It’s beginning to look a lot like 2000. A prominent conservative bolts the GOP and wins the presidential nomination of an established third party. Early on, the poll numbers are encouraging and the media coverage respectful. Soon, however, his insurgent campaign is lost in the shuffle of a competitive two-party race. There is even competition for the dissident Right’s support, as the Constitution Party runs its own presidential candidate. Infighting, missteps, and misfortunes further erode any possibility of a major breakthrough. Even Russ Verney makes an appearance.

This election cycle was an even bigger missed opportunity than 2000. The issues Pat Buchanan ran on—foreign policy, trade, and immigration—are all more salient now than they were eight years ago. Not only are antiwar conservatives up for grabs, but the Republican nominee, John McCain, is despised or distrusted by millions of ordinary taxpaying, churchgoing, Limbaugh-listening conservatives without the paleo prefix. Moreover, Ron Paul momentarily united Buchananites and libertarians during the Republican primaries, raising millions of dollars and inspiring thousands of passionate followers.

The kind of third-party campaign that was quixotic during the Bush-Gore battle of the hanging chads would seem plausible in the fight against McBama. If there were ever a chance to free disaffected conservatives from the chains that bind them to the GOP, this would be the year.

Yet unless something significant is brewing beneath the surface of the polls, that seems increasingly unlikely to happen. There is little evidence that Chuck Baldwin will fare much better than pre-Ron Paul Constitution Party candidates and good reason to believe that Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr will do much worse than the 6 percent nationally that seemed possible this summer.

In recent years, there has been little room for serious third-party challenges on the right. The two most successful—George Wallace in 1968 and Ross Perot in 1992—were difficult to classify ideologically and did not appeal exclusively to conservatives. Wallace siphoned votes from both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. Perot, though most of his supporters were Bush ‘88 voters, actually got his lowest percentages among self-described conservative Republicans. John Schmitz, a sitting member of Congress and John Birch Society leader, took 1.4 percent of the vote in 1972, Buchanan just 0.4 percent twenty-eight years later. The Constitution/U.S. Taxpayers’ Party has never broken 190,000 votes in four presidential elections, other smaller outfits have attracted Prohibition Party levels of support.

For paleoconservatives, this is difficult to understand. The Republican Party has manifestly failed to shrink the federal government, control immigration, reverse Roe v. Wade, curtail affirmative action, and roll back decades of cultural leftism, goals that even the mainstream movement claims to endorse. Democrats have given liberals the New Deal and the Great Society, and would deliver national health insurance if given the chance. Domestically, Republicans have given conservatives the Reagan tax cuts (Bush’s will expire in 2011), deregulation, and a welfare reform bill that had to be signed into law by a Democratic president. Yet the most successful recent third-party candidates have appealed to Volvo-driving white liberals (John Anderson in 1980 and Ralph Nader in 2000), angry moderates (Perot in 1992 and 1996), and segregationist dead-enders (Strom Thurmond in 1948 and Wallace in 1968). It is difficult to identify a significant third-party candidate who was as far to the right as Henry Wallace was to the left, although such candidacies have been tried.

Conservatives attempted to persuade both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to run as third-party candidates. They spurned right-wing entreaties, eventually winning the GOP presidential nomination and, in Reagan’s case, the presidency. The Constitution Party was founded in part as a vehicle for a Buchanan third-party bid. The Libertarians have nominated both Barr and Paul, in the latter case not doing much better than when they have run political nobodies. Paul has managed to win ten congressional elections—and is on track to prevail in an eleventh this November—as a Republican, while getting Michael Badnarik-like vote totals as a third-party candidate.

It may be difficult to remember now, but Bob Barr once seemed capable of succeeding where others failed. True, he always had his problems. He did not have the charisma of Buchanan, the dedicated personal following of Paul, or the wealth of Perot. A solid but fairly conventional conservative as a House Republican, Barr was a recent convert on a whole host of issues he would need to highlight in a successful campaign—the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, Medicare prescription-drug coverage, and, to a much lesser extent, the War on Drugs. Although he joined the Libertarian Party in 2006, endorsed its 2004 nominee over George W. Bush, and focused on civil liberties since leaving Congress, he was vulnerable to charges that he was a flip-flopper—the Libertarians’ Mitt Romney.

But Barr was famous enough to get the headlines he needed and sufficiently respected to be taken at least somewhat seriously. Paul had already proven that a candidate with the right message could raise large amounts of money without being charismatic or superrich. And Barr’s mixture of old mainstream conservatism and new libertarianism positioned him well to appeal to conservatives who thought McCain dissented from the party line too much (on tax cuts, regulations, guns, and immigration) and those who complained the Maverick did so too rarely (on Iraq, Iran, warrantless wiretapping, and the bulk of the Bush administration’s initiatives).

A coalition of Ron Paul Republicans and Rush Limbaugh Republicans would be hard to assemble and even more difficult to hold together. The Paulites would be deflated if Barr were insufficiently antiwar, whereas anti-McCain Republican regulars would be alienated by too much dovishness. But, as Buchanan’s Republican campaigns showed, such a coalition isn’t completely impossible. Early on, Barr’s candidacy was cheered by both libertarian hawk Eric Dondero and the staunchly antiwar Lew Rockwell.

Even if Barr merely consolidated the libertarian and right-wing third-party vote while also capturing some of Ron Paul’s 1.2 million votes, he would likely break Ed Clark’s record as the Libertarian Party’s top presidential vote-getter. If he won the votes of disgruntled mainstream Republicans, he could affect the outcome in several states and do better than Nader in 2000. Under this scenario, Barr would not only give newly organized Ron Paul revolutionaries something productive to do while putting Republicans on notice that they couldn’t take their conservative base for granted. He would do well enough to potentially nudge the GOP in a more sensible direction—or threaten its very existence.

At one point, Barr himself seemed to realize what was at stake. He spoke of building the Libertarian Party into an effective, mainstream political organization that could win elections. But he also talked about how Perot’s 19 percent of the vote influenced the 1994 Contract with America and persuaded Republicans, who had come to believe that deficits didn’t matter, to embrace a balanced budget in the 1990s. Once again, the GOP could lead, follow, or get out of the way.

