Ballyhoo  

The Battle for the Libertarian Party

by Andrew Ferguson

The 2008 LP Convention saw the party nominate its highest-profile candidate ever — and nearly tear itself in half in the process.

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When Bob Barr emerged from an exploratory committee ten days before the 2008 Libertarian Party Convention and announced that he would seek the party's nomination for president, two stories were quickly and widely distributed: one, that Barr's ascent was inevitable, more coronation than nomination; two, that Barr's campaign would steal the election — and with it, the party — by busing to Denver hundreds of extra delegates solely to mark the former congressman's name on the presidential ballot. In writing style, place of publication, and level of detachment, the stories could hardly have been more different: the former appeared in mainstream newspapers, so uniform and uncaring as to crib each other's factual errors; the latter popped up on radical¹ libertarian blogs and message boards, often peppered with the obsessive hyperlinking that makes it difficult to discern any signal in the noise.

But this pair of stories did have one thing in common: both were wrong. Yes, Barr would eventually stand before the delegates as the party's nominee — but not by conquest and not by chicanery. Instead, his victory came after a grueling weekend of arm-twisting, in back rooms that avoided cliché only because Colorado's laws forbade filling them with smoke, culminating in a six-ballot slugfest that could at any moment have gone for one of Barr's rivals. The deals made — and not made — along the way to that nomination very nearly caused a major schism within the party — until, with literally seconds to spare, that disaster was averted by a hallway speech that even the most cynical, jaded observer (meaning myself) had to acknowledge as heroic.

This, then, was the LP Convention 2008, in Denver, Colorado: a battle for the party's heart and soul, for its meaning, and, perhaps, for its continued existence.

Thursday, May 22

The convention's opening night saw it off to a slow start, with a belt of tornadoes in northern Colorado keeping planes away from the Denver airport and attendees away from the opening ceremonies. But conventional talk and Scotch were flowing freely at the Capitol, the bar in the hotel lobby that quickly became the unofficial hangout for Barr's delegates; upon finding out that I was not yet a delegate, they offered to seat me in any one of five different states.² I hasten to note that the offer came with no strings attached: they did not ask me to pledge for Barr; I had only to pay to join the state party of whichever state I ended up in. Deciding that money would be better spent on bourbon, I chose to remain professionally unaffiliated.

So much, then, for the influx of Barr ringers: if they were recruiting singleton delegates down in the hotel bar, surely there was no cohort on the way. True, much of the delegation from Georgia had driven the 20 hours in a van to support their state's former congressman — but they were obviously there to take in the entire convention, every last bylaw and ballot, and besides they had stopped along the way to pick up blogger Thomas Knapp, an adviser to radical candidates Dr. Mary Ruwart and Steve Kubby. Seen from the Capitol Bar patio, the conspiracy theory seemed farther and farther-fetched: how would any campaign, given ten days' time to get organized and win a nomination, at the same time coordinate bus trips (or afford plane trips) for several hundred people?

While I was pondering that, the congressman himself strolled by; seeing a group of his supporters in a festive mood, he sat down for a cigar and a quick chat. This would be the last time in the next 72 hours that I would see him without an orbital ring of black-suited staffers: had I known that, I might have tried to draw him out on his past with the CIA or his history as a drug warrior; his vote for the PATRIOT Act or his authorship of the Defense of Marriage Act — in short, the issues that, Road to Damascus moment or not, continued to make him persona non grata to many libertarians today. But it wasn't long before one of Barr's suits came over and whispered in his ear; with a disdainful "I'm supposed to worry about this shit?", Barr left to worry about that shit, and the chance was gone.

But it wasn't really a night for pestering: more a night for camaraderie, a calm (tornadoes aside) before the storm. Out on that patio I talked with libertarians from Maine, Kentucky, Arizona — almost every state, it seemed (other than North Dakota, which couldn't scrounge up a delegate), plus a couple from foreign parts. Many of these were their state's chair, which in the LP is less about prestige or pecking order than about who's willing to shoulder the load for a while. Even among the ubiquitous Georgians there was diversity: my introduction to the state chair, who would later sport a Stetson on the podium during Barr's acceptance speech, came via a young construction worker who would, seat on the van be damned, vote for Ruwart on all six presidential ballots.

Later on, once the Bulgarian waitress had given us the "you don't have to go upstairs but you can't stay here" stare, I ran into perennial LP candidate-for-office Barry Hess, strolling out in the crisp nighttime air. Hess was talking — politicking without really meaning to — about his political evolution, about how none other than Ronald Reagan told him he was a libertarian . . . and then reined himself in. He wasn't there to run for office: he'd exchanged his presidential bid for a speaking slot at the convention, the better to spend time with his family. "They would like to see me once in a while," he said. A wise choice — Hess had next to no effect on the 2000 race against a much weaker field — and one all aspiring LPers would do well to keep in mind. The ideal level of decision-making, after all, is the individual household: while it is important that we run national candidates, our successes at that level will be measured, not by how many states we rack up, but by how many people stop and think, You know, maybe the government shouldn't make that choice for me.

