Posts on Bob Barr

Earlier this month, it was announced that Bob Barr, Tom Tancredo, Alan Keyes, and Chuck Baldwin would be joining together for an anti-immigration press conference organized by the Minuteman during the Democratic Convention in an attempt to inject the issue back into the presidential campaign.

So how did it go?    

A rally by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps featuring Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr drew just a few dozen people.

Held at a Denver park a few miles away from the Democratic National Convention, the rally was more of a picnic, where even some counter-protesters shouting obscenities at the anti-illegal immigration activists failed to stir much emotion.

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Even Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Republican who launched a short-lived presidential bid earlier this year largely based on his call for an immigration overhaul, showed up late to the rally wearing a golf shirt and loafers and started his remarks by quipping, "I'm like yesterday's news."

Tancredo added, though, that the public interest in immigration issues has been understated by the media and even his own political party.

"I don't care how many times people tell me this issue is no longer important, that voters don't care about it anymore, it's still out there," Tancredo said.

Maybe so, but many of the anti-illegal immigration activists seemed unconvinced the topic would influence this fall's campaigns.

After independent presidential candidate Alan Keyes addressed the group, he was surrounded by supporters — who asked about abortion.

Minutemen organizers insisted the rally was a success, and that the immigration debate hasn't faded.

The reason nobody showed up, said Minuteman President Chris Simcox, was because the media, the Republicans, and the Democrats are colluding to keep the issue out of the campaign and away from the public eye. But Simcox is undaunted:

"This is a national movement," said Minuteman President Chris Simcox, who said membership was either holding steady or increasing across the country. "This is just the beginning."

The conventional wisdom is that Bob Barr’s third-party presidential bid probably won’t have much of an impact on the election or siphon off too many potential supporters of John McCain, but that doesn’t mean that Barr isn’t trying.  

Last month he penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking McCain on the issue of judicial nominations, the one area where McCain has been making inroads with the Right, laying out the case that "Judges Are No Reason to Vote for McCain." And now the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that he has gone straight for the jugular, travelling to Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado Springs:

Buried in a press release for Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate for president, was a mention that on Monday, Barr toured the offices of Focus on the Family, headed by James Dobson — a significant voice among evangelical Christians.

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Barr campaign manager Russell Verney said today that Barr did not meet with Dobson, who was recovering from surgery. But Barr did meet with Tom Minnery, senior vice president for Focus on the Family, and others.

Barr, Verney said, “had a great meeting and discussion with them."

Of course, given that Barr espouses some views that are directly at odds with Dobson’s political agenda, it is unlikely that Dobson will ever throw his support his way. But considering that Dobson can’t seem to make up his mind about McCain, it can’t help McCain’s chances to have Barr hanging around FOF headquarters and meeting with Dobson’s right-hand man.

As John McCain continues to work to win over right-wing leaders, activists, and voters, the one constant theme he has been hammering is his pledge to nominate judges like John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court; a promise that has lately been paying dividends.

But now it looks like some disgruntled Republicans are starting to push back against the idea McCain can be trusted to uphold his promise. For instance, Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr recently published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal less-than-subtly entitled "Judges Are No Reason to Vote for McCain":

The judiciary is becoming an important election issue. John McCain is warning conservatives that control of today's finely balanced Supreme Court depends on his election. Unfortunately, his jurisprudence is likely to be anything but conservative.

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Mr. McCain is a convenient convert to the cause of sound judicial appointments. He has never paid much attention to judicial philosophy, backing both Clinton Supreme Court nominees – Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He also participated in the so-called "Gang of 14," which favored centrist over conservative nominees as part of a compromise between President George W. Bush and Senate Democrats.

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[E]ven if a President McCain were to influence the court, it would not likely be in a genuinely conservative direction. His jurisprudence is not conservative.

Barr obviously has his own electoral agenda in mind by seeking to undermine McCain's appeal to conservative voters on the issue of judges in hopes of winning their support himself, he is not alone in making the case that McCain's promises on judges cannot be trusted, with Bruce Bartlett making the same point in an op-ed in Politico:

[McCain] has already repudiated the best hope Republicans had for circumventing Democratic opposition: the so-called nuclear option, which would have forced the Senate to give all federal court nominees an up-or-down vote. McCain basically destroyed any hope of getting a parliamentary ruling on this scheme by putting together the Gang of 14, a bipartisan group of senators that agreed to allow all qualified nominees to have a vote before the full Senate.

Conservatives have to ask themselves whether the man who torpedoed the nuclear option is really likely to fight to the bitter end for the kinds of justices they want to see on the court.

McCain needs all the help he can get right now winning over right-wing leaders and having former high-profile Republicans out there undermining his key selling point and reminding them of his role in the "Gang of 14" certainly isn't helping his cause.