One afternoon in late August, Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for President, stood in a greenroom at Stephen Colbert’s television studio staring at a closed-circuit monitor. Barr, who was about to appear on “The Colbert Report,” was wearing a dark Brooks Brothers suit and an orange tie. As he watched, the monitor displayed Colbert’s opening segment—a routine involving footage from Burning Man, the annual culture festival in the Nevada desert known for copious amounts of body paint and psychedelic drugs. Colbert pretended that the footage was from the Democratic National Convention. Speaking over shots of a mud-drenched orgy, he claimed to see “Howard Dean stroking the buttocks of Nancy Pelosi”; a bearded naked man was “Wolf Blitzer out of ‘The Situation Room’ and out of his situation clothing.” In the broadcast version of the segment the relevant body parts were blacked out, but on the closed-circuit monitor the images were uncensored. Barr smiled; when the naked man appeared, his eyes widened and he mumbled, “Did he really show it?”
In the nineteen-nineties, Barr, then a Republican congressman from Georgia, led the charge to impeach President Bill Clinton and argued on the House floor that “the flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society.” The Christian Coalition gave his voting record a perfect rating, and he became so well known for his dour, ultra-conservative image that he told the voters in his district, “You don’t send me to Washington to smile.” But in the past few years, Barr says, he has profoundly changed. He now devotes himself to the advance of personal liberty and no longer cares to play the role of law-and-order conservative and culture warrior. After all, America is a free country, or at least this is why Barr says he is running for President: to abolish as many laws as society can bear to lose, to cut away the sinews of federal power, to “get the government out of it.”
To be a third-party nominee for the Presidency, one must achieve a state of mind that in some respects resembles that of the holy fools of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Such candidates are destined to wander the land with little money, yearning for attention and respect while suffering ire and mockery and bad hotels. They persist—whether through force of ego or some inner reservoir of will, or a little madness—though their mission is doomed. “It’s like climbing a cliff with a slippery rope,” Ralph Nader, who is making his fourth run for President, told me. Even Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who won twenty million votes in 1992, failed to create a viable party.
For the most part, Barr seems to find the dim limelight of the political fringe uplifting. He is fifty-nine but has the stamina of a college freshman—he consumes up to fifteen shots of espresso a day, typically in five-shot installments. He has a graying mustache, and his hair, which was curly when he had more of it, is white and combed flat across his head. He is trim and compact, but can be expansive in his movements. While making an argument, he often furrows his brow, puts one hand in his pocket, and thrusts the other above his shoulder, in the manner of a prosecutor driving home a point. Throughout his career, aides have struggled to soften his image, urging him to get new glasses—his preferred frames are rectangular and black—or swap his jacket and tie for a sweater. For a political advertisement, a media strategist once had Barr filmed surrounded by bubbles. “There is this sweet little shimmer to the picture, and I think it subtly makes you go, ‘Awww,’ ” the strategist told me. “You have to go to troubles like that with Bob.”
Booking a politician on a comedy show is another way to soften his image. Barr was hoping that his appearance on “The Colbert Report” would allow him to air his views at length; his staff had debated the merits of flying him to New York for the taping, or to Denver, where they thought he could attract press attention on the sidelines of the Democratic Convention. Because Barr did not have money for ads—his campaign has raised only a million dollars—he was trying to get as much “earned media” as he could. But the interview with Colbert lasted only three minutes. Between jokes, Colbert asked Barr how he was doing. “Campaign’s going good,” Barr said. “We’re in double digits in a number of states, about six per cent across the country.” (He often cites these numbers, from online Zogby polls taken during the summer. They suggested that he had far more public support than any Libertarian Presidential candidate since the Party was founded, in 1971; a double-digit vote for Barr in some states could affect the electoral balance between Barack Obama and John McCain.) Colbert asked him whether he hoped to win over Hillary Clinton supporters.
“I don’t think the disgruntled Hillary supporters will be big on Bob Barr,” he said, but Colbert was already setting up his next line: “You misunderestimate your mustache, sir.”
Back in the greenroom, Barr told one of Colbert’s producers, “He loves the mustache. Somebody suggested at the start of this campaign that I shave it off, but people wouldn’t recognize me.”
