Buy the ticket, take the ride

Ron Paul has endorsed Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party's candidate for President of the United States.

Readers of this blog know that I'm no Paul cultist. And, while I haven't belabored the point (I prefer to ignore them), I keep the Constitution Party lower than the Democrats, lower even than the Republicans, on my preference list. Put a gun to my head, I might vote for John McCain to save my miserable life. If it's Baldwin, though, go ahead and pull the trigger. You can splatter my brains all over the wall before you can have my vote for him. Cigarette, blindfold and mason jar full of cheap bourbon first, if you don't mind too terribly much.

Thing is, it didn't have to be this way. It could have been prevented. Hell, it took herculean efforts on the part of the Libertarian Party and Bob Barr's presidential campaign to make it happen.

The Libertarian Party could have held out for a libertarian presidential slate. It had several good candidates to choose from. Instead, it decided to play cargo cult dress-up games and nominate a duplicate Republican ticket.

Bob Barr could have shown up to the Campaign For Liberty event he committed to participate in, smiled, accepted a handshake from Paul, and walked out without an exclusive endorsement but with more money and more votes than he had walked in with. Instead, he chose to cancel at the last minute, make an ass of himself (and his party) in public by trying to upstage Paul, and piss off the voter bloc that constitutes the closest thing to a libertarian groundswell since at least the 1964 Goldwater campaign, probably since Grover Cleveland's 1892 anti-tariff/hard-money run for a second non-consecutive term, and just maybe since 1776.

Even after that, the Libertarian National Committee could have minimized the damage. It could have issued an apology to Paul and C4L, on the LP's behalf, for Barr's antics. It could have even, in extremis, removed Barr as the party's presidential nominee. Instead, the LNC gridlocked -- its Irresponsibility Caucus met proposals for an apology with proposals for further insult, and neither side prevailed. Unfortunately, either the Irresponsibility Caucus or the Barr campaign apparently has de facto operational control of LPHQ, which has issued a stream of communiques designed to make the situation worse, not better.

It took three massive systemic failures -- at the convention level, at the campaign level, and at the national committee level -- to bring about the current situation. All of those failures were avoidable. The party and the campaign chose not to prevent them. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

The LP is broken, big-time. This year is pretty much shot. Barr looks set to raise a little more money, and probably pull down a few more votes on his name recognition, than Michael Badnarik, the LP's 2004 candidate whom Barr's acolytes have so much enjoyed laughing down their noses at. I doubt more than ever that Barr will bust the 1980 Ed Clark ceiling and reach a million votes, and even if he did, it would be a poison pill -- the more attention he attracts, the more silly and less serious the LP looks.

Can the LP be fixed? Should it be fixed, at least in anything resembling its current form? So far as I can tell, The Libertarian National Committee's main function at this point is to serve as a live demonstration of the futility of central planning and top-down politics.

The LNC also no longer has a monopoly on libertarian partisan politics at the national level. The Boston Tea Party may only be on the ballot in three states this year, but I seem to recall that that's one more ballot line than the LP made its first time out. If the LNC system continues to fail partisan libertarians, they -- as individuals, and as state Libertarian Party organizations -- have somewhere else to go.

That swirling sound you hear ...

... is Bob Barr's presidential campaign circling the drain of history.

Brief recap:

Barr was scheduled to appear with Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin and independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader at a press conference yesterday to endorse a joint four-point issues statement on which all these candidates (and Boston Tea Party candidate Charles Jay) agree.

At the last minute, Barr canceled, with campaign manager Russ Verney allegedly giving as the excuse "it just isn't worth it." When a Campaign For Liberty official, Don Rasmussen, asked Barr campaign deputy director Shane Cory what was up with that, he alleges that Cory's reply was "go f**k yourself." Barr then held his own press conference, grandstanding on Paul's name with an offer of the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential slot, while Verney, the campaign, and LPHQ spun like mad about how this "demonstrates Barr's leadership" and how Barr would be lowered by appearing on stage with someone "like" Cynthia McKinney. Over the last 24 hours, the Barr campaign has continued to run smack on Paul.

Now for a brief digression, just to make things crystal clear: Nobody with two or more functioning neurons is going to accuse me of being a Paul sycophant. I opposed his GOP presidential campaign and believe it did significant damage to the libertarian movement (the newsletter scandal, the pork-mongering, the anti-gay and anti-immigrant BS, etc.). If you don't believe me, Google "Ron Paul" and this blog's URL.

But that doesn't matter, for three reasons:

- One of the major premises and promises of the Barr campaign -- from well before his announcement that he was considering running, going at least back to his sponsorship of a motion on the Libertarian National Committee asking Paul to seek the LP's nomination -- was that Barr would appeal to the Paul voter and supporter bloc. No need to belabor that. Read the history. It's all there in the search engines.

Hint: You don't deliver a voter bloc by monkeywrenching that bloc's hero's event, trying to upstage him, telling his supporters to "go f**k themselves," claiming you're too big and important to appear on a stage with him and other presidential candidates, then talking about him like he's a fool and a knave out of one side of your mouth while offering him the second fiddle position in your own failing effort out of the other, all the while blowing about how this bundle of nonsense constitutes "leadership."

