TNR on Barr

Michael Idov has a colorful story on the Libertarian Convention in the New Republic, much of it based on the unofficial Friday night debate, which the eventual nominee Bob Barr didn't attend.

Several of the LP delegates I spoke to in Denver who attended that debate said they thought Barr made a mistake by not participating, but the fact was that (a) he'd previously scheduled a Friday night reception for his supporters, and (b) the candidates who would actually be in contention for the nomination would be in the official Saturday night debate anyway.

As I explained in my first story from Denver, there was a paranoid vibe among the hard-core anti-Barr contingent. Barr's late entry into the race, and the fact that he'd officially been a Republican until 2006, had a lot to do with that. Understandably, he was viewed as an outsider by many longtime LP people, but some of the more freaky-deaky fringes of the party's grassroots are just paranoid anyway. Ivov captures the conspiratorial vibe:

By Sunday morning, all nerves are fraying. There's another persistent rumor -- cheerful to some, frightening to others -- that a last-minute busload of pissed-off anti-Barr anarchists, summoned by Kubby, is on its way to the Sheraton.

Nerves were also fraying in the Barr camp, after Wayne Allen Root's strong debate showing Saturday night, as Ivov notes:

Stephen Gordon, Barr's rail-thin, gloomy adviser, when the debate is over. He's staring at the convention hall's floor as he speaks. "Root won. Personally, it frustrates the hell out of me."

Rail-thin, yes, but "gloomy" is not a word I'd ever think to apply to Gordo -- most of the time he's a happy-go-lucky fellow. As the man in charge of organizing the Barr campaign's floor operation at Denver, however, he was definitely as stressed-out as I've ever seen him.

There's a certain Rashomon thing comparing my coverage to other reporter's coverage of Denver. For example, Ivov reports a lot of the wheeling-dealing among the campaigns during the presidential vote, while I was focused on live-blogging the balloting as close to real-time as possible.

Denver was a very competitive journalistic environment: Dave Weigel of Reason was also live-blogging it, as were Jason Pye and other Libertarian bloggers, and Aaron Gould Sheinin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was reporting the story in real-time. I was mainly concerned about trying to keep up with Weigel, an excellent reporter who knows the LP inside and out, so I was quite flattered when Rocky Mountain News columnist Dave Kopel credited the Spectator with providing the "best national coverage" of the convention.

Herd journalism doesn't suit me well. Whenever I go to an event that's being covered by a lot of other reporters, I usually feel like I'm out in my own little orbit. It's easy to get paranoid about this stuff: "Look at those other reporters over there, doing their thing -- should I be doing that, too?" But you can't let that stuff get to you.

During the balloting at Denver, I found it convenient to set up my laptop near the Barr booth in the exhibition hall, where Team Barr had a super-fast WiFi connection and a big-screen TV with a closed-circuit connection to the action on the convention floor. I'd go out to the convention floor to collect notes and get photos, then hustle back over to the Barr booth to file the updates as each ballot's results were posted.

Since I was the only reporter doing it that way, it seemed a bit weird, but it had its advantages. My laptop was in a safe and uncrowded space. I could leave it there and roam around to report, not have to worry about squeezing past the chairs of other writers on Blogger's Row, and file my updates without being surrounded by a lot of distractions. Doing it a different way apparently worked, but at the time, I was by no means sure this was how I was "supposed" to be doing it.

Here's my video of another media moment at Denver, with Barr responding to a question from Ivov at a Saturday morning media breakfast -- the camera pans over to show Ivov near the end:



Something else about Denver: Extreme sleep deprivation. Weigel and I talked about this afterwards. All the delegates had to do was to attend meetings, vote, hang out and party. We reporters had to cover most of that activity and then try to write coherently about it. Ivov had the luxury of being assigned this one big feature story, rather than constantly filing updates and liveblogging. We'll try not to hate him for that.