Interview by David Weigel in Reason:
WASHINGTON—”Life was a bitch,” says Bob Barr.
We are sitting in the coffee nook at the Mayflower Hotel, the aged Washington, D.C. institution where, some 76 years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote his first inaugural address. We are not yet talking about the campaign for president that Barr finished in fourth place with 512,000-odd votes. Barr is talking about his habit of downing a high-single-digit number of espressos every day, and how hard this was before Starbucks came along.
“Most countries I’d lived in had cultures of much heavier coffee,” Barr explains. “In South America you’ve got café con leche. In the Middle East you need a knife and fork to drink the coffee. It was hard to get strong coffee here—I was delighted when Starbucks made it big.”
Barr is in Washington to speak with fellow alumni of Georgetown Law School at a meeting of the Federalist Society, and to build up the client list for Liberty Strategies, his consulting firm. “I absented myself from producing income for about eight months,” Barr says. “I’m a working stiff.” Hence the coffee, and hence a packed schedule that’s meant to introduce Barr to the people who can get him back in the black.
Over the course of a six-month campaign, Barr spent more time than he might have liked dealing with intra-Libertarian squabbling, lower-than-expected fundraising numbers, and what his running mate Wayne Allyn Root called “the ghost of Ron Paul”—persistent media attention on the indecisive Republican candidate who, contrary to some expectations, did not endorse the Libertarian ticket. Over coffee, Barr hashed out how he got the nomination, what went right and wrong, and what he’s doing now.
reason: What did you get out of your stint in the Libertarian National Committee?
Bob Barr: From my standpoint, it gave me an opportunity I’ve not had before to learn the personalities in the Libertarian Party, and to learn the structure of the party. It gave me the opportunity to assure at least some Libertarians that I wasn’t a Trojan horse. I wasn’t a Republican trying to use the Libertarian Party to further the Republican agenda, or some such nonsense. I think I accomplished that working with the LNC.
reason: There are still LP members who aren’t satisfied—less than there were in May, but various voices on the web who make this argument.
Barr: In any political movement you’re never going to be able to satisfy everybody. Reagan didn’t. I really don’t think that anybody with a straight face could make that argument now. I really don’t. Which does not mean that everybody in the Libertarian Party loves Bob Barr. I doubt that that’s the case. I do think that over the course of the campaign, the people that we worked with, the issues that we presented, I think gave lie to any lingering doubts that I was not a Libertarian.
reason: In December of last year, you proposed, and the LNC passed, a resolution asking Ron Paul to drop his GOP bid and run as the Libertarian candidate. Was that more for attention, or was it a real attempt to get him to run?
Barr: I meant it exactly how it was worded. I saw at that point, and I don’t think anyone saw otherwise, that Ron was not going to get the Republican nomination. He had, in fact, built up a significant amount of public attention, a persona as a libertarian with a small l, and my thought was, “Let’s make a serious effort here, an honest effort to get him formally back into party and take advantage of what he’s done.” At the time, had he taken advantage of it, it would have been a significant boost for him and the Libertarian Party.
Interview continues here.
We haven’t seen anything bad about life yet. Just give the left-wing illuminati a chance, and things will get worse.
Yep, no doubt whatsoever….
reason: You and Root both spoke frequently about bringing conservatives into the Libertarian Party from the GOP. Are you still focused on that?
Barr: First things first. I’m not going to bring anybody into an organization unless that organization is ready for it, has the groundwork laid for it, has a degree of receptivity to make it productive to bring them in. There’s a lot of work that has to be done to move the party down the road it started on under [former executive director] Shane Cory into a truly professional viable political entity. There are still those in the Libertarian Party that do not want to go down that road, and there are some in the party that will have to make an important decision about that: whether they want to build themselves into a professional viable political party, or whether they don’t.
If so, we’ve got a tremendous opportunity to increase the size, power, influence of the party. The Republican Party is in absolute disarray. And I think it’ll get worse for them. I don’t even think they’ve even reached bottom yet. If the Libertarian Party were at the point I’d like to see it at, we could shine in this atmosphere. We’d be on the news, media would seek us out, to provide the counterbalance that no one else is capable of doing.
“Barr: I meant it exactly how it was worded. I saw at that point, and I don’t think anyone saw otherwise, that Ron was not going to get the Republican nomination. He had, in fact, built up a significant amount of public attention, a persona as a libertarian with a small l, and my thought was, “Let’s make a serious effort here, an honest effort to get him formally back into party and take advantage of what he’s done.†At the time, had he taken advantage of it, it would have been a significant boost for him and the Libertarian Party.”
Yes, because Ron Paul looked like he was about to win the Republican nomination in late May? What a genius idea.
“I do think that over the course of the campaign, the people that we worked with, the issues that we presented, I think gave lie to any lingering doubts that I was not a Libertarian.”
Yes, there’s no doubt left.
Dont smoke, but I hear they’re great!
What about the cigars? 🙂
So…to wrap it up. I love cuban food, cuban culture, cuban art, cuban exiles. The only things I dont like that concern cuba are…Cuba’s current political policy, the embargo of that nation, and the exile community’s harsh politics.
Like? love!
My wife is cuban, for those who didnt know. Her father was on the last Freedom Flight out of Cuba and is now a Dean at a certain major college in the Northeast.
It was his story that led me to first read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom…and i’ve never looked back.
Trent, likes something Cuban? Obviously he is moving towards communism, possibly even Catholic Trotskyism!
I’m just waiting for Coke to put the coke back in Coca-Cola.
Cuban Coffee is far preferable to anything Starbucks can crank out.
He likes 5-shot lattes (as do I), and drinks several a day. What do you recommend?
I’ve tried snorting no-doz, but it just doesn’t absorb well – I end up sneezing it out.