Friday, May 23

Mark Rand and I were up early on the Friday to secure press credentials — a process that should be a formality but (to the surprise of no one who has read Liberty's coverage of previous LP Cons) always seems to get complicated somehow. While we waited outside the press room for the LP's media liaison to answer his cell phone, I perused the rather confusing conference schedule, and answered a nagging question from the night before: why did the party bother cutting a deal to give Hess a speaker's timeslot? A glance over the featured speakers revealed a decided slant to the Right: though I had given little credence to the conspiratorial "conservative takeover" rhetoric, with recently-Republican fundraiser Richard Viguerie delivering the keynote address, and Barr booster (and subsequent nominator) Mike Ferguson the opening speaker, the deck seemed stacked even before taking into account the cancellation of war-hawk Neil Boortz. In a year that had brought unprecedented breadth of opinion to the LP stage, from Barr on the right to Sen. Mike Gravel on the left, the party needed a few radicals to make the schedule appear better balanced.

About then the liaison arrived; he'd gotten stuck over at the Barr campaign booth (though as an official representative of the LP, his work with Barr was of course in an unofficial capacity). After a bit of wrangling, we were officially approved, and set about loitering with purpose.

The delegates were in session discussing bylaws; between the constant calls for quorum counts, and the belief of many libertarians that freedom of speech implies an obligation to speak, it wasn't long before I fled to the comparatively more exciting world of the booths. There one could find a mini-bookshop run by Laissez-Faire Books, a Matrix-ripoff video imploring passersby to "Reform the LP!", a chess board and Go set accompanied by a bizarre topographical diagram claiming to supersede the Nolan chart, and a table full of feathered boas that on closer examination was set up to advertise Shotgun Willie's, "Denver's finest gentleman's club." Now there's a business that knows its target market.

As for the candidates, Hess' deal had brought the field down to 11, most of whom had a booth up. (There had been 14, but Robert Milnes failed to show up, despite sending desperate pleas for help and also travel money to every email address he could find, and John Finan's presence was a publicity stunt — his campaign booth consisted of the motorcycle he had driven a couple thousand miles to Denver, a handful of pictures taken along the way, and no employees to discuss any of it.) Mary Ruwart's staff had staked out a prime spot, greeting all comers and goers with her weirdly Catholic red-heart-and-Mary! logo.

Barr's booth was the only one taking up two spaces, and had enough staffers milling around that they probably could've taken over a couple more, and then at least had room for their multiple TVs. It was on this Friday that the anti-Barr push really got going, and the congressman's campaign didn't help matters: the radicals felt like the party was being invaded, and the campaign was doing its best to come off as invaders. To disguise weakness, put your strongest foot forward; treat the election as if it is already won. That might have made sense, had the voters in question not been the contrary, bloody-minded creatures known as libertarians. As it was, the dark-suit, black-hat approach came off as mere posturing and bravado, compounded by Barr's decision to skip the night's "unofficial debate" deep in the bowels of the hotel, in favor of a solo meet-and-greet.

Perhaps it was a no-win situation for him. The audience was packed with radicals: if there were any undecideds there, they were undecided between the candidates who weren't Bob Barr. But his chair was the only one of 11 that was empty; even the right-leaning Wayne Allyn Root (who, whisper whisper, could just be a Republican plant or somethin') came down into the arena to fight for votes he was unlikely to get — on the first ballot.

But then, it wasn't votes that the candidates were scrapping for, not yet. The first cull of the field came in the form of scraps of paper confusingly called "tokens." Each token represented the support of a delegate; once the candidate reached the required amount — no one was quite sure yet how many that was — the tokens could be transferred by the candidate as seen fit. Once everyone got the hang of it, the token system was brilliant, offering intrigue — who would be kept in the race by others, and what's the quid pro quo — and keeping the field to a reasonable size. Or at least, it would have, if they hadn't ratcheted down the required number the next day. But no matter the number, some of the candidates would be left on the outside; thus was organized this "unofficial" debate, so everyone had a chance to address whichever delegates chose to attend.

The LP frowned on this subversion of debate procedure, forcing the event out of the main convention area, where a room had been secured at a cost of $400, into the bomb shelter across the street, where the price tag was $2,400. The event was organized and partially funded by candidate and minimalistic Liberty advertiser Jim Burns, who used his forum to give inoffensive (well, to Libertarians, anyway) answers to the moderator's softball questions.

Another donor and no-hoper was Alden Link, whose most pressing concern was the need to build more nuclear power plants, in support of which he quoted Fidel Castro. His voice was Elmer Fudd's, if Elmer Fudd ever quoted Fidel Castro. He said, at one point, "The problem of violence in the Middle East only started recently. Saddam Hussein kept peace in his country. It was through violence, but it was peace."

Then there was Daniel Imperato, who gave and gave and gave, but only out of the wealth of his soul. A papal knight and one-time semipro hockey player, Mr. Imperato has spent all of the last 30 years on transcontinental flights, learning how to say "Pillow, please" in 75 different languages; having worked on ID cards around the world, he knows all about the 666 chips we are implanting in children, some of which, in Abu Dhabi at least, call him "Uncle Danny." Shabat shalom!

(The next day, once it was clear that Mr. Imperato would not be "marching on the White House," nor indeed entering the C-SPAN debate, he endorsed Bob Barr and then promptly announced — in a press statement exclusive to Liberty — the formation of his own new political party; however, he hadn't yet made up his mind whether he would accept the party's nomination for president.)

Throughout the debate, Christine Smith, who claimed to stand for "the libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party," grew ever more exclamatory and orgasmic, working herself into a glassy-eyed frenzy that culminated in her shouting her real age to a group of strangers during her closing statement. The suspicion that this was not the act of a sane woman, intensified by the confusion felt by the audience that anyone could have doubted Smith's constitutional qualifications in this area, made her "one to watch" once Imperato was gone. She would not disappoint.

