The Third Man.(Bob Barr)

One afternoon in late August, Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party's candidate for President, stood in a greenroom at Stephen Colbert's television studio staring at a closed-circuit monitor. Barr, who was about to appear on "The Colbert Report," was wearing a dark Brooks Brothers suit and an orange tie. As he watched, the monitor displayed Colbert's opening segment--a routine involving footage from Burning Man, the annual culture festival in the Nevada desert known for copious amounts of body paint and psychedelic drugs. Colbert pretended that the footage was from the Democratic National Convention. Speaking over shots of a mud-drenched orgy, he claimed to see "Howard Dean stroking the buttocks of Nancy Pelosi"; a bearded naked man was "Wolf Blitzer out of 'The Situation Room' and out of his situation clothing." In the broadcast version of the segment the relevant body parts were blacked out, but on the closed-circuit monitor the images were uncensored. Barr smiled; when the naked man appeared, his eyes widened and he mumbled, "Did he really show it?"

In the nineteen-nineties, Barr, then a Republican congressman from Georgia, led the charge to impeach President Bill Clinton and argued on the House floor that "the flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society." The Christian Coalition gave his voting record a perfect rating, and he became so well known for his dour, ultra-conservative image that he told the voters in his district, "You don't send me to Washington to smile." But in the past few years, Barr says, he has profoundly changed. He now devotes himself to the advance of personal liberty and no longer cares to play the role of law-and-order conservative and culture warrior. After all, America is a free country, or at least this is why Barr says he is running for President: to abolish as many laws as society can bear to lose, to cut away the sinews of federal power, to "get the government out of it."

To be a third-party nominee for the Presidency, one must achieve a state of mind that in some respects resembles that of the holy fools of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Such candidates are destined to wander the land with little money, yearning for attention and respect while suffering ire and mockery and bad hotels. They persist--whether through force of ego or some inner reservoir of will, or a little madness--though their mission is doomed. "It's like climbing a cliff with a slippery rope," Ralph Nader, who is making his fourth run for President, told me. Even Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who won twenty million votes in 1992, failed to create a viable party.

For the most part, Barr seems to find the dim limelight of the political fringe uplifting. He is fifty-nine but has the stamina of a college freshman--he consumes up to fifteen shots of espresso a day, typically in five-shot installments. He has a graying mustache, and his hair, which was curly when he had more of it, is white and combed flat across his head. He is trim and compact, but can be expansive in his movements. While making an argument, he often furrows his brow, puts one hand in his pocket, and thrusts the other above his shoulder, in the manner of a prosecutor driving home a point. Throughout his career, aides have struggled to soften his image, urging him to get new glasses--his preferred frames are rectangular and black--or swap his jacket and tie for a sweater. For a political advertisement, a media strategist once had Barr filmed surrounded by bubbles. "There is this sweet little shimmer to the picture, and I think it subtly makes you go, 'Awww,' " the strategist told me. "You have to go to troubles like that with Bob."

Booking a politician on a comedy show is another way to soften his image. Barr was hoping that his appearance on "The Colbert Report" would allow him to air his views at length; his staff had debated the merits of flying him to New York for the taping, or to Denver, where they thought he could attract press attention on the sidelines of the Democratic Convention. Because Barr did not have money for ads--his campaign has raised only a million dollars--he was trying to get as much "earned media" as he could. But the interview with Colbert lasted only three minutes. Between jokes, Colbert asked Barr how he was doing. "Campaign's going good," Barr said. "We're in double digits in a number of states, about six per cent across the country." (He often cites these numbers, from online Zogby polls taken during the summer. They suggested that he had far more public support than any Libertarian Presidential candidate since the Party was founded, in 1971; a double-digit vote for Barr in some states could affect the ...