Liberty Maven

The recent Washington Post feature article about Bob Barr cements the suspicion many liberty seekers have regarding the delusionary hope for fairness for third party and independent candidates. It doesn’t matter that a candidate has the credibility of serving in the House of Representatives for eight years. All that matters is that he is not Obama or McCain and therefore must be stopped.

This treatment apparently is not even limited to third party and independent candidates. The media’s marginalization of Republican candidate Ron Paul reinforces that being a true “maverick” instead gets you the “extreme” or “crazy” label even if you are a member of one of the two major parties. The incredulous and almost laughable treatment of Ron Paul during his primary campaign inspired what became one of the most read articles here at Liberty Maven.

See “The Official Media Guide To Attacking Ron Paul” for a refresher and while reading it think of the media’s  tactics of marginalization and apply it to Bob Barr’s candidacy. Unless a third party candidate has millions if not billions of dollars he will be left out of the media conversation. A third party candidate needs and yearns for legitimacy from the media. While McBama is mentioned thousands of times every single day in the main stream media candidates like Barr, Nader, Baldwin, and McKinney aren’t even considered.

It is not for lack of trying though. Barr in particular is making a valiant effort. Unfortunately, these attempts to get press sometimes only reinforce the “outsider” image like when Nader made the comment of Obama “talking white” or Barr only getting airtime because of his spoiler role for John McCain or Barr’s atempt to get an injunction via the courts against the Saddleback Church’s Presidential forum with McCain and Obama. That effort was interesting in how much media coverage it didn’t get.

Again, we have to say that Ron Paul is right, not surprisingly. He refused to run as a third party candidate. His primary reasoning is that too much time and money must be spent getting on the ballots in all the states. The other reason is the media’s marginalization of third party candidates. Both of these are hard truths to swallow but are true now just as much as they were true back in 1988 when Paul was the Libertarian nominee.

The incumbent two party protection policy can be summed up with the following statement:

When a campaign must spend money and effort fighting the system to get ballot access and debate access there is much less time for discussing the real issues affecting the American people.

Take that point and then add the media’s marginalization and lack of coverage and you have the perfect storm for two party tyranny. I miss the America our founders created. Don’t you?