Barr/Root: A Point-Counterpoint
David Weigel | November 11, 2008, 10:50am
As I reported in my write-up of the Bob Barr election night party, VP candidate Wayne Allyn Root promised the crowd that he'd be back in 2012: "Maybe as your president-elect!" Root e-mailed me later to reflect on how the ticket had performed.
Barr/Root got the 2nd highest raw vote total in the 37 year history of LP, we did it in perhaps the worst environment for Third Parties ever (because of the hype, fear, and excitement over Obama)... and we did it on a virtually non-existent campaign budget. Obama won with almost $700 million. We did it with no money. Only nonstop media appearances... and IDEAS!
In all prior elections, the LP VP candidates were literaly MIA and invisible for the entire campaign. They received zero media attention. In 2008 I changed all that with 800+ media appearances, including FOX News Channel nonstop in the last month of the campaign. What I accomplished is remarkable for a third party VP candidate. That is a SMALL sign of things to come.
I campaigned for over a year with one theme at every event, every media appearance, every debate, every speech, every conversation with voters: that Barry Goldwater had great ideas, yet still lost in a landslide. Reagan took the same ideas and won in two landslides. The only difference was his ability to communicate, educate and motivate voters. I'm a Reagan/Obama for the LP and the Ron Paul freedom movement. Obama's election proves a good communicator can change everything.
Now instead of running for President for a short period of time, or a spur-of-the-minute idea. I have four years to hit the ground running. Four years of nonstop media appearances. Four years of serious fundraising. Four years of contrasting my ideas for smaller government with those of our President Barack Obama, my college classmate, my Libertarian book out with one of the world's biggest publishers in May, and serious interest from major radio syndicators for my own national political radio show called (what else?) ROOT FOR AMERICA.
A little while later I heard from Steve Kubby, the medical marijuana activist who narrowly lost the party's VP nomination to Root and beseeched LP "radicals" not to bolt the party. (Given how few people voted for the breakaway Boston Tea/Personal Choice Party, I think Kubby succeeded.) Kubby
has put out a public statement on this year's LP campaign.
The bottom line for this ticket is that they promised $30 million in campaign contributions and a popular vote of 5%. Instead, they raised just over $1 million and failed to break 0.5% of the vote, landing them a 4th place finish for LP presidential campaigns. Barr and Root received a record amount of media coverage and they are celebrities in their own right, but it didn’t work out the way we were told it would.
So much for media and celebrity.
The Barr/Root campaign was an honest test of media and celebrity and the results are clear. Media and celebrity is not the answer. Our ideas and our ability to communicate those ideas, is what sets us apart and earns us serious attention. The hunger for new ideas has never been greater and our ideas, about limited government, ending personal income taxes and upholding personal freedom are more mainstream than ever.
If we dilute our message and rely upon celebrity, it gets us nothing but empty rhetoric. On the other hand, if we transmit a pure signal and only a handful get it, but they totally and earnestly get it, then that is revolutionary.
I think the poor showing of Ralph Nader—on more ballots than ever, but registering his lowest vote totals ever in most states—is the best evidence that this was just a bad third party year, as Root suggests. But there were two other directions the LP could have gone in. One minor change would have been the selection of Kubby instead of Root as VP. Kubby would have soothed most of the people who went online and agitated against Barr/Root, and given the campaign an extra media hook (the drug warrior and the drug war victim!), but it's unlikely Kubby would have done as much media as Root or appealed directly to conservatives.
A major change would have been the nomination of Dr. Mary Ruwart over Barr. Ruwart might have secured the endorsement of Ron Paul. She certainly wouldn't have spooked him into endorsing Chuck Baldwin. But the low vote totals of the Baldwin campaign don't suggest that Paul could have boosted any candidate that much, given that his endorsement wasn't backed up by campaign appearences or fundraising. And Ruwart would have alienated Barr supporters (and Root) to the degree that they might have sat the election out. With no media profile outside of the movement, she would have gotten a level of coverage comparable, probably, to Cynthia McKinney. There was no one "right" way to boost the LP in 2008.
paulie | November 11, 2008, 1:01pm | #
Badnarik was not perceived as a threat to the GOP, so he didn't have to deal with GOP henchmen suing to keep him off the ballot. Also, a lot of the experienced LP ballot access people stayed home and pouted over Ruwart not getting the nom, so you had fewer and less experienced people working on ballot access drives.
