Votemaster has an interesting article up today. Who is Votemaster?
Votemaster is Professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Professor Tanenbaum currently teaches Computer Science in the Netherlands and he runs the site, electoral-vote.com. Andrew is something of an intellectual heavy weight with an interest in politics. His degrees are in physics from MIT and University of California at Berkley. But he is a legend in the computer science world known both for original work and authoring textbooks.
If you want to know more about the votemaster, see his biography in Wikipedia.
If you want to know how he thinks the new Barr will effect Barack and McCain, follow me past the jump.
The significant event Tanenbaum is blogging about today is Libertarian selection of Bob Barr for their presidential candidate just yesterday.
Barr's impact is yet to be determined, of course, He is strongly conservative in the Barry Goldwater mold rather than in the Bush-Cheney mold. But he is not your standard libertarian. He opposes abortion, whereas most libertarians say it is none of the government's business if you want an abortion. He also opposes same-sex marriage, but opposes a constitutional amendment forbidding it on the grounds this is something for the states to decide. He also opposes the federal income tax and wants to abolish the IRS.
In addition, he is a strong opponent of the war in Iraq. It isn't so much that he feels each state should fight its own wars as his general opposition to foreign involvements. In short, for Republicans who dislike McCain for any reason (e.g., the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill) and who would never vote for a Democrat, Barr provides a satisfactory ideological outlet. He might well drain enough votes from McCain to flip a few states. One state that has been mentioned in this context is Georgia, where he is well known. The combination of Barr bleeding votes from McCain and a massive turnout of black voters for Obama (if he is the nominee), might put the state in play.
If you spend some time at this site, you can see that Barack is not yet running away with the election. Syphing off votes can be very important. Notes Tanenbaum:
For people who think third parties don't amount to a hill of beans, please recall that in 2000, George Bush beat Al Gore by 537 votes in Florida, with 92,000 Floridians voting for Ralph Nader. If 1% of those people had voted for Gore instead of Nader, he would have become President.
Barr has been a darling of the right wing radio talk circuit. He has made the rounds promoting a new book and re-hashing the Clinton impeachment proceedings where he was a House floor manager. This is the same right wing radio that had such a hard time with the John McCain nomination.
Look for Bob to make the radio circuits again where he has the real potential to drain off conservatives. In my own state of Texas and depending on Barack's choice of Veep, it might be enough to deny McCain the Texas electoral votes.
It's nice to see some of the most strident conservatives line up in a circular firing squad. Now if we can just avoid doing that on the Democratic side with these Obama/Clinton flame wars, there may be real change on the horizon.
I think the Nader damage will be minimal this time around. We have all seen that movie.
mrick