While the Constitution Party honorably eschewed (relative) celebrity and chose the consistently antiwar Chuck Baldwin over the neoconservative Alan Keyes, Barr offered disaffected conservatives something Baldwin could not: a chance to have some noticeable impact on the election without voting for McCain. He also stood a better chance than Baldwin of continuing to mainstream ideas Paul brought into the 2008 campaign rather than have them return to the fringes of American politics.

Polls can exaggerate a third-party candidate’s support. Sometimes, people feel more comfortable telling a pollster they back a third candidate rather than admit they are undecided or have no preference. If the third-party candidate’s support is soft, many of those voters will migrate back to their usual major party by Election Day. But the early polling, both nationally and in states like Georgia and North Carolina, gave Barr supporters every reason to believe their hopes were well founded. A John Anderson-sized vote percentage was not out of the question. Some of the more effusive Libertarians even allowed themselves to dream of a Perot ‘92-like showing.

Now Barr will be lucky if he significantly exceeds the 300,000-400,000 votes a Libertarian Party presidential candidate can normally expect to receive. If his vote totals end up looking more like Harry Browne’s than Ed Clark’s, the postmortems will focus on Barr’s rift with the Ron Paul Republicans, beginning with his decision to pull out of a third-party press conference organized by Paul himself. It was never in Barr’s interest to put himself on equal footing with other third-party candidates—for the same reason Perot wanted to debate Bush and Clinton, not Howard Phillips and Lenora Fulani—but his handling of the event was nothing short of disastrous.

“There might be perfectly good reasons not to attend,” argued Eric Garris, “In any event, the decision is the LP’s. But there are no good reasons to say you will be there, to place it on your public schedule, to attend planning meetings, and then to blow it off 30 minutes before the press conference.” Worse, he held a rival event at which he seemed to question Paul’s commitment to individual liberty and continued to bait Paul until the Texan endorsed Baldwin.

On this score, Barr blew it. Yet Paul’s initial dithering was also problematic. Whatever one thinks of left-right coalitions, success in electoral politics requires supporting a specific candidate. It makes no more sense to simultaneously endorse four competing candidates, even if they agree on important issues, than it would for libertarians to be neutral in a race between Paul and Eugene Flynn. You cannot influence an electoral outcome or send a coherent message by splitting 1.2 million votes four ways. Even a straight endorsement of Nader would have been more logical, as anything that strengthens Nader could push Barack Obama in a more antiwar direction.

When Paul finally endorsed the Constitution Party nominee, he did so in a manner that was maximally harmful to Barr and minimally helpful to Baldwin: he waited until after most of the ballot-access fights were over, after Keyes snatched the American Independent Party ballot line in California, after the media became obsessed with McBama, and after the Rally for the Republic. The endorsement said more about the slight by “the Libertarian Party candidate” than it did about Baldwin’s authentic conservatism and virtues as a presidential choice. If Paul had come out for either Barr or Baldwin as early as May rather than in September, his decision would have had a much greater impact.

In February, I agreed with Paul’s decision to remain in the Republican Party, on the grounds that even one Ron Paul Republican in elected office is better than a strong but ultimately unsuccessful third-party campaign for the presidency. The country and the Republican conference needed Paul in Congress rallying opposition to the bailout plan more than anyone would benefit from him protesting his inevitable exclusion from the presidential debates. But the Paulites’ subsequent political activities and the tiny dissident Right’s multiple choices at the ballot box this November do give me second thoughts.

A majority of Paul delegates at the Republican National Convention voted for McCain, not the Good Doctor. Ron Paul Republicans have had successes in primaries—and B.J. Lawson is a particularly promising candidate—but mostly in lopsidedly Democratic areas where they stand little chance of winning in November. The Campaign for Liberty won’t promote antiwar, hard-money Republican primary candidates in exactly the same way as the Club for Growth backs GOP supply-siders. And while the party establishment has tried to exclude Paul supporters as they once sought to freeze out the despised Goldwaterites and Birchers, Paul himself hasn’t done much to build his credibility within the GOP by praising third parties and consorting with Cynthia McKinney.

There is nothing wrong with working within the Republican Party where possible and working outside it where necessary. But both types of work need to be effective. A Ron Paul third-party candidacy would not have been ideal, especially if it meant that Chris Peden would be heading to Congress instead. It probably would have been better than what has actually happened, however. At the very least, the Barr-Baldwin competition would have been eliminated, as Paul would be a candidate both the Libertarian and Constitution parties could have gotten behind.

Both of those parties also have their flaws. The influence of Christian Reconstructionism in the Constitution Party has caused most paleoconservative intellectuals, many of them serious Christians, to hold the party at arm’s length. Its tendency toward factionalism and inability to successfully integrate socially conservative Keyes supporters (many of whom are more interested in abortion than their leader’s neoconservatism) raise questions about its long-term prospects for success as a political party rather than a debating society.

The longer-established Libertarian Party suffers from similar problems and a few new ones of its own. Like the Reform Party in 2000, the LP has proved a deeply flawed vehicle for any kind of conservatism. The LP has pushed Barr to the left on same-sex marriage and immigration, to his detriment in the general election, and basically muted him on abortion. Like Paul twenty years ago, Barr has faced persistent opposition from cultural radicals within the party, some of whom were less than helpful to Barr’s state ballot-access drives. Those radicals will gain further influence in the event of a poor showing by Barr and his running mate, fellow “pragmatist” Wayne Allyn Root.

Third-party conservative efforts are also hobbled by the ease with which most of the right can be brought back into the Republican fold. In 2000, all George W. Bush had to do keep the brigades from defecting with Buchanan was to name a pro-life running mate—Dick Cheney, to add insult to injury—and talk about a “humble foreign policy” with exit strategies and without nation-building. McCain, who entered the 2008 presidential race with even weaker movement conservative credentials, just had to pick Sarah Palin. If Barr’s press conference blunder cost him the Ron Paul Republicans, Palin put most Rush Limbaugh Republicans out of reach. A single desertion by a Buchanan, Barr, or Paul does not a conservative exodus from the GOP make.

With the deck already stacked so heavily against minor parties, there is no margin for error much less problems of this magnitude. Perhaps, as Ron Paul has suggested, the combined vote totals for Barr and Baldwin will give disaffected conservatives reasons for hope. But right now, things are looking pretty grim.

