WWW- Former Congressman Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party’s Presidential nominee, has just passed the $500,000 mark in his fundraising… and is going full steam towards the general election. He is in good shape to be on the ballot in 48 states plus the District of Columbia. Maybe 49 if his petitition drive in West Virginia works out. And that total could even climb to all 50 if his lawsuit against the state of Oklahoma is successful.

This is really the first time we’ve ever seen a serious candidate at the top of the Libertarian ticket, and it’s interesting to watch Barr on the campaign trail. He’s able to get the news media to cover him. He’s able to raise at least some money. And most interestingly, Barr has recently polled at or near 10% in several states.

Could he be a factor in swinging the election to Barack Obama? Barr says he’s not worried about the prospect, but a lot of other people sure are.

The LA Times ran a piece today that followed Barr as a goes about the day-to-day business of running for President as a minor party candidate…

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon and Barr is asking for his Starbucks — five shots of espresso topped off with steamed half and half. The barista emits a low whistle. Barr downs at least three of these a day, right up until bedtime.

“What has to do with your ability to fall asleep is not caffeine. It’s having a clean conscience. I have a clean conscience so I can drink all the caffeine I want,” he said.

He heads into the Washington heat on the way to a private meeting with a supporter, his thoughts shattered by a wailing siren, which he assumes is a frivolous motorcade. “When I’m president, that all stops,” he declared.

Short in stature, with Richard Nixon’s round-shouldered posture, Barr is direct and uncomplicated. He is prompt and never dilly-dallies. He hunts deer, grills steaks and neither knows nor cares what kind of mileage he gets with his 2-year-old Dodge and its V-8 engine.

Although not wearing the much-ballyhooed flag pin, Barr displays his patriotism in other ways: all of his phone numbers end in 1776 and there is a 7-foot Statue of Liberty replica in one of his offices.

When he’s not running for president, Barr is a lawyer and co-owner of Liberty Strategies, an Atlanta consulting firm he founded after his party redrew his district to his detriment and he lost his congressional seat in 2002.

“I didn’t cry over spilled milk,” Barr said, later conceding that sometimes he missed life on the Hill. He flashes his former-member identification card to get through restricted doorways and writes thank-you notes on special former-member stationery.

He has no problem envisioning himself as commander in chief.

“Immediately upon assuming office, I would sit down with our military leaders and I would direct, not ask, but direct that they begin an immediate and significant drawdown in Iraq,” he asserted, deftly shifting talk of Bob Barr as spoiler to Bob Barr as president.

Unlike candidates who play verbal games of Twister to avoid the dreaded flip-flop, Barr freely admits that he has disavowed his long conservative resume in favor of the Libertarian philosophy of less government.

His vote to authorize the war? A mistake. The Patriot Act? Ditto. It was an excuse for unreasonable government spying. He has disowned the Defense of Marriage Act he championed, not because Jeri Barr is his third wife but because Libertarians don’t believe in government telling people who to marry. (He says that is up to each state.)

“Clearly the federal policies I’ve supported in the past are not working,” he said, unabashed.

Barr aims to be on the ballot in every state but Oklahoma, where the signature requirement is too high. Part of his challenge as he stakes out the electoral map is his party’s hard-to-define ideology. Libertarians line up with liberals on privacy issues and with conservatives on gun rights.
They have never fielded a serious presidential contender, and their conventions are even more bizarre than the spectacles the major parties throw. The Denver gathering in May that nominated Barr after six raucous ballots selected as his running mate Wayne Allyn Root, a professional sports handicapper and gambler from Las Vegas.

Barr brings odd baggage of his own to the race. In 1998, he licked whipped cream off the chests of two buxom women at a Leukemia Society fundraiser. During his last congressional campaign, he was handling an antique firearm to underscore his support for the 2nd Amendment and it went off, shattering a glass door.

His second wife, Gail, the mother of his two sons, was once paid an undisclosed sum by Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt for an article accusing Barr of adultery with his would-be third wife. He did not deny the charge, which arose inconveniently during the Clinton impeachment.

Barr raised his sons mostly on weekends; the youngest, Derek, the campaign’s 26-year-old spokesman, speaks warmly of a father who always attended basketball and soccer games and sometimes picked them up from school in a big white Lincoln.

If Bob Barr is anything, it’s focused. He acknowledges his campaign is a long shot, but at the very least he will bring attention to the values of freedom he learned growing up the son of a civil engineer in far-flung places like Iran and Iraq. (The longest place he lived as a boy was Baghdad, for three years.)

It was that kind of focus — that and his love of the limelight — that powered him when he was the lone voice calling for impeachment and members of his own party dismissed him as foolhardy.

It’s been a busy day and Barr boards the evening shuttle from Washington back to Atlanta and his 12th-floor consulting offices, the temporary campaign headquarters.

All around are remnants of the substantial elephant collection — elephant bookends on a desk, a close-up of an elephant’s trunk in the hallway. It’s an awkward display, considering he now regards Republican lawmakers as wimps scared into submission by Bush. But as Barr is fond of saying, “I don’t worry about it.”

In his home state, he still makes headlines.

The next day, when he holds another news conference to file papers to get on the Georgia ballot, the turnout at the state Capitol is a lot better than the ragtag bunch that showed up in Washington. There are serious journalists who knew him when and TV cameramen willing to walk backward to record his every step down the gilded corridors, just like old times.

“It was good of them to come,” Barr said, genuinely pleased with an event that will make the nightly news — not because he might win but because he might cause McCain to lose.