Barr lost his House seat in 2002, after serving four terms, and he began to ease himself out of the Republican Party, much like a man removing his tie at the end of a night of overindulgence: first he loosened the knot, then he undid it, and finally the thing came off completely. He held a chair at the American Conservative Union Foundation, but also worked as a consultant for the A.C.L.U. He opened doors in Washington for Libertarian operatives, and in 2006 he joined the Libertarian Party. His departure from the G.O.P. was notable because Barr didn’t just work in Congress; he often lived there, sleeping on his office couch. And when the Republican leaders wanted to be sure the far-right wing would support a measure they frequently went to him first. Barr didn’t just advocate Second Amendment rights; he held a seat on the board of the National Rifle Association. Although he voted in favor of some civil-liberties and small-government measures, he was also an ardent supporter of the war on drugs. He repeatedly sponsored legislation to undermine ballot initiatives legalizing medical marijuana—“bogus witchcraft,” he called it—in Washington, D.C. Barr vehemently opposed abortion, and once argued that even if his wife were raped he would do what he could to prevent her from having one. He wrote the Defense of Marriage Act, voted for a constitutional amendment outlawing flag desecration, and even tried to legislate against Wiccan soldiers who wanted to practice their faith while in the service. A churchgoing Methodist, Barr rarely invoked religion when discussing policy with his aides, but he told constituents that “God’s hand” was guiding his votes. In 1998, he traversed the country, trying to persuade people that President Clinton was leading America into amorality. “You can lie, cheat, steal, shoot someone,” Barr said in Iowa, at an event attended by Republican Presidential hopefuls. “You can do whatever you want and it doesn’t matter—it’s a cartoon world.” In 1999, Congressional Quarterly labelled Barr a “Conservative True Believer.”
For many people, including skeptical libertarians, Barr still has the reputation of a partisan, but his self-imposed exile from the Republican Party is representative of a broader disaffection among conservatives who did not immediately rally behind McCain. Republicans in the mold of Barry Goldwater, who believe in small government, minimal constraints on the free market, and expansive civil liberties, have become profoundly uneasy about the direction of the country under President Bush, who has presided over the largest increase in federal spending since the Great Society, raised the national debt to more than ten trillion dollars, suspended habeas corpus for enemy combatants, and recently proposed the seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout of Wall Street. David Boaz, the executive vice-president of the Cato Institute, and David Kirby, the executive director of America’s Future Foundation, have argued that, because of such policies, the libertarian vote, which for decades has been solidly Republican, “may be the next great swing vote.” According to surveys, as much as a fifth of American voters hold libertarian values, and in recent years more than seventy per cent of them have voted as Republicans. But Boaz and Kirby noticed that in the 2004 Presidential election only fifty-nine per cent of them voted for Bush, and between the midterm elections of 2002 and 2006 three million of them drifted away from the Republican Party—a shift that Boaz and Kirby argue “may well have cost Republicans control of Congress.” In this year’s Republican primaries, Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas and a longtime libertarian, earned more than twenty per cent of the vote in Idaho, Washington, Montana, and North Dakota. “His supporters are the equivalent of crabgrass,” Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist, told Time. “It’s not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff.” In August, Newt Gingrich warned that if McCain chose as his running mate Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut, Barr would win fifteen per cent of the vote.
For Barr, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent expansion of executive power under President Bush, were a political turning point. “I went through Reagan National after 9/11, and saw guardsmen with automatic weapons,” he told me. “It dawned on me that we’ve entered a whole new world. It may have made other passengers feel more secure, but it made me feel dramatically less free. Freedom is a lot more important than security. You can never buy freedom through security.” Barr reluctantly voted for the Patriot Act; he says it’s among his greatest regrets, and privacy issues are central to his campaign. “When the government can invade the information in your bank account, when the government can listen in to your telephone and e-mail conversations, simply because they think it is necessary to protect us from terrorists, or whoever, they are undercutting the very basis of our free civilization,” he says.
Barr does not like to think of his campaign as an insurgent operation. He isn’t accessible to reporters in a Straight Talk Express kind of way; he prefers formal interviews. His posters suggest that his is a household name, stating simply “Barr ’08.” He likes to say that he is competing against “the two other major parties,” and his short-term goal has been to reach fifteen per cent in national polls—the price of admission set by Republicans and Democrats to join them in a Presidential debate. “Then we get a level playing field,” he says. “Then we can win.”
