Shortly after the Bob Barr 2008 Presidential campaign ended, I received many questions regarding both the successes and failures of the campaign. After all, I was an early opponent of Bob Barr, was in Kansas City, Missouri when Bob announced his exploratory committee, and was in Denver when he finally won the nomination. In fact, Bob received my delegate vote every round after George Phillies was defeated. In my humble opinion, Bob Barr is a very good man and he had the best intentions of the Libertarian Party in mind when running. In this article, I will try to present both the successes and failures of the campaign in a non-confrontational or condemning manner.
A day after Bob won the nomination, I phoned someone involved with the campaign to volunteer and had to leave a message on their voicemail. Unfortunately, I never heard back from this person. After I flew back from Denver, I e-mailed a campaign staffer asking to volunteer. Remember, I was not asking for a paying job. Attached was my resume which includes managing campaigns and other large groups as well as being elected Alternate to a Region of the Libertarian National Committee and while I am very young, my political experience is nothing to be completely scoffed at. This time, I was informed it would be put at the top of the to-do list. Once again, I never heard anything back in response to volunteering. A week or so later, I was informed that Mike Ferguson was named my Regional Coordinator for the Barr campaign. Mike is a very competent political campaigner who has been elected to public office. I e-mailed Mike and within hours received a phone call from him. In my experience with volunteers, many would have given up after the first or second attempt to try to volunteer.
Around the middle of July, I was named Iowa Coordinator for the campaign. This allowed me to see first hand both the successes and failures of the Barr campaign. It is my hope that by releasing this article, in the future, we can improve upon our successes and not repeat the failures. It is not nor has it ever been my intention to attack anyone for trying an idea that didn’t work. As the quote that I have posted on my desk that Theodore Roosevelt once said goes “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming.”
Success and Failures:
Advertising
In 2004, I actually remember seeing a couple of the Michael Badnarik television ads on CNN Headline News. In 2008, I saw and heard no Bob Barr advertisements. The video ad of 2008, in my opinion, was less visually appealing than the 2004 television ad I seen of Michael Badnarik. I have no idea if the Barr campaign used any television or radio advertising either nationwide or statewide. I know they had a couple of radio ads produced and at least one ad that could have been used on television, but I have no evidence they ever ran. If they did, there was certainly not much of an attempt to promote the fact that they were running. Many times the fact that you are running ads is worth more in media attention than the advertisements were themselves.
Additionally, I asked to fundraise in Iowa for our own advertising. All my polling and sources strongly indicated to me that Obama was going to win Iowa by a large vote total and there was only about a three percent chance of McCain winning according to the betting odds. It looked almost a certainty that Iowa was not going to be a swing state and Bob had the potential to do very well in Iowa if we would just have some ability to promote the campaign using traditional media and use public relations to promote our advertising campaign. After all, Bob was born in Iowa City. The local media would love to discuss that little aspect.
After I was given a green light on the Iowa advertising plan and spent a lot of my time pursuing rates and plans, I was told we could not fundraise through the Barr campaign our own advertising. Talk about a clear violation of the 1:10:100 rule. Those of you who have worked with me know that I rarely get angry and am usually exceptionally calm. After I was told this, I was livid and strongly considered telling the national staff what they could do. Fortunately, our Iowa supporters and volunteers never found out about the decision of the national campaign staff.
Ballot Access
The state organizations must be strengthened to decrease the time and effort required to gather signatures. In 2012, ballot access must improve. Ballot access is one area that the party is doing worse than we were in previous years. In 2004, the Libertarian Presidential nominee was on the ballot in 48 states plus Washington D.C. In 2008, we were only on the ballot in 45 states and not Washington D.C.
