The Zeskind Fortnight No. 5
June 9, 2008
The CIA analyst, the butcher’s son, anti-McCain Republicans and the Libertarian Party
By Leonard Zeskind
While Democrats and liberals have been chanting “yes we can” during the last several months, conservative Republicans as well as racists of all stripes have been muttering “no, no you can’t.” They will eschew any Democratic nominee next November, of course. More, the prospect of a President Obama confirms their belief that the United States of their imagination is all but lost. A significant hard-core of these nay-sayers believe that Senator John McCain is not worth supporting. These voters have opposed President Bush’s war in Iraq as vigorously as any left-wing peacenik. Attempts by the federal government to repair the badly-torn social safety net will run afoul of their constitutional principles. And the failed “Kennedy-McCain” immigration reform bill of 2007, reminds them that a Republican, if elected president, would sell their country to Mexico as quickly as an Obama Democrat.
It is tempting to ignore this section of the electorate as a side-show unworthy of any genuine attention, particularly as the country heads into one of the most compelling national dramas since black children faced down Bull Connor’s police dogs in Birmingham. It is from these quarters, however, that the Opposition (with a capital O) will first surface next year. And for those with memories long-enough to recall the storm that blew apart the Clinton administration’s meager attempts at liberal reforms in 1993 and 1994, it is good to keep an eye on developments at this end of the horizon. We begin with Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party.
The Libertarian Party ran its first candidates for president in 1972 and initially had a reputation as a vehicle for the decriminalize marijuana, government hands off my back crowd. By the 1980s, however, a more serious, anti-government regulation, screw the social safety net trend had taken over. While the party kept a platform point supporting a woman’s freedom of choice with regard to abortion, its main constituency lay with anti-tax activists. And in 1988, the Libertarian Party chose Ron Paul as its presidential candidate. Paul had been elected to congress as a Republican from Texas in 1978, 1980 and 1982, and among his many other ultra-conservative moments, sponsored a bill that would have defined “life” at conception, and thus outlawed abortion—contrary to the Libertarians’ stated goals. Paul service as a “contributing editor” to the John Birch Society’s magazine and his dalliance with the anti-Semites among anti-Federal Reserve activists did not seem to bother the Libertarians either. The Libertarians managed to put Paul on the ballot in 46 states and received about 430,000 votes, according to the party’s own history of itself. (It should be noted that he received 96,000 votes in 2006 as a Republican winning the seat from Texas’ Fourteenth Congressional District.)
In the years since, the Libertarian Party has continued to grow, although by extremely small increments. In 2002, it ran more than 1,600 candidates for local office, and several of its members won their elections. In 2004, the party ran a relatively unknown “constitutionalist,” Michael Badnarik, for president. The party’s national committee raised and spent over two million dollars that year, and Badnarik’s campaign spent another million dollars on its own. He received 397,265 votes, according to the Federal Election Commission, about 70,000 votes less than Ralph Nader, but 154,000 more than his competitor from the Constitution Party. None of the third party candidates broached even one percent of the vote, much less the five percent needed to win funding from the Federal Election Commission. The Libertarians remained a medium-sized cog in a small machine run by third party cranks.
Now comes Bob Barr, once a well-known Republican congressman. Elected in 1994 to serve a district in northwest Georgia—parts of which had once sent John Birch Society chairman Larry McDonald to congress—Bob Barr became entrenched on the far right of the Republican Party. The Almanac of American Politics told some of Barr’s story. He worked as a CIA analyst while going to law school and after moving to Georgia the Reagan administration made him a U.S. Attorney in Atlanta. As a congressman, he introduced the Defense of Marriage Act, which President Clinton later signed. It defined marriage, for purposes of federal benefits, as a union between a man and a woman, and also allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. He first introduced legislation to impeach President Bill Clinton, even before Monica Lewinsky became a household name. Barr also opposed gun control measures and became a member of the National Rifle Association’s board of directors. He hit hard on government misdeeds during the Waco disaster and championed the cause of the militias.
On June 6, 1998, Barr confirmed his spot in the firmament with a speech at a Council of Conservative Citizens conference in Charleston, South Carolina. At that point the Council had fully transformed itself from its arch-segregationist days as the white Citizens Council, into a modern proponent of white nationalism. At that meeting, according to the Council of Conservative Citizens tabloid-of-record, Citizens Informer, a panel on immigration featured Jared Taylor and other proponents of “scientific racism.” A youth panel was chaired by Sam Francis, who was at that time the most articulate and well-argued of white nationalists. And Bob Barr had his picture published twice in the Citizens Informer’s report on the meeting, once arm-in-arm with Council director Frances Bell. When the Washington Post asked Barr about his presence with well-known racists, he denied knowing who the Councils were and what they stood for. Nonsense, said the organization’s CEO, Gordon Baum, who told reporter Thomas Edsall that Council members make sure that their outside speakers know what they are walking into.
Barr lost his seat in Congress in the 2002 Republican Primary, and began his six-year move over into the Libertarian Party, and he is now its candidate for president. His running mate this year is Wayne Allyn Root, who describes himself as the son of a Jewish butcher from Brooklyn who went to Columbia University, married a former Miss Oklahoma and became a fabulously successful businessman in Las Vegas. Like Barr, he is a stalwart conservative Reaganaut turned Libertarian. They both hope to pick up where Ron Paul left off in the Republican primaries.
Despite Root’s presence on the Libertarian Party ticket, Barr’s candidacy was endorsed by James Buchanan, a frequent contributor to Aryanist websites run by David Duke and his long-time comrade Don Black. Rather than wait for the Washington Post to discover the story, this time the Barr campaign quickly issued a statement that they “will not accept the support of haters.” The former CIA analyst and the son of a Jewish butcher may have no other choice, however, as anti-McCain Republicans, Libertarians, and hard-core white supremacists all find themselves sleeping in the same bed this year.
TZF
For “Barack Obama, original sin, and the presidential primary campaign,” by Leonard Zeskind, published by Searchlight magazine in London, please go to: http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=template&story=229