The notion of winning a Presidential election is somewhat novel for the Libertarian Party, which for decades ran candidates for high office mainly as a way to propagate ideals. As David Nolan, one of the Party’s founders, wrote in 1971, “This very mania for ‘winning now’ is one of the factors that makes both of our present major political parties unlikely vehicles for libertarianism.” He argued that “a third party, in contrast, can take a long-range approach—running candidates with no intention of immediate victory.” The Libertarian Party was for many years controlled by radicals who wanted to drastically reduce the scope of government and expand liberties in a way that would seem reckless to many mainstream voters—by legalizing prostitution, for instance. The Libertarian slogan is “Party of Principle,” and its founders believed that principles were more valuable than votes.
In the past decade, libertarians outside the Republican Party have tried a number of ways to overcome their marginality. In 1997, a Libertarian writer named L. Neil Smith encouraged Libertarians to run as spoilers against Republicans who had won elections by five-per-cent margins. Invoking a line from the science-fiction novel “Dune”—“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it”—he hoped to force the Republican Party to adopt libertarian-oriented positions. (In at least five recent Senate races, the Libertarian vote was larger than the Democrats’ margin of victory.) In 2001, activists formed the Free State Project, a planned migration of twenty thousand libertarians to New Hampshire—one of the most libertarian states—to concentrate their influence. Nearly nine thousand people signed up; so far, though, only a few hundred have moved.
Barr has been pursuing a different course. “What I have been trying to do in recent years is to get the Libertarian Party to think of itself as a political party that operates in the real world,” he told me. “If you present to the American people a program that says, ‘Elect us and we will radically change everything you know about the political system as soon as we get into office,’ then people aren’t going to vote for you.” In 2006, Nolan told me, the Party had a “civil war” over its platform, most of which was subsequently dropped. The following year, the Party’s dues-paying membership grew by twenty-eight per cent.
Building on this momentum hasn’t been easy for Barr, who sometimes demonstrates discomfort with orthodox libertarian positions, including those on abortion and on the legalization of drugs. He often deflects questions on these issues by saying, “It’s a mistake to say libertarians believe this, libertarians believe that,” or by arguing that the federal government should not have a say in such things. Barr has reversed his position on medical marijuana, but earlier this year when Sean Hannity, of Fox News, asked him, “So if a state wants to legalize heroin and crack, you’re O.K. with that?” Barr attempted to dodge the question. Finally, he admitted, “I would not vote to legalize heroin or crack.”
In August, I visited Barr at his home in Marietta, a conservative suburb of Atlanta, where he lives with his third wife, Jeri, who runs a nonprofit organization affiliated with the United Way. Storm clouds on the perimeter of Hurricane Fay were gathering overhead. When Barr opened the door, he had a Starbucks cup in his hand and seemed relaxed. His home is meticulously well kept and contains a startling number of elephant objets d’art: lamps, bathroom tiles, coffee-table legs, mirror frames, figurines lined up in rows on a shelf. “Left over from my Republican days,” Barr said, and shrugged. “Elephants still make nice knickknacks.” The telephone numbers for his home, office, and cell phone all end in 1776.
In his living room, Barr directed me toward a bookcase holding several Presidential biographies and a cuneiform tablet. The tablet was a relic that he and his family had discovered in a pile of ruins in Iraq. “We found it in Babylon,” he said. “I suspect the statute of limitations has run out on it.” Barr’s father, a graduate of West Point, was an engineer who specialized in foreign civil-infrastructure projects, and Barr—who was born in Iowa City, and has five brothers and sisters—spent most of his childhood overseas. He was entering the third grade when his family moved to Baghdad and rented a house near the Tigris. Barr often played along the river, until a brigadier general named Abdul Karim Qasim seized power, in 1958, throwing the country into turmoil. “There was a twenty-four-hour curfew,” Barr told me. “You could not leave the house. The only communication we had was among friends and colleagues, and short-wave radio. It was a fairly bloody revolution. I didn’t see it, but I certainly knew what was going on.”
The family’s experience in Iraq established a pattern. As an expatriate, Barr enjoyed unusual personal freedom, but often against a backdrop of tyranny or political upheaval. He was detached from American society as well as from the culture around him. In Panama, where his father briefly took a job, the family one night attempted to have dinner in the American-controlled Canal Zone, but were turned away because their car had a Panama license plate. (“Even though we were U.S. citizens, and this was considered U.S. territory, we were second-class citizens,” Barr told me.) Before Panama, Barr’s family lived in Peru, where, as a teen-ager, he learned Spanish. He went to parties, drank, and smoked. A friend of his recalled, “Really, there were no rules, and we didn’t like rules, and the few rules that there were we really didn’t follow.” On expeditions into the Amazon, Barr fished for piranhas, and hunted alligators at night. “You would take a .22 rifle and creep along the riverbank with a flashlight,” he told me. “The light would catch their eyes, and you would see these two glowing points of red, and you would shoot for that.” Barr learned to adapt. “You make friends quickly,” he told me. “But you don’t become too attached, because you know you’re not going to be with them for that long.” His hobby was astronomy—the single geographic constant in his life at the time was the sky.
In college, at the University of Southern California, Barr joined the Young Democrats, but his parents, who were Republicans, told him that they would pull him out of school if he didn’t give up his membership. He switched to the Young Republicans. Mostly he spent time at his fraternity, TKE. He avoided antiwar protests. (Later, on the campaign trail in Georgia, he said, “The peace symbol is very offensive to me.”) After graduation, he worked for the C.I.A. as an analyst of Latin-American issues, and then in the Office of Congressional Affairs. Frederick Hitz, who ran the O.C.A. then, told me that Barr “was quite serious and he got a lot of teasing as a consequence.” Barr attended Georgetown Law at night and, in 1978, moved to Atlanta to practice criminal law. He was aggressive and took risks. Once, fearing that policemen might harm a client, an accused cop killer, on an airplane, he hired another plane and flew behind them. When the brother-in-law of Baby Doc Duvalier, the Haitian dictator, was apprehended in Puerto Rico on drug-smuggling charges, Barr and his law partner, Ed Marger, flew to Port-au-Prince to help. (“Ed and I were sitting on this couch in this beautiful residence with Baby Doc and his wife, and all of a sudden this big rat runs across the room,” he recalled.)
Barr arrived in Georgia at a time when “the only people willing to be identified as Republicans were the folks who couldn’t get into the Kiwanis Club,” Chuck Clay, a former Republican leader in the state senate, told me. “They were moving into this area, and felt with some justification that they were looked down on as either Yankees or foreigners, or folks that were not welcome.” Barr became the G.O.P. chairman of his county, and as more social conservatives migrated to the area he listened carefully to what they were saying. Marger told me, “He absorbed the right-wing ideas of his constituency”—for instance, hardening his position against abortion. One of his former consultants told me, “Bob is a politician, and that means you do what is necessary to get elected. He was from a conservative district northwest of Atlanta, and he needed to cultivate that conservatism.”
When Barr ran for Congress in 1994, Pat Buchanan hailed him as a symbol of “the core of the Republican Party,” and he entered the House as a member of Gingrich’s Republican Revolution. But he did not befriend many fellow-legislators. In his 2004 book, “The Meaning of Is,” he complained about his party’s leadership, especially with respect to Clinton’s impeachment, and wrote about periods of “intense loneliness.” In 1999, Larry Flynt paid Barr’s second ex-wife, Gail, to sign an affidavit stating that Barr drove her to a clinic for an abortion and paid for the procedure. (Barr has said, “I have never suggested, urged, forced, or encouraged anyone to have an abortion.”) The story, along with his lack of diplomacy during the impeachment process—he insisted on calling senators “jurors,” and accused witnesses of not belonging to “the real America”—alienated him from his peers, and Representative Henry Hyde, who managed the impeachment, forced Barr to give up some of his responsibilities.
Barr claims that he lost his congressional seat in 2002 largely because of redistricting, but his campaign also suffered from missteps. A few weeks before the election, he was at a fund-raiser in a supporter’s home and someone handed him an antique .38-calibre pistol, which went off in his hands. No one was injured, but afterward Barr was ridiculed. His opponent called him a “loose cannon” and promised to “wear a bulletproof vest” at their next joint appearance. At a campaign event, one of Barr’s two sons attacked a man who had come dressed as Yosemite Sam, claiming to be “Bob Barr’s Official Gun Safety Trainer.” The scuffle was filmed by a news crew. “Everybody was trying to say, ‘Oh, no, we don’t know who did that,’ and then we look at the footage and it is Bob’s own son,” one of Barr’s former advisers told me. “Lots of mistakes happened in that campaign. Bob never blamed anybody. I mean, he was the one who shot the dang bullet. We were a point or two ahead, and we were moving in the right direction, but that was by far the last straw.”
