Barr brings odd baggage of his own to the race. In 1998, he licked whipped cream off the chests of two buxom women at a Leukemia Society fundraiser. During his last congressional campaign, he was handling an antique firearm to underscore his support for the 2nd Amendment and it went off, shattering a glass door.
His second wife, Gail, the mother of his two sons, was once paid an undisclosed sum by Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt for an article accusing Barr of adultery with his would-be third wife. He did not deny the charge, which arose inconveniently during the Clinton impeachment.
Barr raised his sons mostly on weekends; the youngest, Derek, the campaign's 26-year-old spokesman, speaks warmly of a father who always attended basketball and soccer games and sometimes picked them up from school in a big white Lincoln.
If Bob Barr is anything, it's focused. He acknowledges his campaign is a long shot, but at the very least he will bring attention to the values of freedom he learned growing up the son of a civil engineer in far-flung places such as Iran and Iraq. (The longest place he lived as a boy was Baghdad, for three years.)
It was that kind of focus -- that and his love of the limelight -- that powered him when he was the lone voice calling for impeachment and members of his own party dismissed him as foolhardy.
It's been a busy day, and Barr boards the evening shuttle from Washington back to Atlanta and his 12th-floor consulting offices, the temporary campaign headquarters.
All around are remnants of the substantial elephant collection -- elephant bookends on a desk, a close-up of an elephant's trunk in the hallway. It's an awkward display, considering he now regards Republican lawmakers as wimps scared into submission by Bush. But as Barr is fond of saying, "I don't worry about it."
In his home state, he still makes headlines.
The next day, when he holds another news conference to file papers to get on the Georgia ballot, the turnout at the state Capitol is a lot better than the ragtag bunch that showed up in Washington. There are serious journalists who knew him when, and TV cameramen willing to walk backward to record his every step down the gilded corridors, just like old times.
"It was good of them to come," Barr said, genuinely pleased with an event that will make the nightly news -- not because he might win but because he might cause McCain to lose.
But that, as he likes to say, is not Bob Barr's problem.
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faye.fiore@latimes.com