This quartet would not make it in front of the bright lights of the C-SPAN cameras; only Smith would eventually be nominated. This was undoubtedly good for the party, in terms of the image it presents to the outside world. But it wouldn't be a proper LP Convention without some off-the-wall speechifying; the unofficial debate offered candidates, legitimate contender or not, the chance to play to a raucous libertarian audience, as opposed to a raucous libertarian audience plus whatever weird souls were tuning in to C-SPAN on a Saturday night. Thus, for instance, Dr. George Phillies could reference, with questionable hand motions, the Nolan chart (though not, for some reason, in connection with chess or Go), without needing to explain it. The only ones who didn't seem to play the debate theatrically were the latecomers to the LP: Sen. Gravel, whose entire weekend seemed little more than a commercial for his asinine national direct-democracy initiative; and Root, who to be fair is theatrical all the time.

The winner of the debate, if there was one, was Steve Kubby, a walking advertisement for medical marijuana (check his Wikipedia page for the full story) who had the biggest applause line of the whole night, going after Barr on the PATRIOT Act; the biggest loser, obviously, was Barr, for not being there to defend himself and thus allowing the entrenchment of an anyone-but-Barr mentality among the assembled radicals. But lost among the candidates who were there was Mary Ruwart, whose quiet intensity didn't register amid the more bombastic performances of her fellow debaters. Though she was in no danger of missing the C-SPAN debate, she would certainly have to lift her performance if she was to be more than the anyone-but-Barr candidate.

Apart from being held in a death trap of a room (seriously, if Barr had been the evil overlord type that the wildest-eyed delegates depicted him as, he could've sewn up the nomination right then by simply locking the single exit and introducing the poisonous compound of his choice), and going over time (one of the biggest applause lines of the night was when the moderator announced he'd be forgoing the last few questions to go straight to closing statements), the event was a hit, exactly the sort of freewheeling affair needed to loosen up after a day of stifling professionalism. Perhaps next year the LP will see fit to allow it a place, as a "roundtable" if not a debate, in the hotel proper.

Saturday, May 24

In the convention hall, the delegates were hammering out the new platform; in the war rooms and among the booths, campaigns were trying to gather tokens. At 83 (10% of the registered delegates at the 2004 Atlanta convention) tokens, entry to the debate would be in the hands of the three highest-polling candidates: Barr, Root, and Ruwart. At 57 (10% of the confirmed delegates from the present convention), there were a lot more extras to distribute, so the goal shifted from consolidation to maximum representation: Kubby and Phillies made the total with some to spare (both would likely have cleared the higher bar, Kubby through a mutual agreement with Ruwart and Phillies from across the spectrum); Gravel made it thanks to a substantial wedge from Barr's campaign (the better to siphon votes from Ruwart, for a couple ballots at least); and Michael Jingozian, an up-and-coming businessman outsider who must have thought he was done the night before, cobbled together a few extras from everyone to scrape through at the deadline.

Left on the outside was Christine Smith: when I asked her if she'd made it, she said no, but insisted she "wasn't out of it" because she still had enough tokens to get nominated (a prize which required only 20-odd tickets, I mean tokens). "The debate's only a beauty contest anyway," noted her underling; as Reason's David Weigel said at the time, that's a funny argument coming from a candidate whose campaign literature is built around glamour shots that can't be less than five years old. Regardless, the crazed look in her eye made me wonder if her previous night's performance was not theater, but rather in dead earnest; if so, I thought, the LP really dodged a bullet by keeping her off of national TV. (How shortsighted I was!)

Meanwhile, Mary Ruwart was giving a speech amongst the rental booths; clearly she'd picked the time so she could answer a few questions and then lead the crowd over to triumphantly turn in her tokens. But she was completely upstaged by the Barr crowd: a few minutes before the deadline, Barr came on his booth's PA system, volume cranked way up, and organized his own black-hatted march. But again, the gesture seemed liked a miscalculation: several delegates, and not just radicals, jeered the procession as it went past, one even humming the Imperial March from "The Empire Strikes Back." It smacked of overcompensation, conveying a "resistance is futile" message that would make almost any undecided libertarian determined to resist. If Barr had ended up losing the nomination, this is the moment when it would all have started to go wrong.

The imperial-march stunt, combined with the absence from the unofficial debate, left Barr needing a stellar performance in the C-SPAN debate to salvage his candidacy — and to his credit, he delivered: although the words "I'm sorry" didn't quite escape his lips, he partially repudiated his Defense of Marriage Amendment, thoroughly rebuked the domestic War on Drugs (or at least pot), and thunderously denounced the PATRIOT Act (as president he would "work with a broad coalition to put a stake through it, burn it, bury it, burn it again, and scatter the ashes"). But even as one of the night's acknowledged winners, the mood at his post-debate reception was apprehensive.

The apprehension centered around Barr's campaign manager Russ Verney, who came recommended by Ross Perot after working with that groundbreaking 1992 third-party run and guiding the 1996 follow-up. In his initial memo for the Barr campaign, Verney had laid out a schedule for replicating Perot's 19% vote total in 1992 — a tall task, especially considering how much more difficult it has become for a third-party candidate to crash the network TV debates. Yet by the Thursday night of the convention, he'd revised his numbers upward: Verney told me that the plan now was to start by entering the national debates (which would require a level of poll support dwarfing anything the LP has ever come near), and end by making the race a genuine three-way contest, "taking 34% in a plurality of states" — one assumes the other candidates would be evenly splitting the remainder — thus installing a Libertarian in the White House.

