He was the outspoken Republican who introduced Doma and pushed to get Clinton impeached. Now, after a brief fling with the libertarians, Bob Barr is back – and eyeing a seat in the House

In 2011, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the former Haiti dictator responsible for the deaths of thousands of Haitians, returned home after two decades of self-imposed exile, claiming he wanted to help his people in a time of crisis.

“I mean, there's weird, and then there's Haiti weird, and then there's the special kind of weird with the ex-dictator showing up after 25 years of exile with no warning just after the earthquake and cholera epidemic in the middle of the presidential election weird,” said Jonathan Katz, a journalist who covered Haiti and the author of the book The Big Truck That Went By.

And then something strange happened. In walked one of Duvalier’s newest advisers: Bob Barr, a US congressman from 1995 to 2003 and the libertarian candidate for president in 2008.

"My jaw was on the floor,” said Katz. “Barr put the icing on the weirdness cake.”

Barr’s presence in Haiti came as he began orchestrating what he hopes will be a return to Congress. The former Georgia representative has his eye on the seat that will be vacated next year by Phil Gingrey, who is leaving to run for Saxby Chambliss’s newly opened Senate seat in 2014.

During the Clinton years, Barr was a conservative rock star. He pushed to get Clinton impeached long before it was popular, introduced the Defense of Marriage Act, and became a board member of the NRA, a position he still holds.

But he left the GOP in 2007 to cast in with the libertarians, running for president five years ago – an act that many of his old colleagues have not forgotten. Yet Barr hopes his firebrand streak could help him to return to a Congress where approval ratings are at historic lows.

Georgia Republicans, mindful of Barr's past, fear his re-emergence could create problems for the Peach State. “We already have enough kooks in Georgia,” notes Joel McElhannon, a major Republican strategist and campaign manager for one of Barr’s primary opponents, state house majority whip Ed Lindsey. “We don’t need another one.”

The fear is less that Barr still holds the opinions he held in the 1990s or early 2000s, when he was last in Congress, but rather that these issues and these views could have a negative impact on how Georgia is perceived.

“I was very surprised,” said Martha Zoller, a local radio host and friend of Barr. “I didn’t think he could pose a credible run in a Republican primary.”

But Barr is off to a strong start. He has been able to pull in almost $80,000 more in donations in the second fundraising quarter than his closest opponent; his internal polling shows him with 93% name recognition and 38% of the vote in a four-way primary; and, using much of his own money, he has been able to hire an all-star campaign staff, including media consultant Fred Davis and general adviser John Weaver, veterans of several major campaigns including John McCain’s 2008 presidential run.

Barr’s campaign has also been endorsed by celebrities in the conservative community, including former American Conservative Union chairman and NRA president David Keene and singer-activist Ted Nugent, who also plans to campaign for Barr during the primary. Steve Forbes has also appeared at rallies in the northern Georgia district Barr has called home since the 1990s.

However, there’s a been steady stream of bitterness directed at Barr from a significant portion of his own party. Lindsey wrote an op-ed in August calling Barr a “phony” and a “libertarian presidential candidate-cum-Mad Hatter.” (The Barr campaign declined to comment for this article.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barr leading the charge to impeach Clinton in 1998. Photograph: Richard Ellis/Getty Images

Out of the spotlight

It would be disingenuous to imply that Barr has been sitting on his hands for the past decade. Near the end of his time in Congress, in 2002, he became an adviser to the ACLU – which less than a decade earlier had called Doma, his signature piece of legislation, unconstitutional. He also became the 21st century liberties chair for freedom and privacy at the ACU.

In 2008, he only garnered 0.4% of the vote for the Libertarian party. By 2012, he’d come back to the Republican fold, endorsing Newt Gingrich for president.

During this time, Barr also reversed his stance on many issues unpopular with libertarians. The man who once called medical marijuana “bogus witchcraft” became a lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project in 2007, and worked to repeal the Barr amendment – named for him – which blocked the District of Columbia from legalising medical marijuana.

During his 2008 presidential bid, Barr went so far as to say that, if he were president, he’d work to repeal Doma.

He also joined the Edwin Marger law firm, where he has attracted some unwanted attention.

Barr was hired by the National Alliance – a white supremacist group – to represent a convicted felon who was arrested by federal officials after they found 13 guns at his house. (This wasn’t Barr’s first time working with or for white supremacists. A 1998 Washington Post article reported that he was the keynote speaker at a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group which once said on its website “God is the author of racism.”) It was through Edwin Marger that he came to work with Duvalier in Haiti.

But it’s not just the absence from Georgia politics, his flirtation with libertarianism, his representation of white supremacists, or his cozying up to dictators that have Georgia Republicans like McElhannon saying Barr is a “bad joke told at GOP cocktail parties.” The party seems to be more troubled with his career of apparent inconsistencies.

One leading GOP operative said: “Republicans are disturbed because Bob flip-flopped on every issue but abortion and guns … and blew a hole in a donor's window through lousy gun safety practices. The guy’s a mess.”

(In 2009, while examining an antique pistol, Barr blew a hole through a glass door at the home of a lobbyist who was honoring him at a reception. Barr does not believe in increased gun regulation.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barr: firebrand. Photograph: Douglas Graham/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images

Barr’s past on the national stage is heavily defined by his push for Doma, and the rhetoric he used to force it through. In his official file collection at the University of West Georgia, the Guardian found copies of talking points he used during the passage of the bill. Barr’s personal notes included such statements as: “Societal indifference to heterosexuality and homosexuality would cause a lot of confusion.”

Similarly, Barr saved a letter from a pastor in Rome, Georgia – and, in a note to a staffer, slated it for review before a debate with Barney Frank on Larry King Live – which included this line, highlighted by Barr: “Does a Muslim practicing polygamy 'affect' his non-Muslim neighbors?”

Barr – like the federal government – has reversed course on Doma. But his old zeal still comes through. In one of his most recent op-eds on the Washington navy yard shooting – headlined "Why do our military installations remain gun-free zones?' – he calls gun control a “tired, dead-end Shibboleth,” calls guns themselves merely a “scapegoat,” and blames the shooting on present control laws.

As he has tried to maintain a foothold in the national conversation, other recent columns hit all the highlights of rightwing superstardom.

• On New Jersey governor Chris Christie: “There should be no room in the GOP for Christie’s nebulous, if not disingenuous, political games.”

• On a southern border fence: "Throughout the history of human civilization, wherever there were established cultures and populations, there were borders … stockades that protected early American settlers from Indian attacks; and barbed wire fences stretching across the plains of Texas to protect roaming herds of cattle from rustlers.”

• And on young people and the United Kingdom: “America is heading down the same path as the UK and, unless somehow checked, it is only a matter time before the small outbursts of violence among the various youth protest movements spark a fire that will prove extremely difficult, if not impossible, to extinguish.”

If he manages to return Congress, Barr probably won’t be the arch-conservative he once was. But he could be a master orator with enough rhetorical firepower to out-talk Ted Cruz. If he wins, Barr will be the first Georgia congressman to return to the Hill after a break in service, an honor that would suit a career that is really a study in change.