Similarly, in Connecticut—where the same problem arose—when a decision was made to restart petitioning with new names, and I was asked to file a letter authorizing replacement, I immediately filed the letter. If I had not, I would potentially also be on the ballot in CT.

Eric’s Response:

Mr. Phillies is correct in this assertion. He did send that letter. But then he proceeded to lobby all the CT Libertarian Party activists to sit on their hands and not to lift a finger to assist National from getting Barr/Root on the ballot there.

What Phillies did not count on was the courageous Andy Rule, State LP Treasurer. Rule, a Christian Libertarian, did not buckle under. He stepped forward and volunteered to single handidly run the drive. And that’s what he did, much to the detriment of his personal, and professional life, and to his health. Andy did not get more than 5 hours of sleep for the last week. (Luckily a couple of Ron Paul people not connected with the LP, and brand new Bob Barr supporters also stepped forward to help as volunteers.)

Phillies is a clever little man. He knows how to cover his tracks. He’ll do just enough to give the impression that he’s “on board.” Then behind your back, the knife gets slipped in.

I’ll take this a step further. The Nader petitioners were actively working against us Libertarians in many of the New England States, stealing our locations and blocking us from gathering signatures, as well as making promises to return favors to the LP by providing Notaries, and then bailing at the last minute.

There’s absolutely no evidence to indicate such, but I think it’s quite coincidental that both a Leftwing Libertarian like Phillies and hardcore Leftwingers like the Naderties, both worked to subvert the Barr for President ballot access efforts throughout New England these past few weeks.

Could a little behind the scenes coordination between the two camps have been involved?

After all, who would stand to benefit?

Nader and his followers could have hoped to succeed Barr in total ballot count, say 45 to 44, or so, thus giving him a media talking point.

Thank you for refraining from starting your last post “Dear Moron”. In a gesture of good will, I will refrain from starting this post with “Dear Pathological Liar.”

Apparently, according to your home state newspaper the Boston Globe i this article http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/08/15/a_place_on_the_ballot/ you’re not exactly doing all you could do to have Barr’s name placed on the ballot instead of yours in your home state. Not only that, but you haven’t exactly been discouraging the NHLP from substituting your name for that of Bob Barr either. Maybe the fact the Barr camapaign has had to deal with these unessesscary distratcions in New England, by, and I will say it again, SORE LOSERS, caused then to miss the ballot deadlline Maine or at least was one of the reasons why.

You’ve gone from being upset that Barr won to saying entered the race too late and the delegates were stacked for him. In other words your trying find excuses to deny his legitimacy as the LP nominee. If you had been that nominee would you appreciate it if Barr’s supporters were using his name instyead of your on the LP ballot in Georgia or in states across the South? Of course not, so why do act as if Barr campaign has a legitimate gripe that certain LP members haven’t exactly been loyal to the party nominee. I know, Ron Paul supporters aren’t exactly ready to join up with John McCain nor will some Hilary Clinton supporter back Barak Obama but at least they’re not engaging or turning a blind eye to or pretending not to notice act sabotage committed in their name.

And what will you gain by this destructive behavior Mr. Phillies? Do you honestly think four years from certain LP members will forget your actions in this regard? I doubt it. Do you think in four years time you’ll ride out the Barr/Root faction and you and Ruwart, Kubby and the gang will be back in the saddle with clubhouse all to yourself once again? Then the LP won’t be worth a damn.

I’m not a big fan of party schism on the non major party level because they can get ridiculous but there are serious division of opinion on what the LP should stand for and how it should operate and there disgruntled people willing to shoot their own to get their way. When that happens, then break-up is inevitable and in some cases welcome. There purist libertarian party now forming Mr. Phillies. If that what’s you want, by all means take advantage of it and leave the rest of the LP alone.

Put Bob Barr in the debates and he will instanly be above 15%

Let be real here

I don’t see how this is true when you compare it to other third parties like the Greens or Reform Party. I think the LP has a much greater focus on winning local elections (although it should probably be even higher).

...i don’t see much evidence of that..as evidenced by the FACT that in my lifetime i have met personally maybe eight or nine people who can honestly explain/understand the origin, nature, history, etc. of ‘the/a dollar’/’our’ system of money issuance, etc..

..that is, it appears, most/all peoples’ lives are consumed in the endeavor of acquiring, managing, etc…some ‘thing’ about which they are worse than butt-ignorant..

..darkne$$ prevail$, republicrats…ooga booga!

Be it his former associates (Ayers, Wright, etc..), outright racial bigotry or his documented 100% liberal voting record or both, people have a real problem with this guy. Every gun owner I know is damn near ready to go to war to stop him…yes, it is that bad. So McCain will win because people will be voting for the lesser of two evils…again.

The LP’s day will come, give it 8-12 years. People are starting to wake up. I did.

When you allude to Barr “stuffing the ranks of the delegates,” I believe you assume far too much. I saw no evidence of “convention packing”—the predicted buses full of “ringers” never showed up, and the faces filling the delegations were generally familiar to me from the 2004 and 2000 conventions. Sure, there were some new faces. There always are. But not some noticeably large number of them, and to be honest most of them I ran into were attending an LP national convention for the first time to support Ruwart or Gravel. Furthermore, most of the delegates had been selected by their states before Barr ever announced—many of them before he even formed his exploratory committee.

In the absence of evidence of packing or other nefarious activities, it’s reasonable to accept that Bob Barr received the LP’s 2008 presidential nomination because a majority of the delegates (many after their first choices were “weeded out”) decided that he was the best candidate. I think that majority made a bad decision, but I don’t think that decision was arrived at through the kind of corrupt methods you’re alleging.

