Playing the Spoiler Role?

At Tuesday night's Libertarian debate, the party's most celebrated presidential candidate wasn't even there. In fact, he isn't even a Libertarian. And yet his name was invoked almost a dozen times in the course of the hourlong debate leading up to this weekend's Libertarian convention.

Last week Ron Paul—a Republican, at least in name—crossed the 1 million mark for votes. At the Washington offices of the Libertarian monthly magazine Reason, Matt Welch, the magazine's editor-in-chief, introduced the debate with a nod to the Texas congressman: "We're here to talk about Libertarian politics in 2008 and what is shaping up to be something of a Libertarian moment in the wake of Ron Paul's ongoing revolution," Welch said.

With only one day left before the Libertarian convention—which will run from Thursday through Monday in Denver, Colo.—the 14 Libertarian candidates are all trying to cash in on Paul's appeal. No surprise, considering that Paul has far exceeded the vote counts of past Libertarian presidential contenders. Paul has also managed to hold on to more than $5 million in campaign funds, a remarkable sum, given that Sen. John McCain clinched the Republican nomination in March and that Paul's candidacy, as he told NEWSWEEK in March, is more about sending a message than winning the White House.

But other Libertarians are thinking about the White House—if not winning it, then at least influencing the outcome. A Rasmussen poll released last weekend shows that newly declared Libertarian candidate Bob Barr (assuming he secures his party's nomination) would likely eat into McCain's numbers, winning 6 percent of the electorate and leaving McCain with 38 percent to Sen. Barack Obama's 42 percent (another 4 percent would go to independent candidate Ralph Nader). So a Libertarian candidate could very well swing the election. As Welch put it, there is a "possibility that a third party this year is going to Naderize John McCain," a reference to Nader's spoiler role in the 2000 presidential race.

But the three Libertarian presidential candidates who participated in Tuesday's debate—businessman Wayne Allyn Root, former senator Mike Gravel and former congressman Bob Barr—avoided the spoiler issue. Instead the moderator focused on questions like which federal agency the candidates would eliminate. Both Root and Barr said they would do away with the Department of Education (as Root put it, "The Constitution doesn't have the word education in it"), while Gravel said he'd ax the IRS: "We tax individuals, we tax our savings, but we don't tax wealth. Does that not give a message to the American people that we've got things cattywampus?"

The one thing all three candidates agreed on is that the Libertarian Party is poised to break into the mainstream. "Inside every American beats the heart of a Libertarian," said Barr, who switched to the Libertarian Party in 1996 after spending eight years as a Republican congressman from Georgia. "What we need to do now is show the American people that [Libertarianism] is mainstream. For too long Libertarians have been silenced and painted as extreme. But Libertarianism is more mainstream and bedrock American than any other program our country has ever produced."