Politics Daily

Joe the Plumber Leaving the Republican Party?

David Knowles — 2009-05-07T12:02:00+00:00

Filed under: Republicans, John McCain, Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Sarah Palin

In the words of Sarah Palin's speech writers, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" Time magazine reports that Joe the Plumber (does anybody care what his real name is anymore?) is readying to bolt from the GOP:

Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party -- and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience.

Wow, I guess Matt Lewis gets his wish. So, the incredible shrinking party just got even smaller. After catapulting Joe to stardom in front of Republican audiences, I wonder how John McCain feels at the news of this latest departure. Actually, I think Matt is right to some extent. To put it kindly, Joe is something of a loose cannon. As the GOP quickly found out after McCain used him as a campaign prop, this guy never met a camera he didn't like, and his views were so selfish that he made Ayn Rand look like an altruist.

Where will Joe and his outrage land up next? Maybe Bob Barr has placed a call, or Ron Paul (he's still a Republican, right?). Or maybe Joe will just ditch this whole politics gig once and for all. But how do you go Galt when you make less that $200K a year?

David at Paradigms Lost
David on Twitter

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Georgia On My Mind

David Knowles — 2008-10-26T16:12:00+00:00

Filed under: Barack Obama, John McCain, Polls, Bob Barr

Former Georgia Congressman, and Libertarian candidate for president, Bob Barr made a stunning prediction this week: Barack Obama will beat John McCain in the deep red state that Barr once represented.

That idea is very hard for some Republicans to take seriously. After all, George W. Bush took Georgia by a margin of 16.7% in '04. But Obama has been steadily chipping away at McCain's lead. Witness the latest trend line from Pollster:

Early voting is proving a huge asset to Obama. It remains to be seen whether these lines will continue in their present direction, but we now have our first poll showing Obama with the lead over the past two months. Sensing momentum, Obama has decided to send in volunteers to make a coordinated effort to take back the "Peach State."

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Barr Appears at Netroots Nation

Jay Allbritton — 2008-07-20T16:48:00+00:00

Filed under: Featured Stories, 2008 President, Bob Barr

The Presidential campaign of Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr is picking up steam. In light of recent polling that shows Barr on the radar in important swing states like Florida, Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado and North Carolina, the blogs, if not the mainstream media, are slowly beginning to take Barr's upstart campaign more seriously.

On Saturday, Barr parachuted into Netroots Nation, the left wing's blog convention currently underway in Texas, a state where Zogby has McCain leading Obama by only 3% with Barr drawing 6%. Barr was one of several high profile political stars such as Al Gore, Harold Ford, Nancy Pelosi, and Gavin Newsom, that showed up at the conference in Austin.

But what was the former Republican Representative that helped lead the impeachment of Bill Clinton doing at Netroots Nation?FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver breaks it down:

The conventional wisdom is that he might be trying to draw out some fundraising support. This is one place where you'll find quite a few maxed out ($2,300) Obama donors, and those people could plausibly contribute to Barr if they think his candidacy would help the Democrat. Barr is also attending the competing Right Online Summit, which is also in Austin tonight, and where interestingly enough he was invited to deliver a keynote speech.

I think it's equally likely, however, that Barr is here simply to get a sense for what makes the netroots tick. Whereas the Ron Paul campaign very much played off the netroots model of highly networked, online-based fundraising and activism, Barr has had less success in getting his candidacy to go viral.

Barr recently took a shot at one of the most popular rational for voting for or against any presidential candidate, how that candidate would affect the Supreme Court. Barr argues that voting for McCain simply because he says he'll appoint conservative judges is not a good enough reason, citing McCain's centrism, Obama's centrism, and the unreliability of conservative Presidents' Supreme Court appointees remaining conservative after ascending to the bench.

Barr is also in the process of suing his way onto the ballot in Oklahoma.

Blogger Robert Stacy McCain doesn't buy into the idea that Barr has to hurt McCain.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Brave Nation Of Half-Literate Blog Commenters

Ken Layne — 2008-06-01T20:36:00+00:00

Filed under: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, Featured Stories, Ron Paul, 2008 President, Ralph Nader, Ken Layne's Outrage, Bob Barr

How long has this campaign dragged on? It will be two years old in November, and there's no reason to believe it will stop then.

At this point, it's incredible to consider that some people haven't made up their minds. It's incredible that Hillary is still drunkenly running for president of Earth, that Smooth Barry Obama has won the nomination but has to continue campaigning for it, that a senile old fraud like John McCain is the nominee of any major party, that delusional attention whore Ralph Nader is running again, that an anti-libertarian hack like Bob Barr is the libertarian nominee, and that the libertarian candidate (Ron Paul) is sitting out the race despite amassing a fortune in campaign contributions and a delirious following.

But what's most incredible, to me, as a person who writes about this garbage for a living, is that it doesn't matter at all what I write about, because the comments will be an insane half-literate string of racist nonsense and startling ignorance that has nothing to do with the subject of this post.