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

Travis Childers may be an important part of the Democratic Party’s future. After GOP Congressman Roger Wicker of Mississippi was elevated to the upper chamber to replace outgoing Sen. Trent Lott, Childers ran for the open seat and won. This was the third consecutive special election victory for the Democrats in a Republican-leaning congressional district, making it all the more likely that Nancy Pelosi’s ranks will be strengthened in November.

Yet Childers is no Nancy Pelosi. He is a pro-life, pro-gun, pro-school prayer, pro-traditional marriage, anti-immigration amnesty conservative Democrat who vowed never to vote for a tax increase. When his Republican opponent tried to tie him to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, Childers hit back—but pointedly did not embrace his party’s presumptive standard-bearer. Thus he was able to win in a district that voted 62 percent for George W. Bush in 2004. The Democrats had failed to field a candidate for the district’s House seat that year. In 2006, Wicker’s Democratic challenger won just 34 percent of the vote.

We may be seeing the resurgence of what was thought to be an endangered species: the Southern white conservative Democrat.

Childers isn’t the only recent example. One of the Democrats’ other 2008 special election victories came in Louisiana, where Don Cazayoux beat Republican Woody Jenkins by a slim margin. Cazayoux is also a pro-life, pro-gun conservative Democrat who was willing to go toe-to-toe with Jenkins on his culture war bona fides. Jenkins is, to put it mildly, no moderate Republican.

Only a few years ago, a Southern white conservative who aspired to be elected to anything higher than a state legislative seat would have been well advised to leave the party of Jefferson for the party of Lincoln. Politicians as varied as Lott, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Pat Robertson, and even Phil Gramm began their careers in the Democratic Party. The migration of conservative Democrats to the GOP accelerated under Ronald Reagan and continued throughout the 1990s. Republicans won the 1994 elections in no small part by picking off conservative Southern districts that had been represented by Democrats for decades—just like the Democrats’ Watergate Congress was to a certain extent built on the backs of liberal Republicans twenty years earlier.

Many of the conservative Democrats who survived the 1994 GOP juggernaut thought it best to switch parties. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama and Congressmen Billy Tauzin (Louisiana), Greg Laughlin (Texas), Jimmy Hayes (Louisiana), and Mike Parker (Mississippi) all jettisoned their Democratic affiliations shortly after the election and joined the new Republican majority. Tauzin and Hayes used to host Blue Dog Coalition meetings in their offices. Their decision to become Republicans sent a signal that the entire Blue Dog project had become untenable.

Congressmen Virgil Goode (Virginia), Ralph Hall (Texas), and Rodney Alexander (Louisiana) got the message and later joined them in the GOP. Conservative Democrats who refused to bolt, like 13-term Congressman Charles Stenholm of Texas, were frequently beaten by Republicans if they did not retire on their own. Conservative Democratic party-switchers also fueled the GOP’s gubernatorial gains throughout the South: Kirk Fordice (Mississippi), Fob James (Alabama), Mike Foster (Louisiana), and Sonny Perdue (Georgia). Some of them were their states’ first Republican chief executives since Reconstruction.

Sen. James Webb, the former Reagan secretary of the navy, is the most prominent recent Southern patriot to switch from Republican to Democrat. He left a Democratic Party that had become too soft and dovish only to return when the GOP had become too neoconservative and hawkish. But he may not be the only—and is certainly not the most conservative—example.

Bob Conley left the Republican Party over Iraq, uncontrolled immigration, and what he regards as unfair trade. But Conley is a firm opponent of abortion, amnesty, gun control, and gay marriage and has with some justice been described as “to the right of just about any Democrat you can think of since Larry McDonald,” if not the “best Democrat since Grover Cleveland.” Conley is the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in South Carolina and plans to run to incumbent Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s right in the general.

When Billy Tauzin left Congress to become a lobbyist, his son Billy Tauzin III ran as a Republican to succeed him. Instead the Tauzins lost—by just 569 votes—to the kind of conservative Democrat they thought had been proven irrelevant. Charlie Melancon emphasized his “Louisiana Values,” including his pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-marriage stands. The Democrat joked that the 2004 campaign was the first time anyone had ever called him a liberal. And because he generally voted as a social conservative, Melancon won reelection by a 15-point margin in 2006.

So far, national Democrats haven’t discouraged Southern conservative newcomers. Congressional campaign committee heads helped Childers and Cazayoux, just as they did Heath Shuler in 2006. They helped recruit Webb and promoted him over the more conventionally liberal Harris Miller. Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel have even been willing to boost pro-life and pro-gun Democrats north of the Mason Dixon line, including Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and both Brad Ellsworth and Joe Donnelly in Indiana. Jack Davis has even run as a Pat Buchanan Democrat against Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds in New York. It may not seem like much of an innovation to run culturally conservative candidates in culturally conservative areas, but it took years for the Democrats to decide that they liked being in the majority better than imposing litmus tests.

The new Dixiecrats differ from the old in important respects. Unlike the Thurmonds and the Wallaces who came before them, the new guys largely eschew racial politics. Where even relatively liberal Southern Democrats once supported Jim Crow or opposed civil-rights legislation—think William Fulbright, Robert Byrd, and Al Gore, Sr.—the new conservative Democrats rely heavily on black voters. Childers won in a district that was 26 percent black. Adding their votes to those of white conservative Democrats who usually support Republicans for federal office gave him the majority.

Cazayoux assembled a similar coalition. He might not have been elected had it not been for an influx of black, disproportionately poor voters into his once-Republican congressional district after Hurricane Katrina. (There’s a possibility a black independent candidate named Michael Jackson will cause him to lose the seat to a Republican in November.)

Another difference: While the boll weevils helped pass the Reagan economic program in the 1980s and their Blue Dog successors tended to be fiscally conservative but socially moderate, the new Southern white Democrats are more conservative on social issues than economics.

In 2007, Heath Shuler, Charlie Melancon, and Gene Taylor of Mississippi all earned zeroes from NARAL Pro-Choice America—as well as F’s from the National Taxpayers Union for their votes on taxes and spending. The same was true for non-Southern conservative Democrats like Brad Ellsworth and Joe Donnelly. Donnelly voted 82 percent of the time with the socially conservative Eagle Forum but received a zero from the economically conservative Club for Growth. Ellsworth also got a zero from the anti-tax group while scoring even higher than Donnelly with Eagle Forum.

