Barr’s campaign—and the possibility of a revitalized national Libertarian Party—will likely have more of an immediate electoral impact than Paul’s did. The Republican Party, after all, is teeming with antibodies that have been able to fight off the diminishing libertarian virus within. Unless lightning struck, the heavens opened, and he stumbled upon the Ark of the Covenant, Paul was never going to win the GOP nomination. It wouldn’t take much, though, for Barr’s popularity to force John McCain to campaign in states he thought he had wrapped up, or even to swing one of those states into the Democratic column. The Libertarian Party has its greatest chance to affect a presidential election in 28 years.
[...]
The Barr-Kubby hug revealed what had really happened in Denver, something that got lost in the fury over “neocons taking over” the party: The radicals had actually won. Barr, a politician and lobbyist with plenty to lose, had made the tactical decision to build a third party force outside the GOP. The former drug warrior and social conservative spent days telling delegates what he has spent years telling the press: Any effort to punish Americans for consensual activities is oppressive, doomed, and deserving of failure. After hoping for so long to win prominent converts to the cause, the Libertarian Party finally had managed to do it, over the loud protests of die-hards who worried that embracing a man with Barr’s mixed record would damage the party in the long run.
[...]
The challenge for Barr and the reformers is to deliver on their promises: to score a record vote total, to grow the party’s membership, and to force the two big parties to pay attention. They need to prove that libertarians can do more than form a protest bloc in the GOP or think-tank their way into the mainstream of politics and policy. If they pull that off, the Libertarian Party could reach unprecedented heights.
