[BlueStateBlues]

Not a criticism of Barr, just more information about the 2008 voting patterns.

[Sir Gawain]

Too bad the GOP didn’t field a conservative in this election to run with Palin.

[Cheetahcat]

Not a criticism of Barr, just more information about the 2008 voting patterns

I will criticize him not a chance in Hell!! But still the goofball pulls the tried and true Perot on us helping to put the MSM anointed hate mongers in the white house!

[HighlyOpinionated]

If they know they can’t win, the other Parties should stick to STATE Elections and leave the Federal Elections to the Demos and Repubs.

Cynthia McKinney probably took a vote or two from Obama but not like Barr did from McCain.

Thank you Bob Barr for screwing up the National Election and giving the USofA a Socialist Illegal Alien (not approved terminology in AZ, please ignore if you live there) President.

[deport]

Go look at the senate race in NC and you'll see that Hagan got more votes than Obama did..... Strange that a senator race outdraws the Presidential race.

Hagan 2,225,961  
Obama 2,123,390

[grundle]

I wrote in Ron Paul, and I live in Pennsylvania.

[cherry]

as far as I know, Barr was just part of husseins plan...just like Perot....useless idiot....

hey Barr and you minions...LET THE THE CELEBRATIONS BEGIN!!

[wbill]

Annnnnd......McCain still would've lost the general election.

I tell ya, I dislike pundits that say "If only X number of people had voted for our candidate, then we would have won." Didn't like it in '00. Didn't like it in '04. Still don't. About the most hideous instance of this recently was the FR post "If only 500,000 people had voted for McCain, across 7 different states, then we would have won!" ...Geez, is that all? And if my chair had wings I could fly it.

While I agree that it's important to identify what went wrong, so that (ideally) the GOP doesn't repeat history, I think that it's far better to start thinking about ways to win the next election instead of re-hashing political history.

Otherwise, we're nothing more than a bunch of whining liberals.

[conservative_guyz]

dream on. barr voters weren’t about to vote for McCain - at least not en mass enough to tip the election

[Ingtar]

Barr took a lot more than Nader, but the Catholics crossing over to vote for pro-death Obama eclipse them both.

[montag813]

Bob Barr didn’t matter. Jeremiah Wright did. As in McCain’s refusal to bring Wright up in each debate as Exhibit A in Obama’s defective character.

[nosofar]

If only Democrats had all stayed home, we would have won!

[Species8472]

We threw Ron Paul and the libertarian wing of the party under the bus last year. The only real youth and vigor that Republicans had captured, had been through Ron Paul's leadership.

So what did the Republican Party do with Ron Paul & his followers? They kicked him (and them) out of the tent, and wouldn't let Paul speak at the Republican Convention (among other things).

Did anyone think about the fact that we were throwing out the most Internet savvy, the best grassroots organizing, the best fund-raising, the youngest and most dynamic people in this whole election? I'm sure that a lot of them voted for 0.

[pctech]

Barr did what he said he wanted to do, take votes away from the GOP and play the spoiler. Now someone needs to spoil him.......

[zeugma]

Sounds like the republican party should have nominated someone libertarians could stomach.

[Keyes2000mt]

Barr votes wouldn’t all go to McCain. When you poll 3rd party voters, you usually find that about a third of people wouldn’t have voted without the third party option and that the remainder split 2:1 for one candidate or the other.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

No criticism of Barr? The guy is a blooming nutcase and anyone who thinks he’s more virtuous than McCain is smoking something.

[fnord]

The GOP should have run a more freedom-oriented candidate.

Reagan had no problem putting together 2 massive landslides in spite of a much more viable 3rd party.

The only way we will get a pro-liberty majority in this country is if the two major parties realign:

- on the left you could have the elitist, authoritarian, big government party

- on the right you could have the individual liberty, small government party

Of course, about half of this site’s members would have to move to Daily Kos or elsewhere, having the same goals (top-down control of free people), differing only in the play book they want to use. They can argue amongst themselves on who should be the masters, but the rest of us would be slaves regardless.

All in all, not much chance of such realignment in the cards, so I reckon this country and Western civilization will continue to slide downward to the next Dark Ages. Such is the natural cycle of the human epoch.

[Doohickey]

I’m going to post my comment to your vanity as another vanity in the news forum. Watch for it.

[MitchellC]

Oh well. What's done is done, and the best remedy to this sort of thing is to not nominate folks like John McCain. To do that, we need to either close the primaries outright (and have a rule in place so that people can't change party registration for a week just to screw with us) or the national party can penalize states with open primaries by taking delegates from them, the same as they did for those states that set their primaries earlier than advised.

I would bet that the overwhelming majority of those Barr voters were R-voters who were sickened by everything Bush and McCain have done. Those voters will come around when we nominate good conservatives. What I'm far more concerned about is all the Rs that crossed over and voted for Barack Obama.

[Dr. Scarpetta]

If Barr's votes had gone to Palin and her running mate they would have won North Carolina and Indiana.

Anyone who voted for Barr secretly wanted Obama to win.