Opposition to Barr/Root in the Libertarian Party

David Weigel reports on some of the remaining nay-sayers within the Libertarian Party after the Bob Barr nomination over the weekend:

On the way out of the Denver convention, defeated candidate and Massachusetts party chair George Phillies pulled me aside to express how worried he was about the Barr/Root ticket. "This is a train wreck," he said. "My delegation is majority pagan. Nominating this man is the equivalent of nominating an Imperial Wizard of the KKK to lead a party of African Americans." Phillies raised the possibility of a Massachusetts LP convention that would nominate a new candidate at the top of the ticket, like author L. Neil Smith. And as I left, I heard a rumor that Arizona might do the same thing.

I think this would amount to local party suicide. The only thing all LPers agree on right now is that Barr, by dint of his fame and national media pull, could get more votes than any previous candidate. In most states, a certain vote total will get a party guaranteed ballot access. Nominating an unkown, especially when low-information voters will head to the polls expecting to see Barr, would drive down vote totals.

This really gets to the heart of the matter: why is the Libertarian Party running candidates for the presidency? Is it with any serious intent to win (mathematically unlikely as that may be) or is it to try to raise the public profile of small-L libertarian philosophy and free market economics? In either case, a better-known candidate is going to perform the task more easily than an unknown one.

It could be argued that any principled libertarian could do the job, but the media are the gatekeepers for access to that proportion of the voting public who still pay any attention to TV, and they're not going to provide J. Random Libertarian with any notice at all, unless JRL happens to be "famous" (for some values of "famous). Even a loose-cannon candidate — the more off-the-wall, the better — will get more media exposure than a highly competent, philosophically "pure" JRL.

Does raising the profile of libertarianism make any difference to the philosophy's acceptability to the general public . . . well, that's a completely different question.