Bob Barr relishes spoiler role

Cincinnati — The campaign plane touches down and John McCain emerges to the booming chorus of “Eye of the Tiger” and the raucous cheers of 3,000 supporters. TV cameras record every “Joe the Plumber”-referencing moment by the Republican presidential nominee, whose airport rally will dominate local newscasts.

At the same time, Bob Barr is making his own campaign appearance a few miles away. The Libertarian nominee for president from Cobb County is clearly outmanned — about 200 people have shown up for his speech at the University of Cincinnati student center. And outspent — his campaign plane, he says wryly in an interview, is “called Delta.” But he’s definitely not outgunned, at least when it comes to taking out the opposition verbally.

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Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr says the Republican Party’s problem is that it ‘no longer has a message or a vision.’

“I get kind of tired of hearing Sen. McCain tell us he’s a maverick,” Barr says as titters ripple through the crowd. “In one of those debates, I would have liked to have said, ‘OK, time out. At the very beginning of the debate, Mr. McCain, we want you to recite 50 times, ‘I am a maverick.’ And we’ll just get that out of the way.’ “

A few minutes later, after slamming the recent government bailout of Wall Street, Barr pulls a poker face: “Oh, by the way. Who was the administration’s main cheerleader in the Senate during all those votes? You guessed it! Sen. John ‘I Am a Maverick’ McCain ….”

Make no mistake about it. Barr, the former Republican congressman from Georgia, is running to be the first Libertarian president of the United States. By running squarely, defiantly, against McCain and the Republican Party he feels has lost its way.

Don’t believe it? Ask Barr about his message here in Ohio, a key battleground state where McCain and Democratic opponent Barack Obama have deployed vast amounts of money in a quest to capture its to-die-for 20 electoral votes. His response is almost gentlemanly formal: “Particularly as Sen. McCain seems to be entering the homestretch here with a decreasing chance of winning, rather than an increasing chance, one of the things we urge people is, if you might have been predisposed to vote for McCain, you should now feel even freer not to have to do that.”

Then his words turn blunt: “Vote for the Libertarian. Vote your conscience. McCain’s going to lose anyway.”

Ouch. Obama doesn’t completely escape Barr’s censure, of course — the speech here includes a similar riff on the “Change America Needs” candidate having to recite “I hope for change” 50 times at the start of a debate. But Barr’s heart doesn’t seem to be in it as much. Perhaps he knows what two polls will show the following day: Obama leading McCain by 12 and 14 percentage points among Ohio registered voters.

But nothing’s a sure thing in Ohio, which has gone Democratic only three times in the past 10 presidential elections. As recently as two weeks ago, the Ohio Newspaper Poll was calling the race a statistical dead heat, with McCain up by 2 points. Three percent of respondents were undecided and 1 percent chose Barr. He’s gotten similar numbers in the few polls to break out third-party candidates by name recently — 2 percent in Georgia, for instance, and as much as 2 percent in North Carolina and 4 percent in one poll in Colorado. Sensing an opening in Ohio, Barr has spent several days campaigning here.

Barr’s not going to be elected president. But if the race is at all close, those couple of percentage points he’s gunning for in Ohio and other battleground states could help decide who will be.

Moreover, a decent showing by Barr in this high-profile state — especially if McCain loses — could serve as his “I told you so” moment vis-a-vis a Republican Party he says has drifted far from its Ronald Reagan, “less government” moorings.

“It’s leaving lots of Americans shaking their heads and saying, ‘Yeah, there really is no difference between these two parties,’” says Barr, who’s particularly scornful of — guess who? — on this count.

Before sitting down for an interview at his hotel here, he’s heard McCain on the news having “the audacity to criticize Sen. Obama for [supporting] big government and government spending. Sen. Obama is a classic liberal big spender. That’s what Democrats are. But at least he’s not a hypocrite about it. McCain is a hypocrite about it.”

OK, so there the verbal gunslinger took out two opponents with one shot. It’s the sort of thing that can cause traumatic flashbacks for Democrats who sweated out the number of votes Ralph Nader would siphon away from their candidate in the past two presidential elections. Nader’s running again this year as an Independent. Now, though, the other side appears to have at least as much to worry about if onetime Republican stalwart Barr — he wrote the Defense of Marriage Act and was a House manager for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial — should peel off enough voters to swing things Obama’s way.

None of about 20 people interviewed before and after Barr’s speech mentions Nader, although two say they’re still making up their minds between Barr and Obama. Meanwhile, the Republicans might have reason to be concerned, according to an informal poll conducted at Christy’s and Lenhardt’s Biergarten and Rathskeller, across the street from the University of Cincinnati campus.

The occasion, a meet-the-candidate/fund-raiser event, highlights the daunting challenges of running as a third-party candidate: An organizer stands on a chair to offer Barr yard signs in return for $10 donations while Frank Sinatra warbles “Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you …” on an old jukebox.

Self-described “former Republican” Matt Bianco elbows his way around the pool table for a photo with Barr and informs him, “You got my vote tonight.” The postal supervisor voted in Ohio’s Republican presidential primary last March, but Barr’s call for government restraint regarding civil liberties and the economy will have him pulling the Libertarian lever next week.

Joe Bozzi’s almost there.

“I’m 99 percent sure I’m not voting for McCain,” says Bozzi, 35, an IT director from Columbus, Ohio, who voted for Bush in 2004 but now is considering various third-party candidates. The “Reagan small government Republican” is so discouraged by what he sees as the party’s abandonment of those principles that he’s come here tonight to size up Barr. “I’m looking around, trying to find a new home.”

But what if he votes for Barr and McCain ends up losing Ohio by the slimmest of margins?

“I don’t feel I can vote with the Republican Party, even if it means Obama gets elected,” Bozzi says somewhat glumly, but firmly. “Sometimes you just have to put your foot down and say, ‘Enough is enough.’ “

If the McCain campaign has hit its “enough” point yet, it’s not saying.

With both McCain and Barr in Cincinnati, the former’s campaign won’t even mention the latter’s name when asked for a comment.

“Ultimately, this election comes down to a choice between two candidates and their clear differences on the issues that matter most here in Ohio,” says McCain spokesman Paul Lindsay. “John McCain will continue to communicate the stark contrast between his plans to get our economy moving again and Barack Obama’s plans.”

It’s a time-honored political tactic, refusing to acknowledge an opponent’s existence. Unless McCain really doesn’t consider Barr and his 1 percent much of a threat?

Barr clearly intends his day of speaking and flesh-pressing here to suggest otherwise. But, he says, he’s not the GOP’s biggest enemy.

“The problems with the Republican Party go a lot deeper than Bob Barr, much as my ego might like me to think otherwise,” he says.

“If McCain loses Ohio, it will be because the Republican Party no longer has a message or a vision or a candidate that can appeal to a plurality of voters…. They’re reduced to reacting to Sen. Obama or manufacturing this silliness about Joe the Plumber. Where’s the vision?”