It took six rounds of balloting, but former Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr beat Mary Ruwart, the choice of the Libertarian Party’s radical caucus, for the LP’s presidential nomination today. Wayne Allyn Root, another ex-Republican, took the vice presidential slot after a tight race with medical marijuana activist Steve Kubby. Robert Stacy McCain and David Weigel report on the nominations at The American Spectator and Reason. I agree with pretty much everything Jesse Walker says about the outcomes: I think Barr was the smartest presidential choice for the party, but I would have much preferred Kubby over Root, the latter aptly described by Walker as, “a man with the deportment of a Ronco pitchman with a squirrel in his pants.”

Barr has the highest media profile of any LP nominee since Ron Paul twenty years ago, and the issues environment this year is far more favorable to the Libertarian Party than the one Paul faced in ’88. The high water mark for the party actually came in 1980, when the Ed Clark-David Koch ticket won nearly a million votes (a little better than 1 percent) running as the candidates of “low-tax liberalism.” I hope Barr does better running as a champion of no-war conservatism — or maybe even libertarianism.