On foreign policy, the new conservative Democrats are decidedly a mixed bag. Some, like Conley, are intensely critical of neoconservatives and the war. Others, much like conservative Democrats during the Cold War, are hawkish. All ten of the House Democrats who voted against withdrawal from Iraq in July 2007, for example, are Southern or Midwestern conservatives. The blue-dog Ellsworth is more supportive of the Bush-McCain Iraq policy than the Republican he unseated, John Hostettler who was one six GOP congressmen to vote against authorizing the use of force and has written an antiwar book since leaving office.

It remains to be seen whether the Dixiecrat revival will last. A successful political party ultimately benefits all its factions, even those that reject its dominant ideology. The success of conservative Republicans in the 1980s and ‘90s brought about the revival of moderate Republicanism in some parts of the country as well. Much like the Democrats today, the GOP’s brand was strong enough to win even in hostile territories. Aided by Democratic missteps and misgovernment, Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, Richard Riordan, William Weld, and Pete Wilson could win elections by embracing the national party platform on fiscal policy and law-and-order while taking the popular local positions on abortion, gun control, and gay rights. The GOP held mayoralties in New York City, Los Angeles, and Jersey City as well as the governorships of every New England state but Vermont for at least half of the 1990s.

The Travis Childers Democrats may simply be the Giuliani-Riordan-Weld Republicans in reverse. And just like those Republicans, they may be the first to lose power if the Democratic boom comes to an end. The California GOP, with the ignoble exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in shambles before the end of the 1990s. Republicans hemorrhaged elected offices in the Northeast in 2006, even in once-rock-ribbed New Hampshire. New England sends only one Republican, Chris Shays of Connecticut, to the House. Some of these conservative Democrats could be at risk even in a lackluster Republican year like 2008, as John McCain will beat Obama in many of their districts.

Another possibility is that as the national Democratic Party becomes secure in its majorities, it will no longer need conservative Democrats—and will no longer tolerate their dissent. This is what made so many of their forebears ripe for the taking by the Republicans. To cite just one notable example, Phil Gramm’s support for the Reagan tax-and-budget plan got him kicked off the House Budget Committee by the Democratic leadership, so he switched parties. The Shulers and the Childers may be allowed to continue their opposition to pro-choice legislation as long as their votes aren’t needed, but Democratic leaders won’t go out of their way to help them or recruit other candidates like them.

If they buckle under liberal pressure, these Democrats could forfeit white conservative support. Sen. Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, who carries one of the best regarded family names among pro-life Democrats, already voted to overturn the Mexico City policy prohibiting federal funding of groups that promote or perform abortions overseas. As erstwhile pro-lifer Harry Reid climbed the Democratic leadership ranks, he went from voting with NARAL just 5 percent of the time in 1999 to 100 percent in 2007. Like Jim Webb, the new Southern Democrats could be little better than Reid clones.

Yet there are some trends that might help conservative Democrats stick around for a while. Such Democrats have long been thicker on the ground than Rockefeller Republicans. Oklahoma, for example, hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, has two Republican senators, and a 4-to-1 GOP majority in its U.S. House delegation. But a majority of voters in this 78.3 percent white state remain registered Democrats.

These old yellow-dog Democrats may be about to receive new reinforcements: young white evangelicals. Recent polling suggests they remain pro-life—a Pew Forum survey found them to be even more opposed to abortion than their elders—but are more supportive of activist government solutions to poverty, environmental problems, and health care than the old Religious Right. They may be receptive to Democrats who are socially conservative but economically moderate to liberal. According to the Pew poll, support for Republicans among evangelicals under the age of 30 has dropped 15 points over the last two years. When Relevant Magazine polled its young Christian readership, they found leftward movement on a number of issues and estrangement from Republicans whose name wasn’t Mike Huckabee.

Gene Taylor may be an example of the kind of Democrat who can appeal to these voters. The Mississippian has been in Congress since winning a special election in 1989, representing a district that hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1956. Taylor opposes abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, gun control, and untrammeled immigration while supporting the death penalty, a balanced budget amendment, and another constitutional amendment that would require a two-thirds majority to raise taxes. Taylor earned a 72 rating from the American Conservative Union in 2007 and voted with the Republican rather than the Democratic leadership 54.2 percent of the time in 2004.

Nevertheless, Taylor is enough of an economic populist to win plaudits from progressives in The American Prospect. He opposes free trade agreements, criticizes big business, and voted against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. He may not be enough of an environmentalist for young evangelicals—he only scores 50 percent with the League of Conservation Voters, much better than a conservative Republican and much worse than a liberal Democrat—but his big-government conservatism has already proved viable in an area that frequently votes Republican. He has won reelection with as much as 81 percent of the vote and was unopposed in 2006, after averaging 73 percent in his last three “competitive” elections.

For a long time, Taylor looked like an outlier. He frequently finds himself among just a handful of House Democrats breaking ranks, no larger than the number of antiwar Republicans in Congress. He even refused to vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker until 2006. But Taylor’s brand of Democratic politics may still work for other office-seekers in the South. Just ask the latest addition to his state congressional delegation, Travis Childers.

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

In an interview with Antiwar Radio, Barr acknowledged there was a “great deal of dissatisfaction with the current candidates and the current two-party system.” “Ron Paul tapped into a great deal of that dissatisfaction and that awareness,” he continued. “Unfortunately, working through the Republican Party structure, it became impossible for him to really move forward with his movement. But we have to have a rallying point out there to harness that energy, that freedom in this election cycle.”

Can Barr be that rallying point? He opposes the Iraq war. He has criticized the Orwellian doublespeak of “enhanced interrogation.” He has been good on issues like the Patriot Act, without degenerating into Daily Kos-style hyperbole. We’ll soon find out if he is still sound on immigration and the life issues. The Barr for president boomlet ought to give paleoconservatives some hope.

When Paul more or less wrapped up his presidential campaign, I defended his decision to stay in the Republican Party. I still think he will have more influence, limited though it may be, as a Republican member of the House than he will as the candidate who breaks Ed Clarke’s record as the Libertarian Party’s top presidential vote-getter (or the man who beat Alan Keyes for the Constitution Party nomination). Working within the GOP becomes even more difficult if he is also moonlighting as the presidential candidate of another party.

