As bad as the 2 “major partys” are, I believe there is some cosmic force that makes people insane when they run in 3rd parties.
Barr qualifies nicely then.
The nature of our political system is that it is essentially a two party system at the moment, so of course joining a party with almost no chance of successful election attracts nutjobs; Libertarians won 14 elections total in 2007. If the political landscape were rearranged into an effective mult-party system, the Republicans and Democrats that lean libertarian would join the Libertarians, and the party would become more moderate, and less ‘insane’.