In the spring, while Barr was toying with the idea of running as a Libertarian, his biggest practical consideration was, What would Ron Paul do? Paul attracted much more grassroots support during the Republican primaries than anyone expected. “At the beginning of the campaign, we concentrated on four states, and it didn’t work,” Paul told me. But in the primary debates he defined himself as a politician willing to speak his mind. He argued that the September 11th attacks were a reaction to American foreign policy, advocated the elimination of the I.R.S., and invoked the importance of hewing to the Constitution’s “original intent” (at one point prompting MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, a moderator, to mutter, “Oh, God”). People who had not heard of Paul began sending money to his campaign. Last year, on Guy Fawkes Day, thirty-six thousand Paulites, as they came to be known, raised four million dollars on the Internet—one of the biggest-grossing single-day fund-raising events in electoral history. (All told, Paul raised thirty-five million dollars.) Paul’s book, “The Revolution: A Manifesto,” is a best-seller. When he withdrew from the race, in June, many supporters encouraged him to run as a third-party candidate. He had run as a Libertarian in 1988, winning just over four hundred thousand votes, and this year he was poised to do much better.
Barr called an old friend, Fred Davis, the Republican media strategist (a McCain supporter, who produced the “Celebrity” ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton). Barr wondered whether the Libertarian Party was “desperate for someone to just fill the shoes of Ron Paul,” Davis told me. Barr thought that Paul might return to the Libertarian Party and run at the top of its ticket, but Paul eventually said that he had no interest in doing so and encouraged Barr to run. In May, two weeks before the Libertarian Party Convention, in Denver, Barr announced his candidacy. He won the nomination only after forming a backroom alliance with an opponent, but in a speech he adopted a reassuring tone, saying, “I may not have committed as early as y’all, but don’t cast me aside because I’m a latecomer.”
Barr began to court Paulites, telling them that the Texas Republican was “a very good friend of mine.” However, it soon became obvious that an imbalance of power separated the two politicians. Paul’s supporters could not vote for him in the Presidential election, but they were committed to him nonetheless; Barr was the only libertarian on the ballot, but he lacked a wide base of support. There was also a difference in style. Paul can assert a policy of radical change, but his Texas lilt makes it sound innocuous, and he often yokes disparate issues—the war in Iraq, the behavior of the Federal Reserve, the right to bear arms—into a single failing, the erosion of a great “moral imperative”: individual liberty. Barr shares most of Paul’s political beliefs but not his record, and he talks in PowerPoint.
To Barr’s frustration, Paul’s encouragement did not evolve into an endorsement. After withdrawing from the race, Paul decided to maintain a “neutral stance” toward the November election. He invested his money and energy in Campaign for Liberty, an organization he created to promote his philosophy, and he urged supporters to run for low-level office. “I don’t have a rule that I say, ‘Hey, look, now everybody is going to infiltrate the Republican Party and take it over,’ ” he told me. “A lot of them want to do it. And we may have a bunch of state representatives and others who will be winning seats this year, and so that has a lot more momentum in that area than I ever dreamed. Young people are always attracted to principles, because they see through the hypocrisy of an older generation, and I think that is what has energized so many of them.”
As the Republican National Convention was taking place in St. Paul, Ron Paul hosted an event in Minneapolis that he called Rally for the Republic. It was held in the Target Center, an arena not far from where McCain was planning to accept the nomination. Ten thousand supporters showed up, as did a dozen speakers, including Tucker Carlson, the political commentator, and Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform. Barr was not asked to speak, but his staff bought tickets, and he decided to campaign on the rally’s margins. I got there early, and as people waited to enter I met two Paulites from Georgia: David Williams, a musician and former Republican, who had long hair and was wearing a Statue of Liberty T-shirt, and his friend Sean Mangieri, a real-estate agent, whose T-shirt identified him as a member of the “Revolutionary War Veterans Association.”
Williams said that he became interested in Paul last year, when he “just heard his name on the Internet, and found that he was the real thing. I wasn’t really looking, just heard discussions in chat rooms and from other news.” He was uncertain about Barr. “I’m not sure I totally trust his character yet,” he said. “Much of his voting record is non-libertarian—”
He was cut short by a commotion nearby. A bald man with a mustache and a goatee had begun shouting excitedly, “I’m in a state of bliss being among so many freedom-loving people!”