By Saturday night, Verney — who was behind the imperial-march stunt and the in-your-face attitude more generally — could not even say with confidence that his boss would gain the party's nomination. This was a startling shift, especially considering that the performances of the other two frontrunners, Root and Ruwart, received mixed reviews at best.

One of Root's gimmicks, at the end of any of his public appearances, is to ask for a show of hands: "Who thinks I have energy?" — and when the inevitable 90% oblige, he takes it as a sign of approval. But when you have "the comportment of a Ronco pitchman with a squirrel in his pants," in the words of Jesse Walker, energy is never the problem: rather, it's knowing how to pull back when a deft touch is what's needed. But his dynamism was unquestionable, and by gearing his campaign toward small businessmen, parents with school-age children, and online gamblers, he was aiming primarily at the same pool of Right-leaning voters, perhaps 60% of the delegates, that Barr had targeted. If Root were to outpoll Barr on the first ballot, it could signal the end of the campaign.

Whichever of Barr or Root took the lead on that side, Verney (like most people) expected the radicals to line up behind Mary Ruwart, who fit the profile that the LP had used several times for its presidential nominee: longtime party activist, given the flagship role as a reward for services rendered. And in a normal cycle, that would be enough. But Barr was a different order of candidate from what the party usually sees: the presence of cameras from CNN and MTV News, and journalists from major syndicate newspapers, testified to that. The Barr campaign's performance had opened up the possibility of an upset, if Ruwart could keep the radicals organized ("herding cats," the old joke goes; which was also the name of the South African wine given out to speakers at the conference) and siphon away some of the Barr and Root voters; recognizing that party service and ideological purity alone were insufficient, Ruwart found another point of emphasis: her vagina. Blunt? Yes, but no more so than Ruwart herself insisting from the platform that, with Hillary out of the race, disaffected women might turn libertarian "just to have the chance to vote for a woman for president." This, instead of playing up her long-term experience in and expertise on health care, an issue about which average Americans worry as much as any other.³

Of the other candidates, Jingozian was clearly along for the ride: honest and engaging if a little unsure on basic concepts, he was looking to establish himself in the party for future endeavors. And Gravel, despite a few really big hits, was treading water, on some issues barely even addressing the question that had been asked.

Phillies continued to prove a pleasant surprise, displaying noteworthy charisma for a man who had been most highly regarded before this convention as a number cruncher; without his patient scouring of spreadsheets, the full extent of the financial manipulation between the LP and the Harry Browne campaign would likely never have been revealed. But accountants rarely make good candidates, and Phillies still shows a few signs of the personality in one-on-ones: he has a tendency toward eye-rolling, and a disconcerting hand-wringing gesture that reminds one almost of Montgomery Burns. But on stage he was a different man: he presented himself as the "moderate" candidate, "a candidate everyone can live with" — not perhaps the most inspired approach, but a niche nonetheless. He gained the endorsement of the Outright Libertarians, the LP's GLBT group, giving him a soapbox to hector Barr on the Defense of Marriage Act. His laugh lines, on the whole, went down well; if he had a failure on stage, it was his refrain that he "started campaigning two years ago"; again, in a normal cycle this and his service (Browne loyalists aside) might have pitted him against Ruwart for the nomination, but with bigger names involved the emphasis on his campaign machine was only going to make it sound ripe for takeover.

But the night's real winner was Steve Kubby. He got easily the biggest laugh of the night: going last on the question of the War on Drugs, hearing condemnations of it from all the other candidates, the full spectrum of libertarian thought, he started with, "I'm getting a major buzz up here." Which pointed, as well, to the major concerns about him as a national candidate: first, his health (though he looked quite fit); and second, the reaction of middle America to Kubby's condition. How would they take a candidate who was most certainly taking to the podium under the effects of demon weed? In the words of his adviser: "Who the fuck cares?" To them, medical marijuana is a winning issue; as even my staunchly Republican grandmother has expressed support for it in recent years, I believe that if we're not yet at that point, we're damn close to it.

One thing I found, in canvassing delegates on candidates' performances, was thoroughgoing agreement on the debate as a whole: nearly everyone thought it was the best they'd seen. The seven candidates on stage were articulate and engaging; needling each other without sniping (this, however, could have been the result of a debate rule allotting a

30-second rebuttal to any candidate who was directly attacked; the provision went unused), often finding themselves in full and hearty agreement on those issues — the necessity of ending the War on Drugs, the evils of the PATRIOT Act — where full and hearty agreement is most needed, not just in the LP but in society as a whole. On this night the LP showed its best face on national TV. It wouldn't last long.

Saturday night is when things actually start to happen: hospitality suites are opened, operatives are dispatched, deals are brokered rather than just kicked around. Kubby's performance had raised his stock; his night, like many others', was spent in hopping from one suite to the next, but unlike most of us who were simply hoovering up the food and drink on offer,⁴ he was receiving offers for vice-presidential endorsement.

At Wayne Root's suite, the candidates spotted a delegate wearing both their buttons, with the Root one first. Root asked how that sounded to him; Kubby responded it was just fine — if they were only reversed. And besides, that way it'd be the true grass-root ticket! Ah, convention humor . . .

