Libertarian candidate Bob Barr appears in Oberlin

Jason Hawk | The Chronicle-Telegram

OBERLIN — Bob Barr isn’t expecting to win, but that’s not stopping him from running for president.

The former congressman from Georgia, who gained notoriety as one of the leaders in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, lectured to a crowd Thursday night at Oberlin College and asked for votes.

Calling himself “Bob the Builder,” Barr spent more than half an hour criticizing a lack of substance in the recent debates between Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.

Barr was barred from those debates because he isn’t considered a viable candidate, even though he is slated to appear on the ballots of as many as 47 states, including Ohio.

About 4 percent of voters say they back him, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

As the Libertarian Party candidate, Barr said if elected president he would drastically cut government spending, begin a withdrawal from Iraq, support free trade, protect civil liberties and privacy rights, and push for immigration reform.

“The job of the president is to protect the one thing that is the United States of America — and that is liberty,” he said.

Not included in that job description, according to Barr, is bailing out failing banks.

“What we’re certainly going to get hit with are more laws, more regulation, and not better laws or better regulation,” he said.

“This bailout, buyout plan they’re proposing is an insidious way to say we have a problem, and we’re going to make everyone pay for it.”

Barr took equal time to attack promises of the Obama and McCain campaigns, criticizing universal health care, income taxes, the war in Afghanistan and covert government wiretapping.

He also attacked the war in Iraq, saying President Bush used a “classic bait and switch” to get Congressional approval to invade.

“What we need to do immediately — as I would do as president — is to start drawing down not just the military footprint, but the economic footprint we have in Iraq,” he said.

That appealed to 16-year-old Travis Kurtz of Amherst, who said he would consider casting a Barr ballot this November if he were old enough to vote.

“He’s more leaning toward bringing the troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, which is the most important thing for me,” Kurtz said after hearing Barr speak.

John Malloy, 36, of Chesterland, Ohio, was also in the audience and said he was considering voting for Barr or another third-party candidate such as former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas or Ralph Nader.

“I think Libertarian economic policy makes a lot more sense than the situation we have now, where the two-party system has a stranglehold on us,” he said.

Ron Seward, 51, traveled from his home in Dayton to see Barr speak. He said he’s already cast his absentee ballot for Barr.

Also appearing with Barr were Paul Conroy, Libertarian candidate for the Ohio’s 10th Congressional district, and Robert Owens, the party’s candidate for Ohio attorney general.

Contact Jason Hawk at 329-7148 or jhawk@chroniclet.com.

Free Services for Clubs

Providing free services for campus LP clubs is the core function of CampusLP.org.

• Free hosting
• Free e-mail
• Free redirects
• Directory listing (see below)
• Upcoming: Organization docs and forms, etc.
• Upcoming: basic starter pack (including docs and forms, plus other intro docs and templates (press releases, general meeting poster, etc.)

Club Directory

Any campus Libertarian club can be listed for free in our club directory, and our hope is that all campus LP clubs will make sure their group is represented, so that visitors to the site can be sure to find the group that is on (or nearest to) their school.

We’re working on making the club “profile page” as robust as possible, so that groups who don’t have or want websites can represent themselves thoroughly at CampusLP.org.

Word-Spreading

You will soon discover that “growth” is one of the key imperatives here at CampusLP.org. The site itself is geared toward helping to get new clubs started, and helping existing clubs grow. Which means that an easy way to help the movement grow is to spread the word about CampusLP.org. You will effectively be promoting your local group, the campus libertarian movement in general, the Libertarian Party, and this site all at the same time. And the person you bring here may bring the next great idea or project, or volunteer effort to help with one of the ongoing initiatives here. Or they may start a group at their school, or join their school’s group, or be the one who brings the next person who brings the next great idea or project…and so on.

With that in mind, we provide a lot of ways to promote the site, your club, and the cause in general.

• Tell a Friend
• Tell a lot of friends (import from address book)
• Recommend a given article
• Posters
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Discussion Forums

Events Calendar/Featured Events

Downloads Repository

Wiki Infobase

The Wiki Infobase (please suggest a better name) would be a repository where activists would compile all the essential info-ingredients that Campus Libertarian clubs might need to present their message to their fellow students. For example:

• quotes
• statistics
• essays, white papers, etc
• any other useful or persuasive content

In an ideal world, the various ingredients in the infobase would then be mashed into various final forms – posters, handouts, brochures, LTEs and Op-Eds, etc.

Also, the wiki can accommodate whatever other info-based projects the campus libertarian community may want to hatch up. Feel free to suggest other ways to use it!

Upcoming/Planned/Wished-For Initiatives

Campus Libertarian Literature Series

We would like to create/compile a throrough collection of table literature and other handouts for campus LP clubs. Stuff that goes beyond what’s currently available (from the LP, etc.), in terms of getting to the heart of issues from a campus libertarian focus. At least some of the literature would be made to look like it’s part of a series (like the LP’s does), with a spot for groups to add their own name and contact info.