“It’s about human rights,” Mangieri said, picking up where Williams had left off. “I’m a Republican. I actually pay dues, but I’ve felt disaffected with the Party since high school. Ron Paul’s message—you can say it is about small government, or about tax reform, or any of those things, but it is fundamentally a human-rights issue. Our Constitution is the only document that protects human rights, and those fundamentals are the things that we want to get back to.” Mangieri said that he might support Barr, but he wasn’t sure, either.
When Barr’s entourage arrived, there were a few hundred people on the sidewalk, and it was drizzling. A couple asked him to sign their lucky two-dollar bills. A Libertarian, unbidden by the campaign, followed Barr around holding a “Barr ’08” poster above the candidate’s head. (“I’ve got the fun task of being a sign holder,” the man said.) “We’ve got Fox News,” Steve Sinton, Barr’s communications director, said. Barr’s staff ushered him toward a camera and made sure that a few supporters were standing nearby.
Sinton was hoping to cause a disturbance that would attract reporters—a strategy he calls “causing a riot, getting used, and killing electrons.” The previous day, a group called Minnesotans for Limited Government had invited Paul and Barr to speak at a small picnic in Langford Park, and Barr did so, but then refused to leave when he was asked. When an organizer said that Paul would not appear unless Barr left, Sinton told the man, “The Congressman just got up and talked about liberties, one of which is freedom of speech.”
“Yeah, right, that’s fine, and this is our picnic,” the organizer said. Security guards began to close in.
At the Target Center, Paul’s security team was less vigilant, and Barr set out to win over skeptical Paulites. A man who shook his hand said, “I’m debating about writing in Ron Paul or voting for you. I don’t know if it would matter.” Someone asked whether the C.I.A. should be abolished. “No,” Barr said. “We need a strong foreign-intelligence capability. The key is to make sure that it doesn’t become too powerful.” Barr walked over to a woman who was in a wheelchair; they spoke quietly, and then he moved away. Moments later, the woman’s husband, a thin man with a beard, became agitated. He started yelling, “Get out of here, Bob!” and “No to Barr!” I asked them what had happened. They were libertarians, they said, but their daughter had severe epilepsy, and Barr had told them that he did not support the Americans with Disabilities Act.
By early autumn, Barr’s campaign had drifted even farther toward the political margins. McCain had announced Sarah Palin as his running mate, a choice that helped restore some conservative support to his campaign. John Zogby told me that the six-per-cent national figure that he had recorded for Barr this summer was inflated—his most recent polls put Barr at one per cent.
In mid-September, Ron Paul decided to hold a press conference at the National Press Club, in Washington, to encourage his supporters to vote for a third party, and he invited the Green, Libertarian, and Constitution candidates to participate. All of them attended except Barr, whose campaign advisers decided that he shouldn’t be “reduced to their level.” Ralph Nader, who is running as an independent, told me, “He got Ron Paul so angry. I was right in the greenroom”—at the National Press Club—“and Ron Paul was pacing, and it was ten-oh-two, ten-oh-three, and then he heard that Bob Barr was not going to show up, and he went furious. He said, ‘I can’t believe he let me down like this. I was about to say a good word for him.’ ” Two hours later, Barr arrived at the National Press Club and invited Ron Paul to be his running mate; the theatrical gesture only further angered Paul’s supporters, and some libertarians circulated a petition demanding that Barr withdraw his candidacy. (Two weeks later, Paul endorsed the Constitution Party candidate, Chuck Baldwin.)
That evening, Barr was scheduled to attend a benefit called the Funniest Celebrity in Washington Contest, held at the D.C. Improv, a comedy club. He had asked Steve Young, a political humorist who sometimes uses the name Dr. Failure, to help him write material for a standup routine. When I arrived, Young was scribbling one-liners on cue cards as he waited for Barr. “That tightness,” Young said, holding his chest, referring to Barr. “I wonder where that comes from.” He had wanted Barr to deliver his lines in the deadpan style of Steven Wright, but Barr was unfamiliar with Wright’s comedy. In any case, once Barr arrived, it was clear that he was not in the mood for jokes. He had barely rehearsed, and he had toned down Young’s humor—he refused to ask the audience to imagine how Libertarians would “screw up Washington.” Instead, he said onstage, “Now, Libertarians have never been in charge of anything, you know. In 2008, I say, Vote Libertarian. It’s high time that we get our chance. It can’t get any worse.” Then he concluded, “My name is Bob Barr, and I did approve this standup routine.” ♦
