Third Party Watch

The dust hasn’t even settled from Obama’s apparent nomination win and the first commentary I’m seeing has a very interesting message: Bob Barr Democrats!

Eric Blankenburg writes:

My guess is that [Obama] is going to be the next President. Not because he’s so great. Rather because George Bush has ruined the party that Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, Dick Armey, and others tried to build.

Obama has a big challenge ahead, namely that white, blue collar voters in the industrial Midwest don’t seem to be inclined to vote for him. The big question for Bob Barr is how he turns these “Reagan Democrats” into “Barr Democrats”.

One thing that Barr should propose is to bring our troops home to save our manufacturing base. The U.S. spends countless billions of dollars every year stationing troops in Japan and South Korea. These countries respond by doing everything they can to put GM, Ford, and Chrysler out of business. They are able to compete effectively because their total tax burden is significantly smaller than ours, in part because we are subsidizing their military defense. We need to end the huge defense subsidy that American taxpayers are shelling out to over to 130 countries around the world and then use the savings to cut taxes to help make us more competitive.

We know why McCain won’t propose this—he admittedly doesn’t know squat about the economy and he is too vested in his antiquated Cold War view of the world to make any real change. I do find it very odd that Obama won’t talk about this either. Perhaps his elitist roots make him too tone deaf to the plight of blue collar Americans to care.

This gives Barr an opportunity to win over a lot of folks who voted for Hillary in the primary, while upholding our libertarian American values at the same time.

There is more from three leading D-Media sources: DailyKos, MyDD and HuffPo.

We’ll start at HuffPo:

Now it’s time for reflection and unity. We must all think about the horrible things that the Clintonistas and their serpent-tongued mouthpieces have said over the past five months and uniformly agree that if Obama picks that viperous backstabbing race-baiting, sexism-card-playing homo-sapien for VP, we will vote for Bob Barr.

Sorry Nader, you’re older and crazier than McInsane.

DailyKos (which also has a Bob Barr poll on the posting):

An acquaintance of mine is a lifelong Republican. Being a strong social conservative, he was and is an ardent supporter of Mike Huckabee. He supported George Bush in both elections despite opposition to the Iraq war. Following McCain’s crapfest and Obama’s victory speech tonight, here is what he had to say about McCain:

I like Obama’s communication and he seems like he is willing to reach across party lines. I don’t like any of his policies besides Iraq though.

McCain feels like he will just be Bush Term 3. I got burned once before I don’t want to again.

I’m leaning towards Bob Barr at the moment. Useless vote, probably but the two party system in America needs to change.

MyDD:

The Ron Paul Revolution is going to shift into the Bob Barr Revolution. From the sites I lurk at many of the Paulites like Bob Barr, the are suspicious of him but they like his new stances. I’ve read on RonPaulForums that people think he can legitimize the lib. party. This would take a good 2% from John McCain. I haven’t seen any of the Paulites there that like McCain.

Over in RonPaulWarRoom they have endorsed Barr and he has written guest posts.

The RonPaulForum isn’t as enthusiastic, but are welcome to the idea if he gets a Paul blurb.

Checking out the Youtube (which the Paulbots dominate) I saw that Barr fever hasn’t hit there yet like Ron Paul fever but I see the beginnings of a fever.

Finally the news from the hobbit himself, Ron Paul.

Newsweek did an interview with him and:

He hates John McCain
He calls Barr an ally
He is only a republican becasue it gives him a platform to talk about liberty
He is planning on having a rally at the convention, but not disrupt things, but try to get wacky stuff into the platform
He basically tells them to go with their minds for their vote (aka don’t vote McCain)

Even Democratic Underground is throwing some kudos in Barr’s direction for telling racists where to stick their burning crosses. Gay rights articles are talking about Barr’s road to Damascus moment.

While conventional wisdom indicates that Barr will get more votes from the right than from the left, polling data already suggest a significant amount of Democratic support for Barr. Rasmussen (pre-nomination, nationwide) reports only two percent more support from the right than from the left:

Barr picked up 7% of the Republican vote, 5% of the Democratic vote, and 5% of the unaffiliated vote. participants to choose between Barack Obama, John McCain and some other candidate.

In this three-way poll in North Carolina, Barr had 2 percent more Democratic votes than Republican ones.

In Barr’s home state of Georgia, Barr’s Republican support only outpaces his Democratic support by 2.4 percent. Even before Barr won the LP nomination, Real Clear Politics placed red state Georgia on their battle ground state list because of the Barr factor.

It’s also important to remember that Barr, like Ronald Reagan, started off as a Democrat.

Crosstabs from the initial exploratory committee survey (Disclosure: I wrote the questions) indicate that Barr picks up support in this manner: Clinton nine percent, Obama three percent and McCain two percent (independents earn a whole lot more).

Let’s not forget that McCain’s VP pick is important here, too. From NovaTownHall:

A McCain-Huckabee ticket would be a huge boost for Bob Barr, but I think the McCain campaign has already decided to write off a bunch of traditionally Republican voters.

Also important are people who might strategically donate to Barr, but not vote for him.

Here’s the bottom line. If you were a Clinton supporter but can’t stand Obama, we’ll happily take your support. If you think (as a liberal or conservative) that the Iraq situation sucks, we’ll take your support. If you wish to decrease government spending and balance the budget, we’ll take your support, too. If you don’t wish for your children and grandchildren to be saddled with perpetual debt, we love you too.

A lot of us are merely mainstream Americans with children, mortgages, and a desire to escape it all on the weekend while the economy continues to tank.

It’s time to to stand for principle. I’ll urge my Dem friends with a modicum of principle to consider the alternative and principled choice: Bob Barr.

This entry was posted by Stephen Gordon on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 2:36 am and is filed under Opinion, Libertarian Party, Presidential Race, Bob Barr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.