Has The Free Pass Expired?

While tons of ink and electrons have been spilled detailing the "divisive" and "corrosive" battle for the Democratic Presidential nomination, very little has been said about the presumptive nominee for the Republicans. Oh, a few speeches have been covered, but the impression we are left with is that John McCain is merrily proceeding to consolidate his nomination and to unify his party around his candidacy. In the last couple of days, however, I've come across two articles that seem to indicate it's not all rose petals and candy for Mr. McCain within his own party.

Yesterday, the Boston Globe published an article which makes it clear that Ron Paul is simply not going to go away.

Senator John McCain is sailing toward his coronation as the Republican presidential nominee while the Democratic candidates battle fiercely. But Republicans also are engaged in some tough infighting that could disrupt the national convention and make it more difficult for him to unite the party in the fall.

Across the country, at state and county GOP conventions, diehard supporters of maverick Ron Paul are staging uprisings in an effort to secure a role for Paul at the national convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

And in the four primaries since clinching the nomination in early March, McCain has yet to reach 80 percent of the vote, as Paul and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee continue to siphon away votes, even though Huckabee has withdrawn from the race.

The lingering anti-McCain sentiment among some voters and the continuing Paul insurgency suggest that McCain has not fully quelled hostility from some elements in his party. [Emphasis added]

But it's not just the Pauliacs making trouble for Sen. McCain; another conservative, former senator Bob Barr, is making noises about running for President, this time at the head of the Libertarian Party. From today's Los Angeles Times:

...there are rumblings among Republicans that Barr could steal crucial votes from John McCain in a tight November election. Sean Hannity, the conservative talk show host, has branded Barr a "spoiler," and a Newsweek contributing editor, George F. Will, has warned that Barr could be "ruinous" to McCain in the same way that Ralph Nader was to Al Gore in 2000. ...

A National Rifle Assn. board member who works with the American Civil Liberties Union, Barr is no mainstream conservative.

Since representing Georgia's 7th Congressional District from 1995 to 2003, Barr has reinvented himself as a forceful critic of the Bush administration, crusading for smaller government and protection of civil liberties. "Shrinking the size, the scope, the power and the cost of government" is his campaign mantra.

Barr, who joined the Libertarian Party in 2006, identified his target voters as "disaffected Republicans, true conservatives," but conceded that his odds of winning were "certainly long." But, he said, Republicans and Democrats "have no God-given right" to be the only parties that present national candidates. ...

He reserves particular scorn for the Republican Party. In virtually every important area, he said, President Bush "told the American people one thing and did another thing": He promised to cap government spending but increased the federal budget from $1.9 trillion to $3.1 trillion. He promised to withdraw from "nation-building" but ended up mired in a lengthy occupation of Iraq.

Will Ron Paul get his "role" at the National Convention? Well, he will certainly get a role, but if he thinks he's going to dictate the platform or the themes of the campaign he is likely to be disappointed.

Does Bob Barr have even a snowball's chance in hell at winning the presidency? It's not likely, barring a complete physical or mental breakdown by McCain a week before the election. What he can do, however, is hammer away at McCain's close ties to the current administration's fiscal and foreign policies, policies that a lot of traditional conservatives find appalling.

What both Paul and Barr are doing is keeping the wounds in the GOP festering, making party unity going into and coming out of the convention next to impossible. McCain is not, after all, exactly a unifier. I don't think we can expect a Nader-esque pulling of votes away from McCain by Barr, but we might see a lot more Republicans staying home on election day than we did in 2000 and 2004. And that could be decisive.

It's nice to see our press finally paying attention to that "other" campaign.