Just as Obama sees the light at the end of the tunnel, his rival, John McCain is facing his Ralph Nader moment as former Republican Bob Barr puts forward his own run as a Republican candidate.

Barr, however, is a sideshow compared to the other rogue elephant in the room - Rep. Ron Paul. Ron has run pretty much a minority campaign the whole season and has been ignored by just about every major news organization as irrelevant. That just seems to have motivated Paulites even more but that’s beside the point. The fact is that the Ron Paul campaign has a respectable war chest drawing from the same kind of grassroots organization, on a smaller scale, that has propelled Obama towards the nomination. He counts amongst his supporters fervent believers online (one only has to look at Digg to realize that he’s one of only two candidates with a respectable following - the other is Obama).

That’s an area of weakness that John McCain has not addressed, strange though it may seem - I do think McCain could appreciate and even thrive in the close-knit balls-to-the-wall environment of online message boards and social communities. Now it’s Ron Paul rather than McCain who’s blitzing the virtual spaces and that gives him the kind of organizational power that Nader never had in 2000, and that could be a serious problem for McCain if Rep. Paul ever decides to throw it in with Rep. Barr. The only good news for McCain is that Rep. Paul doesn’t seem to want to play the role of a spoiler.

In the future, we may well see a fundamental battle for the soul of the Republican party, between its libertarian wing and its militarist wing. Where it goes from there is anyone’s guess.