¿Por qué el Libertarian Party no ha tenido más éxito en estas elecciones? Para muchos miembros del LP, Bob Barr era el candidato ideal para sacar al partido de la marginalidad: antiguo congresista por Georgia con una larga trayectoria política, con reputación nacional y experiencia en recaudar fondos para campañas, todo ello en el contexto de una bases liberales republicanas agitadas por Ron Paul y de una amplia desconfianza por parte del ala anti-estatista del Partido Republicano hacia John McCain. Bob Barr parecía tenerlo todo a su favor, pero el LP finalmente obtuvo un resultado mediocre, a la par con carreras presidenciales anteriores.
A lo mejor Barr no era, a pesar de todo, el candidato más apropiado para el Libertarian Party. Quienes queráis ahondar en esta cuestión y en las reacciones (y predicciones) en torno a la figura de Barr y los resultados del LP, es imprescindible que leais este artículo de Brian Doherty en Reason: Where Did the Libertarian Party Go Wrong?
From the beginning, he was attacked for being too federalist and not enough of a libertarian on matters such as the drug war and gay marriage, being insufficiently emphatic about non-interventionist foreign policy and getting out of Iraq, and too right-wing on matters like border security. Many in the LP distrusted him as a carpetbagger from the beginning, and little about the way he conducted his campaign calmed down such detractors. Barr’s Leadership Fund PAC, for instance, gave money this go-round to many GOP candidates who were directly fighting LP ones. (...)
Additionally, a big complaint from local and state LP activists who figure that, since victory is never an option, party growth and branding has to be what it’s all about, was that lots of the campaign literature and early material didn’t flag the “Libertarian Party” at all. Verney stood by that decision: “The one name we had to embed in people's minds was Barr; we didn’t want anyone thinking of anything but Barr. The initial phase of a campaign is always to introduce the candidate and the Barr name was the only name we wanted to keep repeating.”
Doherty destaca que en opinión de muchos liberales Barr no era inspirador, imaginativo ni divertido. También se refiere a las tensiones con Ron Paul, que probablemente dificultaron la tarea de captar a sus numerosos seguidores.
Ron Paul riled up an unprecedentedly large and energetic bunch of grassroots libertarian action in late 2007 and early 2008. He failed to win the GOP presidential nomination he sought, and disappointed his followers and many within the LP by not seeking its nomination, or making any kind of independent presidential run. Where would his fans and their energy go? Barr’s campaign wanted, and mostly thought it deserved, to inherit the crown—even to have it handed over to them.
Instead, after what some insiders credit to poor personal relations and bad attitudes on the part of some Paul staffers toward the LP and some Barr staffers toward Paul, and partially to a bruised ego on Barr’s part, the campaign chose to alienate Paul by refusing at the last minute to show up to an all-third-party press conference Paul threw back in September. As a result, as I was told by LP grandees from across the nation, the Barr campaign had a hard time tapping into all that leftover Paul partisan energy.
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