In an ideal world, a burgeoning campus LP club would be able to come to CampusLP.org, print out ten finished masters, print their own contact info on to those, and then go to the copy shop…and walk out with a table’s worth of hard-hitting and persuasive handouts from a college libertarian perspective.

The above-mentioned “wiki infobase” is also in this ideal world, since it would allow for this stuff to be developed collaboratively among many people, which should produce better results with less effort per person. If that doesn’t fully flower, then the individual pieces of literature could be farmed out to volunteering individuals, once a basic wish list is developed. And if even that doesn’t flower, then I will probably try to put some pieces together myself, in time.

But a small ad-hoc committee in the wiki could probably get a respectable series of literature pieces done pretty quickly, with the right combination of players. (i.e., a good project leader(s), a couple researchers, a few good writers, a page designer or two…)

Poster Contest

We’re hoping to hold a Campus Libertarian poster contest – preferably, one per semester. The goal would be to generate timeless and effective recruitment/promotion posters for campus libertarian clubs across the country.

In an ideal world, the top prize would be $1000, which would be donated by 10 or more interested libertarian “alumni” activists would want to see the campus libertarian movement grow and thrive. Other prizes would consist of donated prizes from businesses and companies that appeal to libertarians and/or students.

The contest submissions would run for most of the semester, with voting taking place in the last month. As part of the contest, all submissions would be made available for campus clubs to us. Folks would be allowed to enter as many times as they want for free, so an effective contest would likely generate dozens of great poster templates for campus clubs to use to spread the word and promote their group (and the movement in general) in their area!

If you’d like to pledge a donation or prize for our first poster contest (I think the first will be for a black and white 8 1/2 x 11″ design), please let me know!

Campus LP Grad School

Free online courses/trainings

• Tabling
• holding events
  
• 
  
• starting a club
• holding meetings
• petitioning
• etc

Campus Libertarian Job Boards

-for CampusLP (volunteer)

-for other orgs (volunteer)

-pay job listings

Coordinated Protests, Demonstrations, Releases

Get up to 100+ campuses at once; have a way for groups to sign on; have event kit with press release, etc.

Newsletter/Print Publication

More to come; upload some and help build the library!

It’s true what they say – the media is biased. It’s biased toward “good stories” that are easy to write. Give them one, and they just might even print it as is. (After all, it doesn’t get any easier to write than that!)

To help campus LP clubs get their fair share of the media pie, we’d like to post one new press release a week during the school year, for campus Libertarian clubs to adapt and release in their own area. Not every release will be the right fit for every club, but over the course of the year we should come up with a pretty good pool of samples, at the very least.

I don’t mind writing the releases if need be, but I’m not at your campuses. So to make this really effective, I’ll need your help. As I see it there are a few ways the various releases could come about:

1. Your club may have a press release in mind already, but don’t want to or can’t write it for whatever reason. I could write up a press release for you based on the background information you provide (and then others could modify and use it if they so chose).
2. Same as above, except maybe you wrote your own press release, and you’re willing to offer it up for others to modify and use if they deem it appropriate.
3. There are lots of issues that span the whole college universe, affecting nearly all student bodies. If we decide what some of those top issues are, a few of the press releases could be on those issues (but not written for any particular school).
4. Similar to the above,some of the press releases could be on general political issues that affect everybody (even beyond campuses). Things like war, the presidential election, etc. Or the issue-of-the-day that is making headlines during a given week.
5. Maybe there are other volunteers who would like to offer their press-release-writing services? Maybe we could have a place for exactly that? A press release writer’s pool for PR-starved clubs?

For any of those options to work, we’ll need to get some feedback and involvement from the folks with the boots on the ground. That’s you, if my surveillance data is accurate. So…

—If you need a press release written for something coming up this semester, let me know, and we’ll get that cranked out lickety split.

–If you write a press release this semester, pass it in, and we’ll post it for the whole class to see. (I’ll even see if I can dig up my gold star stickers.) Even better, if you know you’re going to have one ready on a certain issue or type of event, let me know, so as to avoid duplicative work.

–If you have suggestions for hot issues that affect most or many campuses/students, please post them in the comments. If we get some good ideas, we can start a forum and sort through the best info to use to present them from a campus libertarian perspective. Same goes for issues that go beyond the campus realm…but those are easier to come by. It’s the student-specific issues that you can help out the most with. Presumably there are some issues on campus that get you fired up, no?

–If you’d like to join or start a volunteer pool of press release (and/or other stuff?) writers, chime in and let me know, and we’ll set up a place for it.

Feel free to post comments here or send me a private message if any of the above apply to you.

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