By Carl Milsted, Jr.

The Bob Barr campaign fills my mail boxes with increasingly strident messages, complete with artificial goals and forced analogies. “Help us get a gold medal in Olympic fundraising!” (I paraphrase.)

Boring.

And now they are “fighting mad” at Saddleback Church for being excluded from a candidate forum.

Pathetic.

Bob Barr does not deserve to be on the same stage as McCain and Obama – yet. McCain and Obama have tens of millions of supporters. They have both proven they are real contenders for the presidency of the United States.

Bob Barr has no base to speak of. Yes, he has the theoretical endorsement of the Libertarian Party, but he was nearly beaten by a candidate with some politically suicidal views on sensitive issues like pornography. Half the LP activist base is sitting on its checkbooks or is actively hostile. Look up Bob Barr on Google blogs and you’ll find very little, and much of it negative. Bob Barr gets more coverage and respect from the mainstream media than from the blogosphere! Weird!

And sad. Bob Barr has the potential to be a very interesting candidate. He is the most qualified candidate the LP has ever run. Barr has been a prosecutor, CIA agent, and U.S. Congressman; and unlike Ron Paul, Barr demonstrated deal making ability while in Congress. Bob Barr arguably has a better resume than one or even both of the major party candidates! He has more relevant experience than Obama. Meanwhile, McCain is getting rather old for the job.

This is not to say that Barr is my ideal candidate. He isn’t. He is not a free liberal, and may not even be a libertarian. But given that the other choices are a socialist and a warmongering semi-conservative who attacked freedom of speech, a free conservative looks pretty good.

As president, not as mouthpiece. I am not interested in donating to a candidate in order to have nice words about freedom spoken on TV. And I am doubly uninterested in building up the Libertarian Party; the LP is a dysfunctional organization, probably detrimental to the cause of freedom. (I could yet be proven wrong, however.)

To be interesting to me, and tens of millions of others like me, Barr must first be interesting to those who do value nice words about freedom on TV. Barr needs an enthusiastic base on the order of what Ron Paul had; then the serious voters and donors will get interested.

Here, I can and will help – with sound advice, not money. While I don’t know much about getting national media attention, and I have never run a successful congressional campaign, I do know quite a bit about Libertarians. I was one for a quarter century. Unless the campaign has some heretofore untapped base of fanatical support, it needs to get Libertarians (and small-l libertarians) enthused as of yesterday. Here is my advice to the Barr campaign:

1. Use the word “libertarian” in public. Use it a lot. Libertarians love to here the “L” word on TV. They love to hear it from celebrities, even those who are not “true libertarians.” Just look at the list from the Advocates for Self-Government. And yes, this organization has credibility even from radical Libertarians; just look at its board of advisors.

2. Take some clearly libertarian positions. Take them in public; state them on TV. And don’t waffle! Be clear. Libertarians hate wafflers. You don’t have to take the radical libertarian line, and I don’t recommend your doing so, but take some non-conservative libertarian positions in a way that commits you should you become president. Try this: “Let’s treat marijuana like we treat liquor, and treat the hard drugs like we treat casino gambling.” It’s short, easy to understand, libertarian (though moderate), and answers most of the objections to full legalization.

3. Have some passion! Cut the legalistic mumbo-jumbo. You are talking to The People, not a judge. It’s not about FISA or habeas corpus. It’s about torture! It’s about secret police making people disappear in the night. It’s about a government blatantly spying on its citizens.

4. Buy some advertising. Conventional political wisdom says take early money and use it to raise bigger money. Conventional wisdom does not work with Libertarians. They have been burned way too often by campaigns which spent most of their money on airplane tickets and overhead. Buy ads now even if you think it’s silly. Consider it part of your fundraising expenses. If you cannot afford TV, then buy some Google ads at least; McCain has.

OK, I realize that this plan appears to go against your long-term strategy. Your biggest pool of potential voters is conservatives disgusted by McCain. So yes, you do have to be more conservative than McCain. But that’s easy! A strict libertarian that is pro-life is more conservative than McCain has been in the last several years. And you can use the word “libertarian.” William F. Buckley called himself a libertarian at times; he also called for drug legalization. And when I ran the portable version of Quiz2D on a college campus, the head of the Young Republicans was smack in the middle of the libertarian quadrant.

Your biggest challenge for conservatives is the split-the-vote problem. If you can bring more non-conservatives to your coalition than McCain, while still being somewhat conservative, you become the lesser of two evils.

Carl Milsted is a senior editor for The Free Liberal.