Who pouted and stayed home? Some of us were actively prevented by LPHQ from working. Others, just prevented from being most effective. I know of no one that was offered the opportunity to work and turned it down.
The ballot access this year was severely mismanaged. For example, I was a mile and a half from the Connecticut border when the Massachusetts drive ended. I could have gone to Connecticut and Rhode Island, but they had me go to Alabama. We finished Alabama with plenty of time to spare.
In the meantime, they had a crisis in West Virginia, and we weren't even asked to go there. They didn't call us once. One of our guys, Jake, did go there, and got screwed around big time. He tried to get other petitioners to come in, but they preferred to spend the money to advertise in newspapers and on the radio for inexperienced locals (a time tested way to fail).
Throughout the campaign, they showed a preference for high raw number, low validity, non-libertarian petitioners. They paid them at higher rates than us, more promptly, with better expense deals, and recommended them more highly to other campaigns.
Then they made a show of "firing" us.
Getting back to West Virginia, they rejected the Constitution Party and Nader campaign's offer to have their petitioners carry the Libertarian petitions as well, until very late (too late to make a difference). Stupid!
In the meantime, several of us were stuck carrying Nader and Baldwin petitions in Alabama after the Barr petition here ended, while they were scrambling to finish the New England states (and failed in several of them).
At the very same time, they gathered thousands more signatures in West Virginia after the deadline was already past in a futile attempt to sue their way on the ballot.
They also insisted on inserting themselves into the Louisiana paperwork process (this does not involve any petitioning, just filing fees and paperwork) and screwed it up.
This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the mismanagement goes.
James Anderson Merritt | November 11, 2008, 1:34pm | #
There are lots of good comments in this thread. Here are some responses from a Libertarian in Santa Cruz CA (a town once described by a UC Berkeley instructor as "more Berkeley than Berkeley"):
* I remember previous VP candidates doing media tours in previous years (Jo Jorgensen in 1996 comes particularly to mind; also Nancy Lord and Art Olivier). They just didn't get as much play as the POTUS candidates, naturally. Interestingly enough, this year I kept encountering Barr in video, print, and web media. Root, not so much. I'll take him at his word that he was busy with media this year; but you can't prove it by me.
* Steve Kubby rightly contrasts the promise of Barr/Root with the reality. But the silver lining there was that Barr/Root was an extremely efficient converter of campaign dollars to votes. If Barr raised around a million and got 0.4% of the vote, then we might reasonably hope that the expected $30M would have commanded around 10-12% of the vote -- an outcome that nobody would have bet on, I think, so why spend so much money? Conversely, 5% of the vote should have only cost us between $12-15M, and had we achieved that goal while spending so little, we definitely would have made some big news. My point is that, if we were going to run a losing campaign anyway, it would be best to spend minimal money per vote, get maximal media, and improve our ballot access. All of this seems to have been accomplished by Barr/Root, AND they also got the 2nd-highest vote total for POTUS in LP history (503,919 and still rising -- slowly! -- as I write this). We're all disappointed not to have made a huge splash this year. But Kubby was right again: Celebrity and media weren't the "silver bullet." The actual results we did get are a pretty good consolation prize, for those who want to think positive and look forward to the next campaign. I am particularly encouraged by huge totals/percentages that some of our downticket candidates earned, even in three-way races, and by the re-election of Libertarian incumbents.
* I love having Ralph Nader in the race. I agree with Weigel that his results tend to calibrate our measurement of the public's real hunger for, and willingness to embrace, alternative candidates. Nader tanked this year, but not as badly as in 2004. This and other indicators gave me, too, the definite sense of "1992" in terms of the public's embrace of third-parties: not a horrible third-party year, but not a great one, either. (1992 was a horrible year for the LP, though. Andre Marrou didn't break 300,000 votes for POTUS, as I recall.)