There definitely needed to be better coordination with the Libertarian Party on ballot access. There also needed to be quick decisive decisions made as to what states we were going to target and what states we were going to give up on. I remember that Mike Ferguson was going to drive up to Des Moines, Iowa where the Libertarian Party of Iowa was holding an Executive Committee meeting. At the last minute, he called and told me that he was going to have to go to West Virginia to petition and mentioned sending Vice-Presidential candidate Root in. Instead of flying in Wayne, I had Mike set up a conference call with Wayne and Mike was kind enough to record a video. If we would have started West Virginia earlier we could have possibly got on the ballot. If we would have stuck with the decision not to go to West Virginia we would have saved a lot of volunteer and financial resources. Another example was the Louisiana ballot access. Bob should have been on the ballot in Louisiana and I am informed that he likely would have with better coordination.
The attempt by the Barr campaign to kick John McCain and Barack Obama off the Texas ballot generated great publicity and allowed the American people to view the hypocrisy of ballot access laws. In fact, this was discussed on a radio, not talk radio, station I was listening to.
Communications
The Barr campaign had a very good idea. The Barr campaign allowed the state coordinators to call in on a weekly conference call to discuss strategy. They also allowed us to use the conference call to call our county coordinators in our states. This allowed us to share ideas and communicate more effectively with each other.
Materials
Another bad thing about announcing late is that the campaign does not have things like brochures ready. It wasn’t until July that I got the brochures to hand out. It was also suggested that we would be charged by the campaign for obtaining the campaign materials to distribute; however, the campaign did send me materials to distribute at no cost to me personally. Unfortunately, volunteers were forced to buy their own yard signs. I hated to tell supporters that I would give them bumper stickers, but I had no yard signs for them.
I caught a lot of hell over the fact that Libertarian was not mentioned on many of the campaign materials. There was a legitimate reason for that. It is easier to convince someone to vote for you if they don’t feel excluded by party names. The thing that concerned me was that there was no volunteer form to fill out and send in on the brochures.
Media
In 2004, I seen Gary Nolan on Fox News once and heard that Michael Badnarik won the nomination on the morning radio news break, and listened to Michael on Mancow. The Gary Nolan interview was my first introduction to the Libertarian Party. Compare this with 2008. In 2008, I heard Bob Barr being mentioned shortly before he announced his exploratory campaign, immediately after he announced, during the radio news breaks numerous times, seen Bob in the news papers numerous times, and even on the front page of Yahoo a few times. In fact, my cousin even told me, “I saw your candidate Matt Barr on T.V. the other day.” Well, at least he got the last name correct. I also received a call from a family member informing me that they watched Bob on Glenn Beck. In 2004, nobody I talked to had heard of Michael Badnarik. The massive increase in media attention was by far the biggest success of the Barr campaign and something we should strive for in future campaigns.
Reason Debates: In 2004, Libertarian Party Presidential candidate Michael Badnarik was arrested while trying to debate President Bush and Senator Kerry. Congressman Barr did not go that far; however, he did debate Senator McCain and President Obama live on Reason.com’s website. The technology needs to be improved upon. It would have been better if Bob could have paused live television to respond instead of just talking over them, and the video stream did go down temporarily, but this was a great strategy. I hope the 2012 campaign improves upon the technology and decides to debate like Bob did if he or she is not invited to the official debates.
The Barr campaign also did a superb job talking advantage of the massive government bailouts of financial institutions.
Professionalism
The Barr campaign almost perfected professional looking logos, videos, materials, and website design. This was a huge benefit to the campaign.
There were a couple of times I had to shake my head. For example, the press release regarding the death of Senator Jesse Helms which caused one major supporter who helped convince me to give my delegate vote to Barr to, at least temporarily, withdraw his volunteer support of the campaign and possibly his monetary support. Another time was when supporters were asked to call talk radio and promote the campaign. Someone posted the following comment on Last Free Voice in response.
“We’re getting reports now from that big jet crash out at the airport. Dozens are feared dead. I have on the line a caller who is at the scene. Tell me, caller, what do you see?”
“It’s terrible, Kent! Bodies and plane wreckage everywhere. That’s a great issue to discuss, but let me tell you about a real choice in the race for the presidency, Bob Barr.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know, Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate for President. His website Bob Barr 2008 dot–”
“I’m being told by my producers that was a crank caller. Let’s go to Mr. Baba Booey on line 2…”
Source: http://lastfreevoice.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/60-seconds-for-bob-how-to-defraud-call-screeners-and-piss-off-talk-radio-hosts/#comments
Qualifications to run: No one person ever suggested to me that Bob was not qualified to run for President. In fact, some people even told me they believed he had more legislative experience than President Obama had.
