HOW BAD WILL BOB BARR'S CANDIDACY HURT McCAIN?

I can't be certain of this, but I do believe that when Bob Barr was serving in Congress he and fellow-Republican John McCain were allies. Both were on the right of the political spectrum. But today, where McCain has gone in the corporatist/rubber stamp direction-- in order to appeal to what'd left of the Bush-Cheney base-- Barr has veered off in a libertarian direction... in fact the Libertarian direction. I'm sure the party would have preferred Ron Paul, but they're settling in to a serious run with the former Georgia congressman.

Yesterday Barr tore into his former GOP ally, offering an unflattering critique of McBush that could swing some key and crucial states away from him, dooming a candidacy that already looks pretty doomed to begin with. Barr hit him on his Bush agenda positions on Iraq, energy, and government spending.

"With regard to domestic policy, Sen. McCain really has put forward nothing that would indicate he believes in dramatically shrinking the size and cost of the government," Barr said during an interview on washingtonpost.com's "PostTalk" program. "He does talk a great game about doing away with earmarks, but that really does not get near to the heart of the matter of the massive federal spending, the massive federal debt and the deficits we're running."

...Barr, 59, for years was a conservative Republican foot soldier in the House who strongly supported the war in Iraq, was a booster of the Patriot Act that strengthened the government's domestic surveillance powers, backed measures to ban gay marriage and voted to block the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

But since renouncing the GOP and embracing the anti-government tenets of the Libertarian party a couple years ago, Barr has flip-flopped repeatedly and now strongly opposes the war, condemns the Patriot Act as a violation of civil liberties, criticizes efforts to restrict gay rights, and even favors the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes.

Barr said that "the tremendous growth" of federal government powers since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks "has so dramatically shrunk the sphere of personal liberty in this country ... that it has really caused myself and many other Americans ... to take a much harder look at government power than we did in the past."

Strong Libertarian Party efforts in Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire, Georgia, Colorado and possibly even Texas and Idaho could take enough votes from McCain to swing some of those stats to Obama. As of now McCain's only safe states are Utah, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Tennessee. He is expected to work very hard to capture both Dakotas as well.