* Paul/Barr would probably have been a force to be reckoned with. Too bad that wasn't in the cards. Otherwise, a Barr/Kubby ticket would have been the one I would have wanted most, but in retrospect, I wish we had had TWO guys who were credible as POTUS, one agreeing to stand for VP. This year, as in no other previous LP campaign (including Ron Paul's run in '88), NOBODY who conversed or corresponded with me ever questioned the LP guy's ability to do the job, except in the sense of comparing his ability against that of one or both of the major candidates: I think that's the situation we WANT, and I can't recommend strongly enough that we henceforth resolve to nominate and run for high office only candidates whom the public can see as credible in those roles. If we can't find someone like that who truly understands and intends to apply libertarianism in office, then we would be better off not to run anyone.
* We need to continue with the POTUS campaigns because of what they can do for ballot access and also for the "free-media" opportunities that they can provide to downticket candidates. But that said, I definitely agree that getting more libertarians in office at lower levels is key. There are enough LP members in office now to begin thinking seriously about boosting some of them up to the next level in 2010, and then we will need people who can run to replace them in their current slots.
* Root as POTUS candidate in 2012? I was a bit squeamish about having him as VP candidate this year, and it is hard for me to imagine that he will improve or remake himself well enough in 4 years to be credible as POTUS. But I guess we'll see. I was impressed by Gary Johnson's speech at Ron Paul's Minnesota shindig this year. Maybe we should consider running him as POTUS in 2012, if he'd be willing.
* Dumping the "Libertarian" name. Bad idea. There are some people out there who are doing bad things to the public's perception of "libertarian," but if we can't counter that, they'll just do the same to any name to which we DO retreat. We need to stand tall and proud as libertarians and refuse to yield the ground. That's one thing that more media can do for us -- allow real libertarians to define their own label, rather than letting opponents command the term. The fact of the matter is that libertarians have won substantial office while being criticized by opponents as being libertarian. It's not the label, and it's not the party platform: blaming those things is to make excuses for poor candidates and bumbling campaigns. In every party, there are radicals and purists who come out with their long knives to eviscerate any candidate whom they perceive as not being up to snuff. It's good to listen to what they have to say; it's good to vet libertarian candidates for their understanding of and commitment to libertarianism. But a candidate is much more than that, and it will frequently be the case that someone who is a master of libertarian orthodoxy will be a loser candidate, and that someone who is "less pure" might have all the qualities necessary to win, and thenceforth to make a positive, libertarian difference in the world. As a party, we need to be able to deal with this simple truth and turn it to our advantage. We don't have to change our name to straighten ourselves out on this point.
James Anderson Merritt | November 11, 2008, 3:37pm | #
# The Angry Optimist | November 11, 2008, 3:07pm | #
# Mr. Merrit (sic), the more you let the purists
# define who is (and is not) a libertarian, the
# less chance you are going to have to find
# those "libertarians who can spearhead
# campaigns".
Maybe so, but I think there is a role for purists to point out where candidates are or are not consistent with "full-strength" libertarianism. Sometimes, this will have the effect of educating a candidate, and at other times a candidate can push back and explain where a particular position may not be optimally libertarian but is sufficiently libertarian as well as achievable. This seems to be what has happened anyway, in EVERY active LP campaign for any office that I have ever seen. The party needs its purists to keep it as "honest" as a political party can be. In the end, however, decisions must be made on more than ideological purity.
Also, I think it is a good idea to loose the purists on those outside the party who claim to be libertarian. I have always said that the differences over which we wrangle internally are practically indistinguishable to the general public. But the differences between LP libertarians and posers outside the party are often pretty blatant, IF there is a reasonable yardstick available for the public to judge what a "real libertarian" is. Providing that yardstick is something that party purists can do: in comparing LP candidates against others -- especially opposing candidates -- who profess some sort of (faux?) libertarianism.
This is one reason why libertarians need to be in debates. The Demo or GOP candidate can claim a sort of libertarianism in contrast to his or her opposite number, but usually not if a true libertarian is present to make clear what a real libertarian approach would be. In debates I have seen in the past decade or so, the contrast between LP and GOP/Demo is usually pretty striking; the contrast between GOP and Demo, not so much.
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