Furthermore, I remain deeply skeptical of third parties. The electoral system is designed to stack the deck against them. They become debate societies for lunatics. Most third parties are either tied to the fortunes of a single candidate or labor in obscurity for decades. Yet they can act as a safety valve when the major parties give us such dreadful choices as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain. And if the Republican Party rejects the new blood Paul pumped into it, the Good Doctor’s supporters are entitled to someone to vote for in November. Barr is already gone from both Congress and the GOP, so we have little to lose from his protest candidacy.

Granted, Barr is no Ron Paul. He voted for the Patriot Act he now rails against. In Congress, he was a leading drug warrior. But he is a throwback to an era when the GOP opposed Bill Clinton’s military adventures and made at least some attempt to rein in federal spending (well, during 1995-96, at least).

Since leaving Congress, Barr has spent a considerable amount of time trying to remind conservatives of their past support for civil liberties. This led him to unlikely affiliations with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Libertarian Party. It also caused him to rethink some things. If he runs for president, Barr could end up being a good choice for conservatives who oppose the Iraq War but aren’t ready to become Obamacons.

In fact, Barr might be able to draw more votes from McCain’s conservative critics than Ron Paul. Best known for his work in passing the Defense of Marriage Act and trying to impeach Bill Clinton, he has credibility among the more conventional Republicans on the right that Paul lacked. Paul has taken some 800,000 votes in the GOP primaries so far, about double what a typical Libertarian Party nominee gets in a general election. Barr might be able to top this number.

Of course, there is no guarantee that Barr will even run much less dominate the Libertarian Party’s crowded presidential field. Prominent conservative figures have gone the third party route and then gone down in flames at the ballot box before. In 1988, Ron Paul found himself abandoned by George H.W. Bush’s conservative critics and the more libertine Libertarians, something that could easily happen to Barr as well. And if Barr does throw his hat into the ring, expect his imperfections to be rehashed endlessly.

But in a depressing election year where there are few good choices for traditional conservatives and libertarians, a Bob Barr presidential bid may be the best available option. Bar none.

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

During the 2006 elections, there was one candidate for office who excited disaffected conservatives more than any other. No, it wasn’t a Republican like John Hostettler, Walter Jones, or even Ron Paul. It wasn’t any of the candidates who took up the immigration-restrictionist banner while the Bush administration was pushing for amnesty. Instead the great paleoconservative hope was James Webb, a newly minted Democrat running a longshot, yet ultimately successful, campaign for U.S. Senate from Virginia against incumbent Republican George Allen.

Webb enjoyed the support of many paleo bloggers familiar to readers of this webzine. The leading paleo magazines discussed his candidacy in the same glowing terms that once appeared in reviews of his books. My former boss, The American Conservative editor Scott McConnell, hoped Webb would be Virginia’s “most interesting emissary to the upper chamber since the 19th century” and jokingly asked the day after the midterm elections, “Is it too soon for a ‘Webb for President’ bandwagon?” Not to be outdone, I observed, “Webb is presented as a kind of folk hero, equal parts Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and—at least among his more conservative backers—Ronald Reagan.” The specific comparisons were made by my sources, but the high hopes were mine as well.

And why shouldn’t they have been? Despite his popularity with the netroots, Webb’s writings had distinguished him more clearly as a man of the right than Allen the Republican presidential wannabe. If paleoconservatism is, as Chilton Williamson has written, “the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture,” then Webb easily fits the bill—he was after all the author of books like Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.

So the question then becomes: Why has Jim Webb proved such a boringly conventional Democratic senator? Far from being some kind of right-leaning maverick, he has voted with his fellow Democrats in the Senate nearly 90 percent of the time. Were we wrong to ever expect otherwise?

Webb’s history as a decorated Marine, Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary, a Republican, and a trenchant foe of post-1960s countercultural liberalism is well known. His hippie-bashing was far tougher than that of any Rush Limbaugh imitator on the AM dial. “Jane Fonda can kiss my ass,” Webb once told a radio interviewer. “I wouldn’t walk across the street to watch her slit her wrist.” Yet when Webb wrote about politics and culture, his material was as at home in Chronicles as in the Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard.

“The culture so dramatically symbolized by the Southern redneck [is] the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and the cultural Marxists for a new kind of society altogether,” Webb wrote in Born Fighting. “And for the last fifty years the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America’s future growth.” Webb described “rednecks” as an “obstacle to the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness.”

Most of the above words, published as recently as 2004, could have been written by paleoconservative historian Roger McGrath, who penned a favorable review of Born Fighting for Chronicles. Some of it is even reminiscent of the late Sam Francis. Webb’s 1990 speech at the Confederate memorial was also bolder in its defense of his “redneck” heritage than anything Allen ever mustered: “I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery.”

Webb was also fortunate in his opponents. While a conservative case could be made for George Allen, the other candidate in Virginia’s Democratic primary was Harris Miller, a technology industry lobbyist. Miller was a leading proponent of both mass immigration and non-immigrant visa policies that promote the offshore outsourcing of American jobs. In a Democratic debate, Webb controversially called Miller “the anti-Christ of outsourcing,” a line borrowed from a paleo anti-outsourcing activist.

Finally, Webb’s prescient 2002 Washington Post op-ed opposing the Iraq War, “Heading for Trouble: Do We Really Want to Occupy Iraq for the Next 30 Years?” caught the attention of antiwar conservatives. His opposition to the coming invasion based on conservative-realist grounds was preferable to the simplistic liberal anti-Bush talking points. His military credentials made him impossible to caricature as soft on defense, much less a pacifist. And the column even began with a reference to a Toby Keith song.

Even non-paleo commentators detected Webb’s populist-conservative streak. In a New Yorker profile, Peter Boyer concluded that Webb “almost seems a Pat Buchanan conservative.” Writing in his Bloomberg News column, Andrew Ferguson called Webb “a Buchanan Democrat.” In a longer, perceptive Weekly Standard piece, Ferguson dubbed Webb “the most sophisticated right-wing reactionary to run on a Democratic ticket since Grover Cleveland.”

A little over a year into his first term, and less than a year away from becoming Virginia’s senior senator, Jim Webb so far looks like something else entirely: a paleoconservative Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

As an appointee in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, a writer, and a thinker, Moynihan had many admirers on the right, especially among the neoconservatives. But in the U.S. Senate, Moynihan was a standard-issue liberal voting the Democratic Party line. On foreign policy he would occasionally side with the neoconservatives against the New York Times, but on domestic policy hardly ever. Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action was an early salvo in the debate over welfare reform. But Moynihan ended his career voting against welfare reform, siding with Marian Wright Edelman liberals against a president of his own party.