Barr's staff went for the home run first, approaching Ruwart about a potential VP gig: an arrangement that would have settled the ballot right away. But she had no interest in propping up a ticket many of whose positions she felt philosophically unable to support; when asked later what she'd been offered in order to endorse, she would answer, "Nothing of substance." So Barr too turned to Kubby, who would certainly have brought a poetic sort of balance to a ticket with the ex-drug warrior; Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project was one of several emissaries sent to sell the medical-marijuana patient on Barr's "Road to Damascus" moment about drugs. Gravel had been working him "from day one," according to his campaign manager, but though it was not too late, it was too little: Kubby told him that the Fair Tax proposal would have to go before he could even think of supporting the senator as "standard bearer," and Gravel is nothing without grandiose ideas such as the Fair Tax and the Direct Democracy Initiative. (Have I called that asinine yet? Because it's asinine.)

Kubby's closest ties, of course, were with fellow radical Ruwart, a personal friend as well as the primary provider of his access to the debate. A joint effort (ha!) between the two of them seemed a guarantee, should Ruwart top the ticket, so there wasn't much reason for Kubby to linger at her "Alternative Hospitality Suite." Hell, Ruwart herself didn't even see out her scheduled time at the Supreme Court, a bar across the street from the hotel; on a night when all the other candidates were shaking hands well past midnight, she headed off to bed shortly after 11. It was just as well: unlike the Capitol, which catered almost exclusively to the hotel guests and thus closed down early, the Supreme Court was a full-service dance club; by the time Ruwart retired, her supporters had ceded most of the room, save for one corner and the patio outside, to those patrons for whom it was just another Saturday night.

Back in the hotel proper, the parties wound down or, as often, migrated to other locations. The stragglers eventually wound up at Michael Jingozian's — probably because he was too polite to just tell everyone to leave. Holding court at that late hour were Starchild (an activist, scholar, and sex symbol from San Francisco), Thomas Knapp, and some random bloke from Australia who'd come to the States to visit a pair of girlfriends and thought he'd check things out. But on the whole, for a group who often had to distinguish itself from "libertines" until that word fell out of vogue, the parties were a tame affair: not a snip on the antics that take place during a major-party convention. Perhaps the Libertarians are becoming more conservative, after all.

Sunday, May 25

The action on Sunday kicks off with a prolonged formality: the nomination speeches. It's the last chance for candidates to make an impression before balloting begins; the nominating speakers are usually chosen either to identify or reinforce a connection between the candidate and a particular organization — for instance, Barr bringing ex-adversary Rob Kampia out to underline the about-face on drug policy, and give him the opportunity to, at last, say he was wrong about much of what he supported in Congress. Another strategy is to use someone from within your own campaign — or, more cloyingly, your own family. That was Root's route, sending out his daughter Dakota (who is a couple years away from being old enough to circle her dad's name at the polls) to introduce him for a candidate speech that leaned heavily on the "plain-spoken citizen politician" rhetoric.

Christine Smith provided more unintentional humor with her extended diatribe against the neoconservative conspiracy, complete with statistics on her kill rate at the local gun range; this was prefaced by a couple of guys who didn't seem too sure who she was. Jingozian provided a bit of theater by giving his candidate speech, then turning around and speaking as a nominator for Sen. Gravel — a de facto endorsement that caught Ruwart's staff by surprise, as they had helped Jingozian into the national debate with the apparent understanding that he would throw his support to them when he was knocked out in the early balloting.

But before those ballots could get underway, Barr's supporters had time to do something stupid and juvenile: they gathered at the front of the grand ballroom, waving campaign signs before the eyes of the C-SPAN cameras — and, of course, the eyes of the other delegates. Though later I would have it confirmed that this parade was spontaneous exuberance, not organized from the top, it's hard to imagine it happening without the campaign leadership setting a precedent with Saturday's blustery march. The stunt was met, as it should have been, with a cascade of boos — thanks to the TV debate, the zone covered by the cameras had been a place for demonstrating party unity amid the wide spectrum of contemporary libertarianism. Barr's delegates invaded that space and all but staked a flag: another aggressive blunder that served, for many, as confirmation of the conspiratorial "takeover" rhetoric.

It certainly did for Christine Smith, eliminated after garnering only six votes on the first ballot; during her concession speech, she launched into a tirade against neoconservative infiltration, and about the LP no longer being "the party of principle" if it nominated a man like Barr. She too was booed, and again justly so, but the ill feeling between the Barr and anti-Barr factions was clearly intensifying, and risked spilling over in full view of the nation.

That was not, however, an immediate concern for the congressman's supporters: Barr took an unexpected lead, pipping Ruwart by a vote and Root by a comfortable 30. The result surprised and relieved many of the congressman's faction who expected a three-way heat on the first ballot — or worse, a Root victory, which would have installed the self-proclaimed "King of Vegas" as the man to beat. Now Root would need help from the radicals to defy the odds: an unlikely scenario, given the disdain between the two delegations — indeed, between the two candidates. Nonetheless, Root, believing that Ruwart could not rally half the delegation behind her, attempted to make a deal from a position of power, presenting himself as the only candidate who could beat Bob Barr head-to-head.

