The wrong analogy

Matthew Yglesias on the Bob Barr candidacy:

In theory, at least, there's room for a sort of John Anderson figure and you could see Barr playing that role.

Eh? Anderson was a bland technocratic geek, a moderate Republican who appealed to voters who were sick of Carter but feared Reagan's Radical Right reputation.

Barr has impeccable conservative credentials. He served in the CIA when the agency was run by the elder Bush, and served as a U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration.

Barr's publicly-stated reason for leaving the GOP was the Bush administration's internal-security measures. Barr's Fourth Amendment critique of the USA-PATRIOT Act has been echoed by such stalwarts of the Right as Phyllis Schlafly and the John Birch Society.

What a Barr presidential candidacy represents -- and he has said this in nearly so many words -- is a conservative dissent against the drift of the Republican Party toward statism. Barr is trying to resurrect the "Spirit of '94," the anti-Beltway agenda on which he and the rest of the "Contract With America" Republicans were first elected to Congress.

The anti-statist flavor of Barr's conservatism is what made him simpatico with the Libertarian Party, although it remains to be seen whether the LP's convention delegates will be simpatico toward Barr as their presidential candidate. Some LP members are purists to the point of fanaticism and will oppose Barr on ideological grounds; some longtime LP members are likely to resent Barr as a newcomer.

But whatever Barr is, he's not John Anderson.