Jake Porter was Bob Barr’s Iowa Campaign Coordinator and is a longtime Libertarian Party activist. He recently penned an interesting piece on the successes and failures of Bob Barr’s campaign for President as a Libertarian.
Shortly after the Bob Barr 2008 Presidential campaign ended, I received many questions regarding both the successes and failures of the campaign. After all, I was an early opponent of Bob Barr, was in Kansas City, Missouri when Bob announced his exploratory committee, and was in Denver when he finally won the nomination. In fact, Bob received my delegate vote every round after George Phillies was defeated. In my humble opinion, Bob Barr is a very good man and he had the best intentions of the Libertarian Party in mind when running. In this article, I will try to present both the successes and failures of the campaign in a non-confrontational or condemning manner.
More here.
I have to agree with Jake about the Barr campaign’s lack of advertising.
Advertising makes a campaign seem more credible. Badnarik was NEVER mentioned in the media until the last couple of days of the ’04 campaign, when he started some paid TV ads. IMO, Barr’s early positive media was BECA– USE it was believed his campaign would have some advertising in the near future.
And advertising can be bought very cheap. Nader in ’04 ran one ad I am aware of. His MasterCharge parody ad was run once (early in the campaign) on the NBC Sunday show, but was repeated hundreds of times throughout the campaign on other shows for free. Recently PETA supposedly tried to run an ad on the SuperBowl, but was turned down because it was considered too racy. But the ad was shown repeatedly on every news and commentary show (for free) for weeks.
With all the clever people in the LP, we should be able to do something similar.
PEACE
Witmer,
We’ve all seen your side of the story. Ferel frree to link the NFV comments, but dont replicate them here, im tired of reading the same old crap over and over again.
An interesting survey showing our current circumstances is found at
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/03/pdf/political_ideology.pdf
Unlike many surveys, ‘Libertarian’ and ‘Progressive’ were included as alternatives to ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’. Progressive and Conservative are roughly evenly tied among Americans. Interestingly, conservatives rank libertarians as being little better than liberals, while young liberals have the most positive image of libertarians.
Thanks Jake for that excellent lessons learned report. And thank you for all the hard work you put in on the Barr LP Campaign. I hope to meet you in person sometime.
I wouldn’t trust Bob Barr as far as I could spit at him.
One Jake to another: Just call me. You’ve got a lot of the facts about WV plain wrong. If I get no phone call, I will repost the facts that I have already posted at LFV here. I won’t shut up about the truth until someone takes the truth seriously. Peace.