Root-Ruwart was never a possible ticket; Ruwart was not going to be anyone's VP. If Root's deal with the radicals had gone through, it would've been in the form of a Root-Kubby pairing. In fact, it seemed at this point that Kubby would end up as right-hand man no matter the candidate, such was his rise in stature over the convention weekend. All of which highly spiced the second ballot: with delegates having fulfilled their pledges in the first round, many now began to vote as they felt the situation warranted. The results were startling: Barr picked up an extra 35 votes and Ruwart 10, while Root dropped 15. Gravel picked up only a couple; despite receiving the expected endorsement the round before, he picked up only two of the 23 Jingozian delegates now in play.⁵

In this round, Steve Kubby was low man out; in his concession speech, he endorsed Ruwart, all but ending Root's hopes for the 2008 presidency, and infuriating Gravel supporters who believed that Kubby had backed out on an earlier deal (this would be comprehensively refuted by the Gravel campaign and Kubby himself). If the radicals were going to push back, this was the time.

The third ballot had Ruwart and Barr (losing two votes!) in a dead heat, with George Phillies making way. But he endorsed no one in his concession, instead giving an impassioned speech for party unity: "The enemies are not in here. The enemies are out there!" He left to a standing ovation, a fitting end for a campaign that probably deserved better than it got. With this "centrist" libertarian gone, his delegates scattered, going half for Barr and half for Ruwart, both of whom were busying themselves making pitches to Gravel.

The day before, according to Independent Politicial Report, the senator had organized a strategy meeting in Phillies' suite, inviting as well Kubby and Ruwart. The latter never showed; and it appeared later that she had not been informed of the summit, though her staff had. This lack of organization, as much as anything, could have cost her Gravel's support; though he did not make a concession speech ("Not my style," he said), he let it be known that given a choice between the two, he would take Barr.

From that point, it should really have been academic: without Gravel's full delegation and a chunk of Root's, Ruwart could not assemble the majority she needed; Root would have been eliminated, and his delegates broken mostly to Barr. But a moment of panic on the congressman's side created an opportunity Root was quick to exploit, shepherding Barr and Verney into his war room to hammer out a kingmaker's deal: in exchange for his endorsement, Barr would in turn not only endorse Root for VP — when many thought Kubby was a better choice for party unity — but also train him to run for president in 2012.

Root's dictation of terms was a final and forceful demonstration of the Barr campaign's weaknesses: the relief among his supporters when he took the final ballot over Ruwart, 54–46%, obscured the fact that it should never have been that close. Yes, the campaign started late, late enough that the exploratory committee was no formality: they had to be all but certain that Barr would win the nomination before he could commit to sacrificing all his income from Republican sources — up to half a million, by one account. To run and lose would have been a calamity, and that fear of defeat must have played into the decision to approach the convention as if Barr could not be defeated. How much better it would have been, if he had apologized out front for everything, instead of waiting for the nomination speech! How much better, without the bush-league stunts and the stern black suits! He could have taken this thing on the second or third ballot.

Root's deal points as well to the failures of Mary Ruwart's campaign: Barry Hess pointed to it, unintentionally, while nominating her, mentioning that certain candidates (coughBarrRootcough) were "the darling[s] of the old media. The new media has Mary." Do they? The anti-Barr movement seemed content to express its message through well-worn forms: buttons, fliers, press statements . . . where were the video montages? The cut-ups documenting Barr's (recent) anti-Libertarian statements, juxtaposed with bits on his congressional record, designed to cast doubt on his entire "Road to Damascus" shtick? Yes, she too was a latecomer to the race, but anyone who has been heart-and-soul into libertarian politics for a few decades now, and anyone who has a technically savvy delegate base, should have been able to use that "new media" to appeal to a roomful of people whose propensities she knew and shared. Instead, contrary to Hess' assertion, Ruwart remained wedded to "old media": even during her nomination speech, the extent of her technical display was a slideshow making note of her popularity on a few internet forums, a Life Extension magazine cover, and some circled paragraphs out of a handful of newspapers — one of which was The New York Times. How "new media" is that?

The problem of organization would bite the radicals again in the vice-presidential election. In his acceptance speech, Barr gave Root a somewhat endorsement — enough of one, anyway, that the assembled contingents could use "Barr-Root! Barr-Root!" chants to drown out the "Mary! Mary!" of the radicals. But not all, apparently, were on board: Kubby, working with endorsements from Ruwart and Gravel (though not Phillies, even though he and especially his Massachusetts delegates were dissatisfied with a Barr-Root ticket), benefited as well from a number of Barr voters working the convention floor on his behalf. But he was let down by his own core constituency: 20 to 25 Ruwart voters (who "look like they've had their heads shoved underwater," Weigel said), evidently taking the VP race as a foregone conclusion, left without voting — and therefore couldn't influence a race that was decided by 30 votes, in a room that was looking for an excuse to buck Barr's endorsement and "balance the ticket."

Defeated on both fronts, some of the radicals turned their attention to assuring representation on the Libertarian National Committee in the next day's elections — comedian Doug Stanhope was even passing out paper bathroom cups of Scope, "to wash the bad taste out of your mouth." But not everyone was so sanguine: suddenly, talk of a schism within the party, of turning backs on the ticket — as one delegate did, literally — no longer seemed far-fetched; as more and more disaffected radicals poured out into the halls, they began to swirl around Steve Kubby, who held the option of addressing the delegates to concede the VP race.