- Secondly, Barr's delusions of grandeur and absurd strategies aside, Barr isn't just a presidential candidate, he's the presidential candidate of a party, the Libertarian Party. That party has longstanding ties to Ron Paul, who was its 1988 presidential nominee. At one point, polling indicated that more than seven of every 10 LP members wanted to run Paul on the LP ticket again this year. Whether I liked it or not -- and often I didn't -- Libertarians across the country put gallons of sweat into building bridges with the Paul movement over the last 18 months. I don't know if Barr has succeeded in burning those bridges with his antics yet or not ... but make no mistake about it, he's poured gasoline on those bridges and he's capering around them with a Zippo^® in one hand, a can of accelerant in the other, and a deranged grin on his face.

- Thirdly, the Paul press conference was a no-brainer. It was a major media opportunity with no down side. It was a cake walk. All Barr had to do was stand on a stage with four other people, at least two of whom are more famous and well-thought-of by the public than he'll ever be, smile and say nice things about an issues statement that every last freedom-loving American can wholeheartedly sign on to, and watch the money and votes roll in. It was seemingly impossible to screw this up. But -- wouldn't you know it? -- the Barr campaign found a way to turn a cake walk into a fiasco, just like his old party seems to do every time.

The Barr campaign broke its promise to try to deliver the Paul voter bloc yesterday. The Barr campaign created a major schism between the Libertarian Party on one hand, and a major ally of the LP and his supporters on the other, yesterday. And the Barr campaign demonstrated the most mind-blowingly blind level of incompetence and inability to discern opportunities to even promote its own candidate yesterday.

And they don't seem inclined to even try to stop the bleeding.

The Libertarian National Committee needs to issue an abject, no-exceptions, no-excuses apology to Ron Paul and the Campaign for Liberty for its presidential candidate's misbehavior, repudiate that misbehavior, and dissociate itself from that misbehavior. Actually, it needed to do that yesterday afternoon, and the clock is ticking. That's what it owes to Paul, to Paul's supporters, to the Campaign for Liberty, and to the LP members who resemble all those descriptions. And, for that matter, that's what it owes to the Barr campaign. Sometimes supporting the presidential campaign, as it is the LNC's obligation to do, entails at least trying to clean up the presidential campaign's messes.

The Libertarian National Committee also needs to take up the question -- i.e. get a motion made, seconded, and in play -- to remove Barr as its presidential candidate. Barr has arguably attacked the party's interests multiple times -- in terms of publicly espousing positions that conflict with the party's Statement of Principles, and in terms of running a campaign that embarrasses, misrepresents, and diminishes the credibility of, the party. If the LNC doesn't take official notice of that and deal with it by considering its options under the party's bylaws, then the LNC is a dead stick and should stop wasting the members' money on the pretense that it is a real board overseeing the real operations of a real political party.

Third parties: Late, for a very important date

This year, the Constitution Party's national convention is scheduled for April. The Libertarian Party will convene to nominate its 2008 presidential slate in late May. The Green Party won't choose its ticket until July.

This may not seem unusual (the Republicans and Democrats usually hold their conventions in August or even early September), but third parties and "major parties" face very different sets of obstacles in publicizing their presidential prospects.

The Democratic and Republican presidential candidates have been the subject of fawning media coverage for close to two years now. They've been debating each other on prime time television for nearly a year. They've battled each other in highly-publicized primaries and caucuses all over the nation. Everyone knows who John McCain is. Everyone's heard of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

I'm not one for silver bullets -- no one thing will put third party candidates into contention for the presidency -- but some changes just make sense. One of those changes is nominating earlier. My recollection is that the Libertarian Party used to nominate its presidential candidates the year before the election. Andre Marrou was nominated for president in 1991. Ron Paul was nominated in 1987. And so on, and so forth. It was only in 1996 that the LP moved its nominating convention into the year of the election itself.

Late nominating conventions handicap third parties. We can't expect the kind of pre-nomination media coverage that "major party" candidates get. The sooner a party positions itself behind a nominee, the sooner that nominee has access to the party's full pool of presidential contributors and can get to work reaching beyond the party to the American public. It's all well and good to hope that a pre-nomination third party candidate will "break out" and catch the mainstream media eye ... but it seldom works out that way.

This year, the LP and Constitution party nominations are very much up in the air only a few weeks ahead of their national conventions, with credible rumors of two possible late entrants (Bob Barr and Mary Ruwart) in the LP race, and Alan Keyes mulling a Constitution Party bid. And while Cynthia McKinney is probably a lock for the Green nomination, she's not yet free to take that for granted and start running her general election campaign with the assurance that her new party will remain behind her.

These parties' nominees will only have a few short months to go from zero to general election speed. They'll be facing "major party" opponents who've enjoyed 24/7 media coverage for the past year, coverage which will only intensify as November draweth nigh -- and even post-nomination third party candidates are doing well to wrangle 1% of the mainstream media's attention during the general election cycle.

It's time for third parties to re-think their nomination convention timing. While an election-year convention has some media potential, that potential probably doesn't outweigh the benefits of giving our nominees a full year in the general election campaign saddle.

Cross-posted at Third Party Watch