Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr of Smyrna made it official on Monday: He's now a candidate for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination.

Barr announced his candidacy in Washington, D.C., where he had spent eight years as a high-profile, low-seniority congressman representing west Cobb and much of west Georgia from 1995 to 2003.

"I've heard from Americans from all walks of life … they want a choice," he said. "They believe that America has more and better to offer than what the current political situation is serving up to us."

The platform he offered sounded a lot like what congressman and nominal Republican Ron Paul has been touting on the stump during his non-too-successful bid for the GOP presidential nomination this year: an immediate pullout of all U.S. troops from Iraq; a freeze in discretionary spending in Washington, cutbacks in spending on U.S. military bases overseas, and sharp reductions in spending at the departments of education and commerce. Paul hasn't gotten much traction and we doubt Barr will get much more, though not for lack of trying.

Since abruptly quitting the Republican Party two years ago, he has heightened his criticism of the Patriot Act, and would work to repeal that if elected, saying it is too much of an intrusion on people's privacy.

And Barr promised a hard line on immigration reform, saying he would enforce laws that have gone unenforced and would not even provide free school lunches to children of illegal immigrants.

"This notion that government owes something to people just because they're here does not resonate with me," he said. "This is not a charity."

Barr has spent the past nine months or so traveling the country speaking to Libertarian Party state conventions, and as the MDJ's "Around Town" column was first to report, seemed to be laying the groundwork for a presidential bid.

As a back-bench GOP congressman, the limelight-loving Barr was a fixture on the political talk shows but had little real power. In the smaller confines of the Libertarian Party, he's a big fish in a shallow pond, one of the very few members of that fringe party with any name recognition or hands-on governing experience.

It's hard to think of anyone whom the Libertarians could nominate who would make them a better candidate than Barr, who is smart, articulate, right on their issues and has the connections to parlay an obscure nomination into something more tangible. He and they, however, have little money and, to be honest, no hope of winning in November.

While some are expressing fears that Barr will draw enough voters away from Republican John McCain to be a spoiler, we suspect that most Americans, even those who have Libertarian leanings, will understand that a third-party vote would essentially be wasted.

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