Over the course of the convention, Kubby had earned respect from all factions; he seemed to have answered the questions about his health, and was proving that he could be more than just a one-issue candidate. With Mary Ruwart proving an ineffective leader of men, Kubby had emerged as the de facto leader of the radical anti-Barr faction. Had he gone before the assembly and refused to endorse the ticket, the radicals would have followed him out the door — and there was no shortage of people clamoring for him to do just that. Faced with the decision of a political lifetime, Kubby turned to Thomas Knapp and asked him whether he should make the speech. "If you go up on that stage and do anything other than announce your support for the ticket," Knapp said, "I will never speak to you again." Not that Knapp was any friend of the ticket; at the time he too refused to endorse Barr-Root, even claiming that he would return to his home in St. Louis and withdraw from the congressional race in which he was the Libertarian candidate (a position he would shortly back down from). But he made the point forcefully that the stage at the convention was not the place for such gestures, and Kubby was convinced.

Instead, it was decided that a meeting would be assembled for Kubby to address the radical rank-and-file; the question of place was made moot when the assembly gathered around him in the hallway. His speech began more as an explanation of why he wasn't going on stage even to thank his supporters, but opened up into a call for party unity, remarkable considering its spontaneity:

Because I can't get up there and endorse the ticket, and because I don't want to see people leaving this party, it's very important that we all get together and pick up the pieces, get our strategy together, get our group together. This takeover by the neocons absolutely depends on one thing: forcing this coalition to get out of the party so that they have a free shot at it.

And that can't happen. We have to have our libertarian wing of the party back in the mainstream of this party. I believe that this event can be a unifying experience for all of us, because we understand that this party is not for sale, and we do not accept a hostile takeover. We're not going to trash our ticket, we're not going to hurt our ticket, but we are going to do everything we need to do to recover from this setback, take back our party, and kick those goddamn neocons off to the freakin' moon!

Applause thundered through the hallway, and Kubby continued, appealing to all present to work for the party rather than against Barr and Root. "That's what they want you to do, they want you to walk out and leave this party . . . so that they can loot the mailing list and steal ten years of work on ballot access" — "Oh hell no!" said one delegate. Kubby wrapped up by asking for a show of support: "How many people are willing to remain and work to keep this party together?" At least 90% raised their hands. "You guys are awesome!"

The other 10% — those who, one assumes, were not awesome — remained unconvinced, and they have been bitching loud and long on the blogs ever since. They can generally be spotted by their support for Christine Smith, who capped her weekend of embarrassing behavior with an attempt to disrupt Barr's post-election press session; that having failed, she settled on making strident proclamations on the death of the LP to any TV camera that so much as panned across her.

But no matter how much noise her ilk made, they were clearly in the minority: all those with standing in the party — i.e., those who through long experience have learned to work for change within the bylaws when things don't go their way, rather than just tossing their toys out of the stroller and leaving — got behind Kubby's call for unity, announcing support for the LP (if not yet support for the ticket). Party cofounder David Nolan, despite his frustration at the unbalanced ticket, even seemed to suggest that Barr and Root could still "surprise" him.

With that possibility open, all that was left for the Barr and anti-Barr factions was to take baby steps toward each other. Kubby put in an appearance at the celebratory banquet — the only losing candidate to do so — and another at the private bash up in Barr's hospitality suite, where he received a standing ovation (well, everyone was standing already, but you get the idea). Word circulated that, as a token of thanks, Barr and his campaign would lend Kubby support for a 2010 gubernatorial bid in California — a race ideally suited for him: staying in-state, he won't have to worry about running out of the medicine that keeps him alive, or about facing uppity sheriffs who want to bust him for using that medicine.

Both banquet and bash were successes from the now all-important perspective of fundraising: the soirees pulled in somewhere between $60,000 to $70,000, a record for a first-night haul. But the goal Russ Verney set for the national campaign is $30 million: to get anywhere near that, Barr will need to tap the network that earned millions for Ron Paul's ultimately quixotic run (or better yet, tap the millions themselves). Trouble is, much of that network is in the hands of radicals such as Ernest Hancock, a fiery activist from Arizona who was running for LNC chair, and who told me earlier in the convention that, whereas "Ron Paul is an A-minus libertarian, Mary Ruwart is an A-plus" — as close to an endorsement as he was allowed to give under FEC guidelines.

Arizona is a famously contentious state for the LP, with radicals and moderates generally maintaining an uneasy peace. But the convention had made that peace less easy than at any time since the party split in 1983, and rumor had it that it would be a struggle for AZLP leadership to get the ticket registered over the objections of the radicals. So Barr left his own celebration for an informal chat with Hancock, Barry Hess, and a few others down at the Capitol patio, to see what if any agreement could be reached. The discussion ranged widely, from jury nullification to the Fed, but kept returning to the War on Drugs. Hess and Hancock good-cop, bad-copped Barr on the issue, noting that they were eager to work with the campaign, and predicted that most of the other radicals would also come around, if an unyielding, unequivocal statement of opposition was forthcoming in the first couple weeks of Barr's run — assurance, basically, that the campaign would not veer rightward as soon as the convention was over. The ex-congressman spoke frankly of the main points he expected to hit in the early going, but also admitted there was much still to formulate. Barr listened more than he talked, and excused himself only when he was down to three hours of sleep before his early morning radio appearances — to be fuelled, no doubt, by his perpetual stream of quintuple Starbucks lattes.