Don't even bother reading the rest, just get to the comments and start pasting in your all-caps screaming lunacy. Who are you people? Who gave you people computers? Is this what Al Gore intended when he created the Internet?

The 2000 election was the first to be heavily covered by online media, and the 2004 election was the first to get overwhelming coverage from the political blogs that had sprung up like partisan mushrooms, but the 2008 election will be the first to be completely defined by the angry morons who call C-SPAN, yell idiocy at talk-radio hosts and, especially, leave hundreds of inane comments on websites.

I used to laugh at the people who predict the world will end in 2012. Now, I desperately hope it's true. The only sad thing about the 2012 Doomsday Scenario is that it supposedly won't happen until December of 2012, which means Hillary will be running for president again. But at least there won't be a 2016 election.

When space-monster archaeologists visit the ruins of Earth, they'll find a very detailed record of the 2008 campaign, preserved in the browser cache files on millions of computer hard drives. They will marvel at three-paragraph AP stories posted on CNN that somehow elicit 500 comments that have nothing to do with the story. They will wonder why so many people who can't type, spell or put together a coherent sentence nonetheless composed thousand-word freakouts about things they don't understand. But mostly, the aliens will laugh at the outrageous idiocy that defined America's voters just before the world ended:

* One party's candidate is a Scary Muslim, which is why the pastor of his Christian church is so scary to white people.

* Meanwhile, a lady continues to run for that party's nomination, because her husband was president eight years ago, so she deserves it.

* Poor, uneducated white people who go back and forth between the Democrats and the Republicans and the Reform Party, based on which candidate says the most racist stuff about Blacks and Mexicans, decide that this ultra-liberal elitist Ivy League Wellesley/Yale lawyer who lives in the richest part of New York is, actually, a working-class white-power hero.

* A nasty old jerk, born to an elitist military brass family, spends the last thirty years as a Washington insider, congressman, senator and sellout while living large on the fortune of his beer-heiress second wife. He is somehow, inexplicably, marketed as a "maverick."

* Meanwhile, the people with money and brains are so put off by these old hacks that they go crazy for the handsome young guy for the sole reason that he doesn't make them feel disgusted about politics, because he is sort of new to it.

* As America loses its long-held leadership of the world and the entire U.S. Economy literally dies and the smart money has long since moved to developing countries and wages stagnate and crushing debt hangs over everything and Americans are dumber, fatter, sicker and poorer than anyone in the modern world, the 2008 campaign was basically 24-month-long indictment of the United States as an easily manipulated nation of bigoted half-wits who will, as always, get nothing from whoever wins the White House.

Ken Layne is the editor of Wonkette.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Former Rep. Bob Barr Wins Libertarian Nod

Denise Williams — 2008-05-25T21:10:00+00:00

Filed under: Breaking News, 2008 President, Conventions, Bob Barr

Former Georgia Congressman (1995-2003), Bob Barr, has won the Libertarian Party nomination as candidate for president. The party convention, held this week in Denver, nominated Barr on the 6th ballot, defeating Mary Ruwart - a research scientist.

Barr, probably best known for his role in the Bill Clinton impeachment trial, left the Republican Party in 2006 and shortly thereafter set up an exploratory commission for the 2008 presidential campaign.

Barr, long a favorite of some conservatives, leads some to think he might pull some votes from John McCain in November. However, since leaving Congress in '03 his personal platform has a decidedly leftist feel. Historically opposed to Bush administration thought on Iraq, Iran and the Patriot Act, Barr has recently joined the ACLU. As a Republican, he too was seen as a maverick, while at the same time his past record of social conservatism seems at odds with traditional Libertarians.

Barr's nomination brings some much needed attention to this alternative party - perhaps in part why he got the nod over more traditional and long-standing Libertarian Party members. On again-off again Libertarian Ron Paul is perhaps the best known of past party members with former Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel as it's newest. Gravel fell out of contention after the 4th ballot.

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Bob Barr to Run for President

Jay Allbritton — 2008-05-12T12:28:00+00:00

Filed under: Iraq, 2008 President, Bob Barr

Former Republican Representative from Georgia, Bob Barr, officially announced his run for president today. Barr will first have to secure the Libertarian Party's nomination. If Barr does get on the ballot in November, he is perceived as a potential drain on John McCain's support among reluctant conservatives.

Barr helped lead the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton. He has since broke with the Republican party over a variety of issues, including the Patriot Act and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which Barr fervently opposes. He has consistently railed against the politics of fear, a theme he hit on again in his statement today, "We believe in an America that is not and should not be and should never be driven by fear as current policies on behalf of both parties are in this country," Barr said.

Barr believes his campaign has the potential to pick up where Ron Paul's primary campaign left off. In March, he told The Atlanta Journal Constitution, "Ron Paul tapped into a great deal of that dissatisfaction and that awareness. Unfortunately, working through the Republican party structure, it became impossible for him to really move forward with his movement. But we have to have a rallying point out there to harness that energy, that freedom in this election cycle."

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments