we can the few remaining members of the Never saw a pointless war we didn’t like unless it was started by Clinton party. Hell, they even like the pointless wars started by Wilson and Kennedy/Johnson. (FDR’s war, like Afghanistan, doesn’t qualify, since we were attacked — and actually responded to the proper countr(y|ies).

  • Paul Marks

    Of course the mainstream media people are having former Congressman Barr on their shows in the hope of pulling votes away from John McCain – that is politics 101.

    However, Bob Barr could serve a valid educational purpose (as Dale hopes) if he uses the exposure to make clear libertarian points:

    For example:

    “John McCain only wants to limit the out-of-control entitlement programs by reforming them in various [normally Cato Institute moderate inspired] ways – I hold them to be both unconstitutional, economically and socially fatal, and a moral evil”.

    If former Congressman Barr says things like that and if he is given a chance to explain what he means (a big “if”) even I would have to admit that he was serving a valid educational purpose.

  • Jon

    Ummm

    Barr is not even a Libertarian. Many of the Libertarians over here are pretty disgusted with his being selected. The Republicans are invading my party.

  • Laird

    Disenchanted Republicans have always been the primary source of new LP members (I came that route myself), so it is foolish to complain that they are “invading” the party. I will agree that Bob Barr was previously (when he was a Georgia Congressman) a fairly authoritarian Republican, and I have had my doubts about his Libertarian bona fides. However, in the couple of years he’s been a LP member I have watched him pretty closely (he is the LNC rep from my region), and he has been saying and doing mostly the right things. I supported his nomination (perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I could not have supported any of the other candidates), so I for one was happy with the selection.