The impromptu forum — no suits looming, at least within a ten-foot bubble — was a nice touch from the now-presidential candidate, showing that he recognized the mistakes he had made at the convention and that he was prepared to learn from them. Which is, more or less, the entire narrative of his candidacy, one that he has elaborated at many of his campaign stops since, including an appearance on "The Colbert Report." That segment is as good a confirmation as any that Barr should prove a wise choice for the LP: speaking in front of a national TV audience of 20- and 30-somethings who are interested in politics, Barr carved out a niche for himself in this election, rejecting the spoiler role that would have him pulling from McCain, insisting that the LP offered a real alternative to the two-party dominance of American politics. What other candidate would have gotten that audience, or, having gotten it, would have had the savvy or the confidence to trade jokes with Colbert, a man known for his humiliating interviews of public figures? Barr has come a long way from his days as a PR-disaster-in-waiting: so long as he avoids whipped cream, supporters' handguns, and Sasha Baron Cohen, he will not bring the LP into disrepute.

Meanwhile (and fortunately), none of the rest of us had just won a presidential nomination, and thus would not have to answer a 4 a.m. wakeup call. Instead we floated from patio to pub and back again, a party in search of a place. At last those final few of us determined to celebrate, to mourn, or to experience every last moment gathered ourselves in the hotel lobby, to drink our way resolutely through a handle of Old Crow. The talk moved as quickly as the booze, but kept coming back to the one thing rued by the radicals and puzzled over by the Barrites: given the situation on Saturday, Mary Ruwart should have won. But that advantage was squandered through organizational failings and a comparatively lackluster debate performance; even with the spontaneous stupidity of the sign parade reminding the delegates of the Barr campaign's blunders, the radicals still couldn't rally behind Ruwart and push the advantage home . . . and somewhere in there I fell asleep, glass in hand. Those late-nighters at the LP Cons can really pack it away!

Monday, May 26

By the next morning, all that was left unsettled was the election of an LNC, and the staking out of a seat on the airport shuttle. I took to the floor one last time to say goodbyes and ask for parting thoughts. Near the front of the stage I caught Mary Ruwart, with Steve Kubby alongside, waiting on the results that would see Ruwart and her campaign manager into LNC at-large seats. Any last things to say about the 2008 LP Convention? Ruwart, staring daggers, said nothing: not a word about the position she was expecting to win, not a word about how this would give her both the opportunity and the authority to keep the Barr campaign on message, not a word about how the assembly had seemingly endorsed (and the Barr-Rooters conceded) this authority by making the at-large committee majority radical. After a few awkward seconds Kubby came to the rescue in a small-scale recapitulation of his Sunday heroics: "We're here to support the ticket. It'll be a great year for the party, and a great year for liberty."

Barr-Root should deliver the biggest vote total and percentage ever for an LP presidential ticket, so Kubby ought to be proved right. If so, thanks are due him for rejecting the all-or-nothing, purge-or-walkout approach that has too often characterized the party — and thanks are due as well to those radicals, including Mary Ruwart, who however hesitantly have followed his lead and found positions from which they can respect both the mandate of the delegates and their own consciences. With the nomination in hand, Barr's campaign could pull in votes with or without the backing of the "libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party." But any gains he realizes at the national level will never carry over to 2010 or '12, nor will they translate into gains for state and local candidates, unless all factions of the party are working toward those ends. If the LP is to mean anything, if it is to present a vision of liberty compelling enough to hold the attention of the American public, it needs both radicals and moderates, idealists and gradualists: those who can maintain the vision, and those who can show the steps it will take for that vision to become reality.

If Barr holds strong on his rhetoric, showing that his journey down the "Road to Damascus" has only just begun . . . and if the radicals can keep the schismatics from creeping back in and bringing down the alliance through snipes and purity tests . . . then the LP stands to enter 2009 the strongest it's ever been. But those are big ifs, and 2008 has a while yet to go. The battle continues.

Notes

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1

I use "radical" throughout, not as a pejorative, but as the preferred term for those LP delegates allied (or nearly so) to the LP Radical Caucus. Their statement of purpose may be found at lpradicals.org; briefly, they support an absolutist rather than a gradualist approach to achieving the LP platform. [return]

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2	This geographic flexibility is not at all unusual at LP conventions: Liberty's founder Bill Bradford, a Michigan-born resident of Washington, once found himself seated with the delegates from Missouri. [return]

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3

It could've been worse, I suppose. Ruwart was among those who signed the Libertarians for Justice pledge, which was allied if not identified with the 9/11 Truth movement. No doubt there is much to investigate about 9/11, especially the incompetence of our federal law enforcement agencies and the grotesque failure of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to provide adequate safety equipment to workers on the cleanup site. But in an interview with Liberty, Ruwart went further and admitted to being skeptical about the official account, mentioning the possibility of explosives in the towers in addition to two jumbo airliners. As Robert Stacy McCain, on site for the American Spectator, pointed out, one doesn't need the definitive Popular Mechanics report to disprove the demolition theory; Occam's Razor will suffice. [return]

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4

I should note here that I consistently and knowingly violated a long-standing principle of R.W. Bradford's: that of never accepting anything from candidates other than access. I chose instead to accept everything from candidates — partly because camaraderie and information go hand in hand, but mostly because, at any gathering of political animals, what a man really needs is a good stiff drink. [return]

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5

A contrast in styles: Jingozian, whose knowledge of libertarian doctrine was scant but who demonstrated decorum and general decency, would go on to be elected vice chair of the LNC; Christine Smith, who in her increasingly rare moments of lucidity demonstrated a solid grasp on the principles of the party of principle, would after the convention resign her party membership. [return]

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