The Third Coming of Bob Barr

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/bob_barr_running_for_congress_the_bizarre_return_of_georgia_s_unpredictable.html


Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party's 2008 nominee for president, is back in the Republican saddle, and wants to be back in the congressional saddle too.

HOLLY SPRINGS, Georgia—The letter was so compelling because no one expected Bob Barr to write it. It was January 2009, shortly after President Obama had put forward Eric Holder as his nominee for attorney general. Barr had just run for president as the Libertarian Party’s nominee, but he remained best-known as the tireless inquisitor of Bill Clinton. Republicans, eager to weaken Obama, were lacerating Holder for his role in Clinton’s pardon of financier Marc Rich. Barr was not.

“Mr. Holder and I may have had disagreements over policy matters during the time he served in the administration of President Clinton,” he wrote. “However, I never had reason to question his personal and professional integrity, or his deep understanding of and commitment to our Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.” Holder, he suggested, “will restore public confidence in the Department of Justice.”

Barr, at that time, seemed to be morphing into a sort of post-partisan figure. He’d left the GOP for the Libertarian Party in 2006, out of disgust for the Bush administration’s civil liberties record. “I’ve been very pleased to listen to some of the things some of the Democrat leaders are saying,” he told me then. He won the Libertarian nomination by telling activists that he’d “made mistakes,” like backing the war on drugs. “The last few times I’ve been on the same panel as Bob Barr,” Democratic New York Rep. Jerry Nadler told me recently, “we’ve been on the same side.”

But in March 2013, Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey announced a run for Senate. Twenty-four hours later, Barr jumped into the race for Gingrey’s seat in the deep red northern suburbs of Atlanta—some of the turf he’d held between 1995 and 2003, when he was redistricted out of Congress and began his amazing journey across the ideologies. Three months later Barr informed readers of his syndicated column that “the time has come for Attorney General Holder to step down,” in order to “salvage” his reputation.