Libertarians Nominate Barr/Root

It took 6 rounds of voting for the 643 delegates at the Libertarian Party’s national convention to select their nominee officially. The outcome was fairly certain after the first round, though, when the conservatives Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root combined took almost 43% of the votes. In the final round of voting, Barr beat out the liberal Mary Ruwart by a vote of 334 to 276.

According to a press release posted on the Libertarian Party’s website, Wayne Allyn Root and Steve Kubby, another candidate originally seeking the presidential nomination, moved to a second round of voting to decide who would be the vice presidential candidate. Gail Lightfoot, Jim Burns, and Daniel Williams were eliminated in the first round. The party’s official totals omit None of the Above votes even though all ballots include that option and a few delegates chose it.

The line of state delegation chairs as they gathered to read the first-round ballot results made very clear that the Libertarian Party lacks diversity in terms of ethnicity or skin color. That was confirmed by the lack of any faces that were not white as the C-SPAN cameraman moved around the convention floor. There were women, but they were outnumbered by men. Of the 49 states that had delegates at the convention, only 5 of the people reading first-round results were women. (North Dakota did not have any delegates. Some states had a single delegate.)

Iowa’s delegation cast its first-round votes for George Phillies (3), Wayne Allyn Root (2), Mary Ruwart (1), and Mike Gravel (1). After reading the results, state party and delegation chairman Ed Wright recited Iowa’s motto: “Our liberties we prize and our rights we shall maintain.” In the final round, 2 of Iowa’s delegates supported Ruwart and 5 voted for Barr.

C-SPAN had non-stop coverage of the convention floor for close to 7 hours on May 25, 2008. A person giving a nominating speech for Christine Smith said she just missed out having enough tokens to participate in Saturday night’s televised debate. She used the support she had received from delegates to give enough strength to other candidates in order to expand the number of people participating in the debate. Candidate Michael Jingozian gave the nominating speech for Mike Gravel.

There was humor displayed by several delegation chairs during the first-round voting announcements. When the convention chair was corrected for skipping from New Hampshire to New York, the New Jersey chair said, “Once again, New Jersey is the butt of all jokes.” The Washington chair took pride in saying the airplanes on which delegates flew, the computers they used, and the coffee they drank to keep them awake at the convention were all from his state. Alaska “welcomes global warming with open arms,” according to its delegation chair and the lack of votes for the local candidate, Mike Gravel. The Minnesota chair said it is hard to tell the Democrats and the Republicans apart because they both “trip all over themselves trying to get stadiums built.”

Candidates worked the convention floor between voting rounds. The C-SPAN camera captured both Smith and Ruwart warning that, based on messages they have received, a ticket headed by Barr would result in many Libertarians leaving the party. Smith said Barr needed more distance from his Republican past and Ruwart cited Barr’s lack of support for the legalization of all drugs.

Correction: Barr voted for the Patriot Act but was not an author, as was reported in the article on the May 24th debate.

M.R. Field was editor of Leading Voices: Iowa, a newsletter focusing on politics, women, and change.