Bob,

I understand that people are going to differ on the definition of “libertarian” and on what it means to run a libertarian campaign. That’s just the way it is. What I found more surprising than that Barr continued down policy paths that didn’t meet my own criteria in that regard was that he started running (and continues to run) a campaign that fails the “practical politics” criteria highly valued by the “reform” wing of the party.

I’m trying to be fair here—everyone with two or more neurons firing inside their crania knew that “we’ll raise $40-50 million and win the election” was stuff and nonsense and so I don’t use that as the zero point in judging his campaign—but frankly his effort so far is embarrassing.

Even Eric Dondero, who’s famous for putting his hype on steroids before letting it off the leash, has been reduced to setting the threshold for “success” as exceeding Ed Clark’s 1980 vote total—in an election likely to have half again as many voters and with no John Anderson analog running. A candidate like Barr, in an election like this one, should be looking at at least 2-3 million votes. I predicted some time back that he’ll pull 750-850k, and I’m beginning to wonder if I was too optimistic.

Also, I agree with Ayn R Kay (miss our monthly meetings, Buddy) that the Barr supporters have not helped his case. I really did give him a chance, but after a mild comment on another list was told to “Put up or shut up”. So, we can’t ask questions now? Too much like Bush regime for me.

Yeah, that’s what I said. Too much like the Bush regime for me.

What a brood of vipers we’re dealing with here…

Yet despite all of this the sore losers remain just that. Whether it’s George Phillies taking LP ballot spots in Massachucetts…”

I realize you seem to be a bit slow, but I will be patient. That’s why I am not opening my response ‘Dear Moron’.

When we started petitioning to put the Libertarian Presidential team on the ballot in Massachusetts—which, by the way is not spelled the way you think it is—we were told by the State Government that we could substitute whoever won at the National convention for whomever we did petitioning.

When the State government changed its mind, LPMA immediately told national about the situation.

The decision for Massachusetts to continue to petition for Phillies/Bennett, as opposed to restarting with Barr/Root, was made by Sean Haugh for the LNC. If you are unhappy that the LNC put me on the ballot here, for the moment, go whine at them.

Similarly, in Connecticut—where the same problem arose—when a decision was made to restart petitioning with new names, and I was asked to file a letter authorizing replacement, I immediately filed the letter. If I had not, I would potentially also be on the ballot in CT.

If Mr. Barr had wanted a party to unite behind him after he won the election, he needed to have entered the race well in advance and debated his opponents. His position on not appearing at the Jim Burns-organized debates at National, as reported elsewhere, namely that he would only debate real candidates, tended to kill the unification possibility.

Your assertion that people are sitting on their wallets is an insult to the donors, who despite the economy appear to be a bit ahead at this point to their donations four years ago to Mike Badnarik.

Having said that, Barr’s statement advocating to protect discrimination against women in particular Federal programs, as opposed to proposing to end the programs, certainly crossed my acceptability line.

Phillies

But more importantly, Libertarian Bob Barr gets 5%. He also beats Ralph Nader in the poll, by 3 points, 5% to 2%.

5% in Texas is a pretty damned large number.

Do you all realize, that alone could equal hundreds of thousands of votes? Texan Libertarian Presidential candidate Michael Badnarik got 383,000 nationwide in 2004. Bob Barr could get nearly the same number of votes in Texas as Badnarik got nationwide, if these poll numbers hold.

Amazing!

It’s Republicans these days who are calling for a repeal of seat belt laws, opposing smoking bans, supporting an end to affirmative action, and standing firm against political correctness.

Thus, Barr is by definition a “libertarian.”

Let’s remember the First expressly political Libertarian in history – Barry Goldwater – was a Republican.

By actually getting more than 1% in the polls (and higher than that in some cases) Barr is actually doing better than most libertarian candidates have at the midway points. He certainly has had far more media attention than any other. We’ll have to wait until the end to see about the fundraising.

Yet despite all of this the sore losers remain just that. Whether it’s George Phillies taking LP ballot spots in Massachucetts and New Hampshire or bloggers writing poison pen articles or people sitting on their hands and their wallets, apparently the purist faction could teach PUMA to Hilary Clinton supporters.

Why should Barr and his team bring in people who haven’t elected anyone to so much as county dog catcher anywhere? It would be nice sure and perhaps tactful but not absolutly necessary. As for Ron Paul, some of them are suppporting Barr and some are not. The Paul campaign was a very diverse group of people and not all of them were libertarians. It should also be pointed out that many libertarians did not support Paul either for largely the same reason they don’t support Barr, that he’s too Republican.

The only delusional people are those Libertarians purists who think that after over 30 years in existence that they’re just one magic formula away from being a major party. Build from the ground up? Don’t you think someone out there in LP World would have figured that out by now? Or maybe (perish the thought to some of you), just maybe, there aren’t that many libertarian puritans out there, at least not enough to build a serious national party.

There are people who lean libertarian on certain issues from a right or left perspective. The problem is, you’re never going to convince to join a party where one must be all libertarian all of the time. The only way the LP is going to grow is by picking off chunks of the libertarians leaners from one of the major parties. Barr is trying to do this from a Republican perspective (Gravel would done so from a Democratic perspective if he was nominated). There are a lot of disaffected Republicans out there. It would make sense to nominate a candidate who could appeal to them and not to anarchists. Maybe Bob Barr is not your cup of tea, but if he does get over 1% and more importantly keeps John McCain out of the White House, then he will have accomplish more than any LP nominee ever has and the possibilites from such a showing for the future are endless.

But if that upsets your puritan proclivities, fine then. The Boston Tea Party awaits for your donation.

My God, you have thought that after Michael Badnarik (not just his Presidential camapaign but his awful Congressional camapaign too) that going in a different direction wasn’t just a necessity, it was imparative.