The Libertarian Party on Sunday picked former Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr to be its presidential candidate. “I certainly have no intention of being a spoiler,” he said today. As Dana Milbank recently reported, Barr does note hide his disdain for John McCain:

Barr took issue with McCain’s Iran policy. “I’m not going to go around making up songs about such a serious matter as going to war with a sovereign nation, as Senator McCain did,” the former congressman said, tut-tutting McCain’s “Barbara Ann/Bomb Iran” episode.

He quarreled with McCain’s Iraq policy. “These troops need to be brought home,” he offered.

He ridiculed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which, he said, means McCain “cannot ever lay legitimate claim, at least with a straight face, to…being labeled as a conservative.”

He put down McCain’s plan to do away with pet-project earmarks, claiming it “would make barely a drop in the bucket with regard to the national debt, the deficit.”

And he disparaged McCain’s fiscal policy, saying “there are some legitimate questions that have been raised over whether Senator McCain is simply a Johnny-come-lately to the modest tax cuts.”

Steve Benen suggests that Barr might attract the support of Ron Paul and “be able to put a few percentage points together in some competitive states.”

Today on Fox News, the former New York bureau chief of the Washington Times, Liz Trotta, discussed Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) recent remarks about Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. After mistakenly calling Obama “Osama,” Trotta joked that it would be nice to see them both killed:

TROTTA: And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that sombody knock off Osama — Obama. Well, both, if we could.

HOST: Talk about how you really feel.

Watch it:

(HT: The Zoo)

I’m not sure how much of a difference it would really make in the end, but I do think it’d be neat to have a president and a team who can write and deliver great speeches with this one wending together a tribute to Ted Kennedy with a call to service for young people:

Each of you will have the chance to make your own discovery in the years to come. And I say “chance” because you won’t have to take it. There’s no community service requirement in the real world; no one forcing you to care. You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should by. You can choose to narrow your concerns and live your life in a way that tries to keep your story separate from America’s.

But I hope you don’t. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, though you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all those who helped you get here, though you do have that debt. It’s because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role you’ll play in writing the next great chapter in America’s story.

As with many of Obama’s speeches, I think it would be possible to sniff at this one and proclaim it banal. But I think part of the brilliance of Obama’s rhetoric is an ability to elevate important but somewhat banal sentiments, like how cleaning the facade of an old building you’ve passed dozens of times can make you appreciate the architecture in a way you rarely have before.

John Sides argues convincingly in the LA Times that once the Democratic nomination race is finished, the dynamics of an Obama-McCain campaign are very likely to unify Democratic voters around Obama. It’s a good piece, and a welcome reminder that it would be good to see more political scientists doing popular writing on these much-discussed points about election dynamics.

I’d say that the more legitimate concern about unity would have to do with elite unity. There’s a certain set of people who, say, donated to the Clinton re-election campaign in 1996, to Al Gore in 2000, to the DNC when Terry McAuliffe was chair, to some pro-Kerry 527 groups in 2004, and to Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign in 2008. These folks aren’t going to vote for McCain, but how invested will they be in backing Obama? That’s in part going to be a function of whether or not Bill and Hillary urge them to be deeply invested in backing Obama. And much the same could be said for other brands of elites — interest group leaders, random consultants and strategists, etc.

Maybe Hillary Clinton would strongly prefer being Vice President to being Senator from New York. If so, her sway over these kinds of people could be a good reason for Obama to seriously consider a unity ticket even though such a ticket has a bunch of other drawbacks.

Reacting to the California Supreme Court’s decision allowing gay marriage, the website of the far right group Campaign for Children and Families recently compared county clerks issuing same-sex marriage licenses to Nazis gassing Jews during the Holocaust. From the site:

Ask your county clerk if they were a Nazi officer during WWII and had been ordered to gas the Jews, would they? At the Nuremberg trials, they would have been convicted of murder for following this immoral order.

Campaign for Children and Families has now removed this text from its site. Good As You, however, has saved the original version here and writes, “We know you said it. We know that you were likening the ‘tough’ decision to marry gays to the mind-blowingly abominable order to murder humans. And everyone else is going to know it to. We’ll see to that.”

(HT: Pandagon)

I think to really appreciate how foolish it is to worry about literally regaining the loyalty of “Reagan Democrats” you need to look at the winning coalition Jimmy Carter assembled in 1976. That’s the coalition Reagan disrupted, and I think it’s safe to say that it’s a coalition that’s dead for good. It’ll be a cold day in hell before you see someone win New York and Texas while losing California and Illinois. At this point, the past is a different country in political terms.

UPDATE: And note that even in the more normal 1968, Humphrey carried Texas but badly lost in Vermont. Humphrey did better in West Virginia than in Pennsylvania which could never happen for a Democrat these days, and Nixon got a higher percentage of the vote in Oregon than in Oklahoma.