Racism: During the 2008 Ron Paul Presidential campaign, Ron Paul refused to return money donated by a member of the White Nationalist Community, Stormfront. This along with the newsletters did, in my opinion, great harm to the Paul campaign. When an endorsement of Bob Barr was posted on a separatist website, Barr campaign manager Russ Verney released the following statement:
“The Barr campaign is not going to be a vehicle for every fringe and hate group to promote itself. We do not want and will not accept the support of haters. Anyone with love in their heart for our country and for every resident of our country regardless of race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation is welcome with open arms.”
“Tell the haters I said don’t let the door hit you on the backside on your way out! “
Source: http://www.reason.com/blog/show/126790.html
I believe the reply posted by Mr. Verney above kept the campaign on message.
Swing-State Strategy
One strategy that it appears both the 2004 campaign of Michael Badnarik and the 2008 campaign of Bob Barr used was targeting swing states. In my opinion, it didn’t work either time and when you target swing states you might get more media attention; however, voters who think they can decide the outcome of the election don’t end up voting for a third party candidate. In the future, I would like to see the Libertarian candidate target safe states to try and increase their vote totals that way.
Volunteer Support
In my opinion, one of the biggest factors that harmed the Barr campaign was the fact that Bob announced so late that he had not had time to develop a campaign structure like I assisted with as National Mobilization Facilitator and later on as Chief of Staff for the Phillies campaign. With the Phillies campaign, we had coordinators in a little over twenty of the states, one in D.C., and I had plans to name the rest shortly after the convention ended. Running for President takes a lot of planning and when a candidate decides impulsively at the last minute they don’t have the time to put together a staff and fix any problems before the general election. This should be a lesson to the future Libertarian Party delegates about nominating candidates who have not had time to build their campaign organizations. In November, at the end of the campaign, it appears the Barr campaign was about where the Phillies campaign was at in May in regards to the number of state coordinators.
As Iowa coordinator, you would likely think I would have had access to the Iowa volunteer lists. I did not. In order to contact the Iowa volunteers I had to write an e-mail, send it to my regional coordinator, and he had to send it to someone on the national staff to actually send out. Sometimes it would take almost a week of fighting to get an e-mail blast sent out. I really did like the e-mail blast idea. In fact, it made my job of getting talking points out very effective; however, I think in hindsight it should have been just a small part of the volunteer contact strategy.
Perhaps the biggest failure, in my opinion, was immediately following the campaign. The day after the election, I wrote an e-mail to be sent out to all the Iowa supporters thanking them and asking them to get involved with the Libertarian Party of Iowa. It never went out.
No state pages on website: One thing we learned in 2008 was the ability to use the Internet, for more than just porn and eBay, to promote campaign events. I first started seeing this work when I was working with the Phillies Presidential campaign. Our MySpace coordinator was posting events to the Phillies MySpace calendar. People started showing up to events because they seen it on our MySpace profile. That is why we started the process of state pages during the Phillies campaign. After the nomination we would be ready to promote news and events in every state.
During the Barr campaign, it would have been great to set up state pages to inform supporters what events were happening and news such as polling numbers, door-to-door efforts, and petition deadlines.
Wayne Root
It has been suggested to me that the second biggest failure, behind the swing-state strategy, in the Barr campaign is that they did not properly utilize the media skills and abilities of Vice-Presidential candidate Wayne Root by trying to get Wayne on more talk radio programs.
The article wouldn’t be complete without mentioning some of my own personal mistakes in the campaign. I predicted we could get a coordinator in all five of Iowa’s Congressional Districts. We only finished with three. I also believed I could get around two percent of the vote with the limited resources I had. While we received a higher percentage and more votes than any Libertarian Presidential candidate since Ed Clark in 1980 we did not come anywhere close to getting the two percent I believed we could receive. I also failed in my project to get Bob to Iowa.