Will Webb also roll over and play party regular? Washington has a way of taming mavericks and draining people of everything that makes them interesting. Steve Sailer once referred to “the Joe Liebermans and Daniel Patrick Moynihans who talk like Irving Kristol but vote like Walter Mondale.” Webb writes like Pat Buchanan but votes like Harry Reid.

In 2006, Webb ran as a pro-abortion defender of Roe v. Wade, the single issue that gave his conservative admirers the most pause, so it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that he has a 100 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America. But on a number of other issues he has been more likely to take the liberal line than act as an independent conservative or as one who defies the left-right political spectrum. He’s no radical—the National Journal rankings put him toward the center of Senate Democrats—but neither does he buck the leadership much. Webb’s rating from Americans for Democratic Action, the gold standard in evaluating liberalism, is 85 percent.

A putative cultural conservative divorced from social conservatism, Webb received a zero from the Family Research Council in 2007. But he got an A from the left-wing National Education Association. While the Club for Growth does not always pick the right targets, a senator who is reasonably fiscally conservative ought to vote with them much more often than 13 percent of the time, as Webb did last year.

Webb voted 100 percent of the time with the AFL-CIO, the Utility Workers Union of America, and the National Association of Social Workers. The man who once called race-conscious affirmative action “a permeating state-sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws it sought to countermand” voted with the NAACP 93 percent of the time and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights 85 percent of the time.

Immigration reformers had particularly high hopes for Webb. Peter Brimelow, who has known the senator for decades, even invited him to play some role in the restrictionist webzine VDARE. (Webb declined, preferring to stay in the mainstream media.) Yet Americans for Better Immigration gives him a middling C-minus rating, assessing his record as being weak on reducing illegal immigration but bolstered by votes to reduce “unnecessary visas” to foreign workers. Webb initially voted for the McCain-Kennedy-Kyl amnesty bill of 2007 and then helped reject it by voting against cloture. But by that point, the bill’s defeat appeared likely and even pro-amnesty Sam Brownback had switched sides.

Webb hasn’t gone wobbly on the war, though some antiwar activists criticize him for voting for supplementals that fund the Iraq mission without setting any timelines for withdrawal. He has also introduced legislation complimenting Walter Jones’ House bill requiring congressional approval before the war can be widened to Iran, unless there is an imminent risk of attack. He is still touted as a promising running mate for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. But is he really more valuable to traditional conservatives than a Walter Jones—or even a Chuck Hagel?

In retrospect, some warning signs were there early on. One can understand how the Iraq War could cause Webb to break with George W. Bush and George Allen, both of whom he had endorsed in 2000. It becomes harder to see how he could so readily bury the hatchet with John Kerry, a man whose hand Webb refused to shake for 20 years after the Vietnam War. But perhaps Webb’s view that Kerry had been mistreated by the Swiftboat Veterans in 2004 is a possible explanation. Webb’s sudden embrace of Bill Clinton, however, is most difficult to fathom.

“Every time I see him salute a Marine,” Webb remarked to an interviewer, “it infuriates me.” In January 2001, Webb enthused in the Wall Street Journal, “It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical fraudulence that has characterized his entire political career.” Yet when Clinton came to Virginia to campaign for Webb, this went down the memory hole, along with much of Webb’s past opposition to feminism and racial preferences.

It is also possible that Webb’s cultural conservatism never had any policy or ideological content, but was simply a manifestation of his personal loyalties and affections. His celebrated post-election op-ed about class conflict and income inequality contained no real policy prescriptions and a telling dismissal of “God, gays, guns, abortion, and the flag.” The anti-outsourcing writer Rob Sanchez complained during the primary that Webb’s rhetoric on immigration and H-1B visas was not yet matched by substantive solutions.

Andrew Ferguson also noticed during the campaign that Webb was trying to synthesize positions that cannot easily be reconciled, such as amnesty for illegal immigrants coupled with tough employer sanctions and attacks on high CEO salaries alongside “a cut in the capital gains tax, in case a redneck wants to sell his stocks.” But Ferguson didn’t deny Webb had political promise, arguing “this inversion—the use of multiculturalism to advance the ethnic interests of white people, and the use of warrior rhetoric to discredit the Bush administration’s war—might be extremely valuable to Democrats, if they knew what they were doing.”

Does Webb know what he is doing? Some speculate that he is merely trying to build up his credibility within the Democratic Party before pushing for reforms or showing his true passions. Representing New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan always had to look nervously to his left, fearing a challenge by someone like Bella Abzug or the state Liberal Party. Webb’s Virginia is more conservative and congenial.

Unfortunately, the liberal northern Virginia suburbs are Webb’s base of support. Without huge margins there, even the Macaca-stained Allen would have beaten him—a more adroit Republican could still do so in 2012. Maybe the fact that Webb was “Born Fighting” means he will eventually spend his Senate career doing the same. But so far, the voting records of Jim Webb and Pat Moynihan have more in common with each other than they do with either man’s writings.

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

This is the final installment in a four-part symposium on the Ron Paul movement. John Derbyshire, Justin Raimondo, and Paul Gottfried have made previous contributions.

A colleague, for whom paleoconservatism is as esoteric as paleontology, recently inquired into the mood of Ron Paul supporters: Do they view his campaign as a worthwhile endeavor, if not a success, or as a bust?

There are nearly as many answers to this question as there are Ron Paul supporters. Even among this website’s contributors and readers, there isn’t anything approaching unanimity when it comes to Paul postmortems. But the Good Doctor’s presidential bid has had some salutary effects, even if we won’t get to see President Paul take the oath of office and actually mean it, much less turn to his two immediate predecessors and announce, “You have the right to remain silent.”

First the good news: Paul attracted a large, impassioned, and surprisingly young grassroots following. Even after dozens of primary defeats, he continues to bring in crowds that rival those of the frontrunning candidates, outdrawing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Georgetown University just this month. Paul has raised millions of dollars, including more than $19 million in the last quarter alone, winning the fourth quarter Republican “money primary.” And though Paul hasn’t done well in many big-state primaries, he has registered double-digit showings in a number of caucuses, likely won more delegates than most media estimates suggest, and finished ahead of every top-tier Republican in at least one contest.

