RICHMOND--
Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party nominee for president, may win in two ways. (1) He may receive more electoral votes than Barack Obama and John McCain. He also may get down on all fours and outrun Big Brown over a mile and a quarter. Or (2) he may influence the profligate Republican Party, which he says "left me," to readopt the small-government principles of Ronald Reagan, who made him proud to be in the GOP.To effectively do that, the former Georgia congressman, who spoke here Monday at the Bull and Bear Club at the invitation of John Taylor's Tertium Quids, a libertarian advocacy group, must be part of the presidential debates. The cover charge to that stage is at least a 15 percent preference rating in several averaged national polls. Mr. Barr is now polling about 6 percent. Catch-22: Most voters are not thinking about Mr. Barr, in part because he has no national arena in which to declaim; but the perfect such arena is denied him because most voters are not thinking about him.
Mr. Barr is not the King of Charisma, a quality that helped, say, Jesse Ventura befuddle the two-party system. But he is not without notoriety: In the House of Representatives--which he reached partly because, as a U.S. attorney, he put another Georgia GOP congressman, the crooked Pat Swindall (who must have been named by Al Capp) in the jug--Mr. Barr launched impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair. He also was the first member of Congress to call for Mr. Clinton's resignation.
In Congress, Mr. Barr was mostly a conventional hard-right Republican, a nemesis of illegal drugs (including medical marijuana) and same-sex marriage, a supporter of the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act. He has attenuated or, more often, reversed his positions on those issues. He would leave marriage to the states, allow the legalization of therapeutic marijuana, pull from Iraq every troop this side of Marine embassy guards, and undo much of the Patriot Act, a civil-liberties shark he regrets ever having helped release into the waters of American civil liberties.
Mr. Barr, who is about as slick as Velcro but speaks sensibly and with apparent sincerity, most of all would shrink the federal government, returning it to its much more modest role envisioned by the Founders. There are indeed Americans who want to repeal the New Deal, as there are those who can abide neither Mr. McCain nor Mr. Obama. Moreover, 80 percent of voters think the country is headed downhill.
It's a testament to the pre-emptive power of the two-party system that Mr. Barr, chasing this swarm of dissatisfied citizens, is unlikely to net the magic 15 percent--which is also the decibel level needed to capture the country's, and his former party's, ear.