When Bob Barr began his campaign for the presidency this past spring, he did so with far more fanfare than usually accompanies the quixotic bids of third-party candidates not named Ralph Nader. And with good reason: Barr is no crank or clumsy ideologue but rather an intelligent and successful politician whose breaks with the Bush administration and Republican establishment had gotten a considerable amount of attention. Barr had the potential, it was thought, to peel away significant numbers of anti-interventionists, civil libertarians, committed federalists, and small-government conservatives and libertarians from the repugnant John McCain and the weak-kneed Barack Obama, forcing them to do more than pander to the mythical center.

It’s reasonable to think that Barr’s failure to do this was well-deserved, that his votes for the Patriot Act and the Iraq War resolution made him an unacceptable choice for anyone who took such issues seriously. But in many ways, Barr’s avowal of libertarianism was not entirely disconnected from his congressional career: he had been a strong critic of the Waco siege, had worked with the ACLU to oppose the Clinton administration on a number of issues, and his position on marriage was arguably in keeping with soundly federalist principles. Not only did Barr’s campaign rhetoric provide a striking contrast to the inability of the major-party candidates ever to talk about liberty, but he was also able to present himself as the consistently conservative option, recalling a time not that long ago when a commitment to limited government meant something more than opposing earmarks and implementing temporary tax cuts and “freezes” on discretionary spending.

In a nearby parallel universe, no doubt a similar Republican candidate is trouncing the descendants of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman for being a bunch of spying, warmongering, profligate spenders—but this is the universe we’re stuck in, and there’s not much of a place in the GOP for rhetoric like that.

But such rhetoric is sorely needed, and so even if a vote for Barr is ultimately a vote for the sort of cross-partisan coalition he could have helped to build, it’s a vote worth casting. Next time, perhaps, the candidate who stands for liberty will do better than 1 percent. 

John Schwenkler is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

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