Best of all, Paul has gotten such seemingly antique notions as limited constitutional government, sound money, and the foreign policy of the Founding Fathers unprecedented exposure on the Internet and even in the mainstream media. Not bad, for a “fringe candidacy.”

On to the bad news: Those tens of millions raised, the huge rallies, and the strong online presence raised expectations. Despite successful money bombs, straw poll victories, and big, young crowds on the trail, the Paul campaign has seldom met those expectations where they count most—at the ballot box. Sometimes the Paulites came agonizingly close—a little over three more points apiece in Iowa and New Hampshire would have ensured third-place showings in both pivotal early states, making Paul an indisputable part of the 2008 race narrative. Sometimes, it wasn’t even close, as when Paul finished behind the recently departed Rudy Giuliani in California.

Short of a Paul administration, what would success have looked like? First, a solid enough showing to demonstrate that even a critical mass of Republicans had turned against the war in Iraq—a final nail in the Bush Doctrine’s coffin. Wobblier Republicans like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee might have been encouraged to continue their early gestures toward foreign-policy independence. Even more reliable hawks like John McCain might have felt constrained in widening the war. And the entire debate would have been freed from its artificial red-team/blue-team boundaries.

Second, a strong enough showing to force Republicans (and enterprising Democrats) to pander to Paulites on other issues. Even as few as a million primary votes—the number Alan Keyes won in 2000—would have been the beginnings of a formidable constituency for smaller government. Early signs of success were enough to win favorable press in the Wall Street Journal and Newsmax, the latter publishing a cover story that argues that Paul might be onto something when it comes to government-cutting, if not all that wacky antiwar stuff. These examples suggest that even if mainline Republicans had tried to co-opt Paul without rethinking foreign policy, it still might have nudged the conservative movement in the right direction.

Third, the Paul campaign could have succeeded simply by doing well enough to establish that there is an identifiable “Ron Paul” wing of the Republican Party. In 1988, Pat Robertson’s failed bid for the GOP nomination helped identify conservative Christians and organize them in an effective national pressure group. Paul could have done the same for libertarian, antiwar, and small-government conservative Republicans.

Some of these goals may still be achievable. Paul did start something of an intra-Republican war debate, albeit against the party’s will. Libertarians and less statist conservatives will be looking for Paul’s donor lists when the campaign is over. Some people already identify as Ron Paul Republicans. But none of these objectives have been realized to the extent that once seemed possible.

In Iowa, some polls found that a small majority of registered Republicans wanted to withdraw from Iraq within six months. Yet Paul won 10 percent of the vote there—not bad, but nowhere close to the 51 percent that could reasonably be described as antiwar. In New Hampshire, Paul actually lost self-described opponents of our current Iraq policy to John McCain of all people. That’s the same McCain who would be “fine with” a 100-year presence in Iraq.

Since Super Tuesday, Paul’s share of the vote in most primaries has settled into the 3-to-5 percent range. Paul advertised in Arkansas, a state most of the top-tier Republicans had ceded to Huckabee, and still managed to win just 5 percent of the vote. He also went on the air in Tennessee, where he did only slightly better with 6 percent of the final tally.

What went wrong? Some of the problems had little to do with the candidate or his campaign. Huckabee’s rise into the top tier absorbed the media’s limited attention for candidates other than Rudy McRompson. Mitt Romney’s poor showings in the primaries forced him to devote resources to caucuses like Maine and Alaska, where Paul had his best chances for victory. Four of the five original candidates who were trailing Paul dropped out before the first ballots were cast. Only Duncan Hunter stayed in to take his beating.

But a successful presidential campaign must do more than rise above the also-rans. Paul’s message was often mismatched with the Republican primary electorate. Sometimes, as Paul Gottfried documents, the problem was with Paul. Often it was with the increasingly big-government, “invade the world, invite the world” GOP. Either way, Paul frequently did not campaign as if he were trying to win over the major voting blocs that actually reside in the Republican Party.

In the Jan. 14 American Conservative, I observed that paleoconservatives are divided tactically: some prefer to work within the larger conservative movement; others hope to replace that movement with a Real Right; others still think it best to forge a Left-Right coalition against the neocons. By running for the Republican presidential nomination, for better or worse Paul chose to adopt the first strategy. In practice, his campaign often seemed to translate into an effort to follow the third.

Much of the “Ron Paul cured my apathy” vote came from the same well that feeds Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. And indeed, some Paul supporters saw themselves competing with Obama for votes more than with Huckabee or Romney—not a winning strategy in Republican primaries. Paul appealed to young progressives who suspected—rightly, as it turned out—that the Democrats are not serious about ending the war or substantially changing the country’s foreign policy. They make good allies on an ad hoc basis; occasionally they might make good converts to a more principled conservatism. But failing the latter, they don’t make promising recruits for an intellectually coherent movement.

Some of these young progressives have become interested in fiscal and monetary policy; a few of them have had their minds opened to the Old Right. But not enough of them have entered the Republican electoral process to make Paul a stronger contender. It is doubtful the influence of recent former Obama supporters will make itself felt in other identifiably conservative ways.

This is all new territory for paleos. Bill Maher didn’t praise Pat Buchanan during his Republican presidential bids. Neither “The Daily Show” nor “The Colbert Report” existed in 1992 or 1996, but if they did, it is hard to imagine they would have welcomed Buchanan with open arms back when he was at the peak of his influence among conservatives. Paul did much better at winning favorable coverage from smart liberal hipsters, but Buchanan enjoyed far more success in the primaries because his ties to populist conservatives in the pro-life, pro-gun, and anti-tax movements (and even talk radio) were stronger. Even if there is no such thing as bad publicity, not all publicity translates into an equal number of votes.

Yet there remains one area where Paul’s revolution can eclipse the Buchanan brigades. Between Buchanan’s three presidential campaigns, relatively little effort went into movement-building. Few like-minded Republicans entered primaries and ran for office. No Buchanan caucus, however small, was built in Congress. The millions shouting “Go Pat Go!” were not taking their pitchforks and storming state legislatures or city halls. If the Paul movement can persevere and cohere—neither of which is certain—it can go beyond a cult of personality and be a beginning rather than an ending.

