Libertarian Presidential candidate Bob Barr takes aim at swing states

From the
Associated Press. This is the exact opposite of the “safe states” strategy the Green Party pursued in 2004, as well as some others in the past.

ATLANTA (AP) — Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr has been careful to choose spots where he can hurt his former party the most in the run-up to Election Day, which is why his list of recent campaign stops reads more like a list of battleground states.

The ex-Republican representative is eyeing Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Georgia, states where the presidential race hangs in the balance and where he sees “an opportunity for a real impact.”

In some ways, his longshot presidential bid is as much about sending a signal to the GOP as it is about earning a respectable showing for his Libertarian Party.

“If the Republican Party hasn’t gotten its message already, I don’t think it will,” he said. “The message is: Y’all have no vision, no message. And that’s why we’re running this campaign.”

Some Republicans worry that Barr could play spoiler in a close election if he draws disaffected conservatives from Republican John McCain. Barr has in recent weeks latched onto the $700 billion bailout as evidence that both major parties are addicted to spending.

But in the run-up to the election, Barr has seen little bounce in the polls. An Associated Press-GfK poll out last month had Barr capturing about 1 percent of likely voters, the same amount he had pulled three weeks earlier.

Barr has remained positive, saying that he is confident he will earn enough votes so his party can “play with the big boys.”

“My goal is to have a significant piece of the popular vote so the other two parties cannot ignore the message of the Libertarian Party — which is significantly smaller government,” said Barr. He said polling near 4 percent in a handful of key votes would help achieve that goal.

A former federal prosecutor, Barr built a national following in the 1990s for aggressively pursuing President Clinton’s impeachment.

He won the Libertarian Party nomination in May after becoming disillusioned with what he saw as unchecked growth of government and federal intrusions into personal privacy under Bush.

As the election grew closer, Barr has sharpened his attacks on McCain in hopes that frustrated fiscal conservatives will join his anti-government crusade. In one missive to supporters, he declared McCain’s campaign over and called his message “mixed and angry.”

On the eve of the election, Barr was campaigning furiously in Georgia, the state that sent him to Congress four times and where he still enjoys a significant name recognition. He hopes to poll well in the Peach State, but harbors no illusion it will send him to the White House.

“That would be an awfully long long-shot,” he said. “And I’m not holding my breath.”

George Dance writes in Nolan Chart:

As Election Day nears, third parties are dropping in the polls, as usual in a U.S. presidential election. Various theories have been advanced to explain that well-known phenomenon. Mine is that one cause is the drop-off of national press and (especially) television coverage — the notorious “main stream media blackout” (MSMB) on all but the Democratic and Republican candidates. Thanks to the MSMB, most voters who have been impressed during an election cyle by a third party candidate will have simply forgotten about that candidate by November 4.

The Barr campaign is suffering from that, but with an added twist. In the face of a national blackout, third parties tend to run their campaigns to maximize local press and TV; Barr’s (and Nader’s) have been paradigm examples this year. Even here, though, Barr’s bucket has been coming up dry recently.

For instance, on Oct. 22 Barr spoke at the University of Cincinnati, a type of venue that in the past has resulted in good local press. This time, though, there was no local coverage at all. Only one newspaper reported on the event at all: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which had embedded reporter Jill Vejnoska was in the Barr campaign for the day.

So what happened? What kept Barr out of the papers and off the air that day? Vejnoska tells us exactly what happened; at the same time as, and a few short miles from where, Barr is speaking,

The campaign plane touches down and John McCain emerges to the booming chorus of “Eye of the Tiger” and the raucous cheers of 3,000 supporters. TV cameras record every “Joe the Plumber”-referencing moment by the Republican presidential nominee, whose airport rally will dominate local newscasts.

Which it did. As a result, Barr was completely blacked out.

Barr had expected that. “The two states we just found out about today are Ohio and New Hampshire, where McCain apparently added stops to his schedule in order to shadow us,” he had told the Washington Times the previous day. Barr claimed that the McCain camp was shadowing him as deliberate policy, because they are afraid of him spoiling McCain’s chances in swing states like those, “the critical ones, in which the gaps between Senators McCain and Obama are smaller than what we are polling.”

A McCain spokesman shrugged off the claim. However, it is undeniable that the GOP has been worrying about Barr’s spoiler impact since he became the Libertarian nominee. A variety of Republican luminaries, including Newt Gingrich, spent the summer publicly and privately asking Barr to withdraw.

It is also certain that they had a reason to worry — several constituent parts of the GOP base have had serious problems with a McCain candidacy, as shown by (for one example) the sharply increased late-primary vote for Ron Paul — and that the Barr campaign has been targetting just those constituencies for just that reason.

Bob Barr also, as I discovered in May, went on the enemies list of Karl Rove (who has been pulling strings in the campaign since Bush’s anointing of McCain in April) back in 2002, due to Barr’s early leadership role in the campaign against the USA PATRIOT Act. From what I’ve read, once one goes onto that list, one stays on. .

Rove is reportedly the man behind the talk-show blackout of Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik in 2004. As reported after that election, the GOP had threatened to blackball any host who booked Badnarik. A similar story may come out this time; as of now, we have only the fact that (after a promising two appearances on Colbert) Barr has had next to no talk-show face time. Book Bob Barr, and you don’t get Sarah Palin; what host could be expected to stand up to that?

Palin’s very selection owes much to the perceived Barr threat. McCain’s vision, from the start, was to run a bipartisan campaign with former Democratic Vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman as his running mate, and he held to that until almost the end of August. He caved only after Gingrich went public with the warning that that ticket would be dead on arrival. Gingrich’s prediction: if Lieberman were nominated, Barr would take 15% of the vote.

It is certainly fair to say that the Republicans have done their best to minimize the impact of Barr’s candidacy, and that they have succeeded in many of the conventional areas. The “Barr Buzz” that I wrote about so hopefully in May is long gone, replaced by the “Barr Blackout.”

Barr has been trying different things to shine his light through that blackout. Some have been embarrassing, as when he tried to capitalize on the “Joe the Plumber” nonsense by temporarily dubbing himself “Bob the Builder.” But one move of his was inspired.

Barr has begun blogging at the widely-read (1.2 million visitors last month, per Compete) online magazine, Townhall. He has been using that platform to make one last direct appeal to his targeted GOP constituencies, even (or especially) if that means dealing a final blow to the McCain campaign.