Below The Beltway

Bob Barr was recently interviewed by National Review Online about his bid for the Libertarian Party’s Presidential Nomination:

NRO: On balance, which of your prospective opponents poses a greater threat to liberty in this country, Barack Obama or John McCain?

BARR: Both of the candidates are very much in the mold of big government, status quo establishment, and a vote for either one of them is not really a vote to change dramatically the course of what we’re witnessing here with the current trend toward bigger and bigger government and more and more power vested in the executive branch. I think it’s necessary to really make a dramatic break with that trend.

If you have a president who supports McCain-Feingold, for example, as Sen. McCain obviously does, then that’s going to be a philosophy that’s going to color his administration. A president, whose signature piece of legislation as a senator, for example, was McCain-Feingold, certainly cannot be expected to name or support jurists who truly believe in shrinking and not expanding the power of the executive.

NRO: So you believe that under either president, the American people’s liberties, broadly understood, would deteriorate at the same rate?

BARR: I don’t know if they would deteriorate at the same rate, but neither of the candidates that are currently in line for their parties’ nominations would move in the direction of increasing individual liberty and shrinking government power, which is certainly what I would seek to do as president, and something that I know is important to the American people.

I found that last question interesting only because the implication of it seems to be shouldn’t you support John McCain because he’ll take away our liberties at a slower rate than Barack Obama ?

And that, it seems, is pretty much where the interviewer was trying to push Barr:

NRO: But you don’t believe that Americans would experience significantly less liberty if a President Obama was to, say, raise taxes, spend more, and enact a series of regulations that curtail Americans’ liberties?

BARR: I think anybody that does that would be by definition curtailing Americans’ liberties, but why wouldn’t the American people legitimately blame Sen. McCain for that? Because Sen. McCain, for example, if he loses to Sen. Obama, did not put forward an agenda that appealed to a sufficient number of Americans, did not convince them of his bona fides in terms of being a so-called conservative candidate. Why blame Bob Barr? Why not blame Sen. McCain for not putting together and moving forward with an adequate platform?

Exactly. If McCain loses, it won’t be Bob Barr’s fault anymore than Al Gore losing Florida in 2000 was Ralph Nader’s fault. It will be because he didn’t convince enough people to vote for him.

H/T: Jason Pye