This could be true even if Paul doesn’t run as a third-party candidate. Let’s face it: While it would give us all someone to vote for, Paul probably hasn’t done well enough in the Republican primaries to have much impact if he fought to November. We can hope that his vote totals will improve once he can reach beyond members of George W. Bush’s party, and we can certainly point to some encouraging poll numbers.

But the early polling was encouraging when Buchanan bolted the GOP in the fall of 1999. In November 2000, he won just 0.4 percent of the vote, barely beating Harry Browne. The antiwar liberals, burned by Ralph Nader, will be reluctant to vote third-party. Especially if Obama is the Democratic nominee, few of them will want to feel responsible for electing President McCain. And although large numbers of conservatives are now insisting they can’t vote for McCain, if the presidential election is close most of them will be unable to resist the temptation.

Most of Paul’s media attention, even from liberals, has come from the fact that he is a Republican saying things about the Iraq war that Republicans are not supposed to say. Take away the GOP affiliation, and most of that attention will vanish. The Libertarian Party or Constitution Party nominee will not appear on “The View.” A third-party candidate probably won’t be invited on “Meet the Press” and certainly won’t be included in the debates.

Paul would probably do just well enough to be blamed for whatever happens—if McCain is elected he will be criticized for splitting the antiwar vote; if a Democrat is elected he will be attacked for splitting the conservative vote—without changing the country’s political dynamics. The kind of change we’re looking for can’t be achieved in one election—it will take many elections, for many offices, and an intellectual movement outside electoral politics entirely. Keeping Ron Paul in Congress and electing more people like him, even as the GOP keeps trying to recruit more Chris Pedens, will contribute more to these goals than breaking Ed Clarke’s record as top Libertarian Party vote-getter.

The challenge that awaits the thousands of activists who have been inspired by Dr. Paul isn’t to run and register under a new third party as the number of dedicated constitutionalists in Congress is reduced to zero. It is expanding the ranks of Ron Paul Republicans—and small-government supporters of all stripes—in a hostile political climate. That takes more than one man. It requires a real movement.

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.

By W. James Antle III

Debating in Ronald Reagan’s shadow in Simi Valley, there were plenty of Republican presidential hopefuls willing to deviate on social issues like embryo-destructive stem-cell research, but only one dissenter on the Iraq War—ten-term Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. It’s a role Paul reprised this week in South Carolina and, with any luck, will throughout the 2008 campaign.

What’s more, Paul has even begun to get some serious media coverage—albeit with the usual condescension toward principled “longshot” candidates.

That’s still a big improvement from when Paul declared his candidacy in March. Back then, the media was focused on another Republican with heterodox Iraq views. With headlines blaring “Chuck Hagel expected to announce 2008 bid,” reporters trekked out to Omaha with the expectation that the two-term Republican senator from Nebraska would toss his hat into the ring.

Instead Hagel merely announced that he would make another announcement—later. Members of the Fourth Estate weren’t amused.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank penned a column panning the senator’s performance under the title “When No News Is Strange News.” His colleague Howard Kurtz commented, “Boy that was strange.” National Public Radio called Hagel’s press conference “March Madness.”

So the media got their Hagel for president story wrong. But subsequent coverage compounded the error by exaggerating the senator’s import to conservative critics of the war in Iraq. The Associated Press called him “one of the more forceful Republican voices in opposition to the Iraq war.” Agence France-Presse dubbed Hagel a “fierce Iraq war critic” with an “anti-war posture.”

A report in The Politico before Hagel’s bizarre hurry-up-and-wait statement claimed that “his candidacy will test whether an anti-war—and sometimes defiantly anti-Bush—contender has a viable constituency in the Republican Party.”

There’s just one problem with all this: Chuck Hagel isn’t all that anti-war.

In 2002, Hagel joined a majority of the Senate—and all but one senator in his own party—in voting for the war. Until this year, he has supported every appropriation and fulfilled every Bush administration request concerning Iraq.

At the March 12 media event in Omaha, Hagel specifically eschewed the anti-war label, saying “that to have a different position than the president’s on a war doesn’t qualify anyone to be an anti-war candidate.”

For years, Chuck Hagel has been willing to complain about the war in speeches and on the Sunday morning television talk shows. Only recently has his voting record begun to catch up.

By contrast, Paul has consistently backed up his talk with action. He voted against the war at the height of its popularity, only one of six House Republicans to do so. He has taken the politically risky—fellow Republicans might say risky and foolish—step of voting against every appropriation funding the war. He voted against a resolution saying Iraq was part of the broader war on terror. Paul has even voted for withdrawal.

In fairness, Hagel’s resolve on the war has stiffened this year. He co-sponsored with the Democrats a resolution opposing the surge, but it was non-binding. Hagel also helped hand the Bush administration a political defeat by voting to impose a withdrawal timeline. But the same legislation also funds the war, substituting constitutionally problematic micromanagement tactics for Congress’ unambiguous power of the purse.

If Paul is the stronger anti-war candidate—and his run a better barometer of the GOP’s openness to debate on Iraq—why doesn’t he tend to attract the same fawning profiles as Hagel? Maybe it has a little bit to do with their differing political outlooks.

Paul’s opposition to the Iraq conflict stems from his general libertarianism, since he agrees with Randolph Bourne that war is the health of the state. He has always opposed big government and continued to vote against expansions of Washington’s reach—long after it became unfashionable to do so within the GOP that gave us No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

In fact, Paul believes that the Constitution set up a limited federal government with enumerated powers. And he doesn’t always see the either party’s spending wish list enumerated in the text of that founding document.

Hagel has a generally conservative voting record with much to recommend it. But his independence can easily be overstated. He is critical of the administration while the cameras are running, but usually votes the party line once inside Senate chambers.

Sound familiar? Not for nothing did colleague George Neumayr designate the Nebraskan “Chuck McHagel.”

Neither man has much chance to win the Republican presidential nomination. Both are stuck at 2 percent in a recent CNN poll. Hagel has irritated the GOP base with his shtick, Paul with his consistent voting record.

Ron Paul is finally having his big media moment. But will he be forgotten again if Hagel decides on an independent run, either at the top of the ticket or as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s running mate?

Let’s hope not.

W. James Antle III is associate editor of The American Spectator.