While you couldn’t tell it from the continuing dearth of coverage on CNN, MSNBC and Fox, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr is still quietly moving forward with his plans to move in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue next January. Most recently, Team Barr has gotten on the ballot in Kentucky, and look to do the same in Maine now that the deadline for signature submissions has been pushed back to August 15. Earlier projections of Barr being in the running in 49 of 50 states still appear to be solid.
In another interesting note, out in Montana, Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer told reporters that Barr might be the best choice for voters who are interested in keeping their Second Amendment rights intact.
While defending Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s record, Gov. Brian Schweitzer said Tuesday that Montana voters whose main issue is guns might consider voting for Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr instead of either Obama or Republican John McCain.
“If guns are your primary issue, you’re probably not going to like either of these guys,” Schweitzer said during an telephone news conference put on by the Obama campaign.
He said a third option for voters for whom guns is their primary issue is to vote for Barr, a former Georgia congressman, “if you’re absolutely not going to vote for McCain or Obama on guns.”
One of the issues facing Barr and other third party candidates is the perception problem. Most major polling groups aren’t even including anyone but Obama and McCain in their list of polling choices, but when third party candidates are included in the mix, they account for nearly 20% of the vote in some results. Barr himself still pulls better than 5% in some region, an impressive feat for a candidate facing a virtual blackout by the media at large.
In fact, while the televised talking heads battled it out to parse every word by McCain and Obama on the Georgian conflict, little noted was the most common sense response of all, which came from Bob Barr.
“Russia and Georgia risk falling into a full-scale war in which the U.S. can and hopefully will avoid any involvement. But had Georgia been a member of NATO we would now be risking a full-scale confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia,” Barr observes.
“Obviously, America should encourage both countries to back down and resolve their differences peacefully,” explains Barr. But “the status of South Ossetia, as well as Abkhazia, another Russian-supported separatist zone within Georgia, matters a lot more to Russia, on which the two territories border, than to the U.S.”
I find it refreshing to hear a politician who doesn’t immediately enter into the race to see who can rattle their swords the most loudly in the direction of the Russians. We’ll continue to keep you up to date on all the candidates here at TMV as this endless campaign season finally and mercifully winds down. But take a moment and imagine what might happen with the above referenced poll numbers were Barr to show up at the presidential debates and if the general public then actually realized he was running.