Libertarian Barr wants to send signal to GOP

ATLANTA — Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr’s longshot presidential bid seems to be as much about sending a signal to his former party as it is about earning votes for his new one.

And as voters head to the polls Tuesday, the ex-Republican representative is hoping votes in his favor will do both.

“If the Republican Party hasn’t gotten its message already, I don’t think it will,” he said in a telephone interview. “The message is: Y’all have no vision, no message. And that’s why we’re running this campaign.”

Barr has campaigned in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Georgia in the weeks leading up to Election Day, targeting the swing states where he said he sees an “opportunity for a real impact.”

Not coincidentally, those states also are key to Republican John McCain’s presidential bid.

Barr is seeking to draw in disaffected conservatives from McCain by transforming the $700 billion rescue plan into a rallying cry. At campaign events, he exhorts supporters to “remember the bailout,” which he said is evidence that Republicans and Democrats are addicted to spending.

“In my campaign for the presidency, no issue has provided more traction for us than the BOMB — the ‘Bush/Obama/McCain Bailout,’” reads one of his campaign postings. “Nothing provides a clearer contrast between me and my opponents.”

But there’s little indication that the bailout has measurably boosted his campaign. An Associated Press-GfK poll out last month had Barr capturing about 1 percent of likely voters, the same amount he had pulled three weeks earlier.

Barr, though, said he is confident he will earn enough votes to allow his party to “play with the big boys.”

“We want to have a significant impact so the Libertarian Party can become a significant national player,” he said.

Barr, a former federal prosecutor and four-term representative, built a national following in the 1990s for aggressively pursuing President Clinton’s impeachment.

He won the Libertarian Party nomination in May after becoming disillusioned with what he saw as unchecked growth of government and federal intrusions into personal privacy under Bush.

Barr has sharpened his attacks on McCain as the election grew closer, sending a missive to supporters that declared McCain’s campaign over and derided the Republican’s message as “mixed and angry.”

And he has urged Democrats in solid-blue states to vote for him as a way to tell Obama “that the American people are serious about real change in Washington.”

In recent weeks, he’s crisscrossed swing states where polls showed a tight race between McCain and Obama. He’s under no illusion, though, that the race will end with him in the White House.

“That would be an awfully long long-shot,” he said. “And I’m not holding my breath.”

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On the Net:

www.bobbarr2008.com/