ATLANTA -- There's little evidence in Bob Barr's office that the former Republican congressman is on the verge of running for president.

There are no throngs of volunteers. Telephones do not ring off the hook. On a recent afternoon, a lone reporter paged through American Rifleman magazine while waiting for Barr to return from Starbucks.

"Oh, we're very busy!" chirped his receptionist, who was surfing the Web for tourist spots Barr might visit on a trip to England.

More than a month after Barr, 59, set up an "exploratory committee" to gauge how many Americans would vote for him as a Libertarian presidential candidate, he is still considering whether to enter the race.

The world inside the Beltway, it seems, is indifferent.

"Unless he commits a felony between now and November, no one will ever remember he ran for president," said Charlie Cook, political analyst and editor of the Cook Political Report.

Yet there are rumblings among Republicans that Barr could steal crucial votes from John McCain in a tight November election. Sean Hannity, the conservative talk show host, has branded Barr a "spoiler," and a Newsweek contributing editor, George F. Will, has warned that Barr could be "ruinous" to McCain in the same way that Ralph Nader was to Al Gore in 2000.

With less than two weeks before the Libertarian Party selects its presidential nominee, Barr will discuss his plans at a news conference Monday in Washington.

Perhaps best known as the Republican member of Congress who led the impeachment effort against President Clinton in 1999, Barr was most recently in the public eye as the guy who ate cheese in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."

A National Rifle Assn. board member who works with the American Civil Liberties Union, Barr is no mainstream conservative.

Since representing Georgia's 7th Congressional District from 1995 to 2003, Barr has reinvented himself as a forceful critic of the Bush administration, crusading for smaller government and protection of civil liberties. "Shrinking the size, the scope, the power and the cost of government" is his campaign mantra.

Barr, who joined the Libertarian Party in 2006, identified his target voters as "disaffected Republicans, true conservatives," but conceded that his odds of winning were "certainly long." But, he said, Republicans and Democrats "have no God-given right" to be the only parties that present national candidates.

"Your vote for a candidate of principle is never a wasted vote," he said.

He spoke with disdain for mainstream politicians and pundits.

"Maybe it's important that Sen. Obama does not know how to bowl, or that Hillary Clinton can wolf down a shot of whiskey," he said. "But many people I speak with have a deep dissatisfaction. . . . There's a sense that government keeps getting bigger and bigger. To the extent that people have a choice, it's the choice of voting for the party of big government or the party of bigger government."

Barr, who was born in Iowa and graduated from high school in Iran, does not appear to have a strong local base. He moved to Georgia when President Reagan appointed him U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.

He does not fit the conventional model of the Southern politician.

"Humorless, pessimistic, sarcastic to the point that his wife beeps him when he is on TV, 'Smile, honey,' " is how the 2002 edition of the Almanac of American Politics describes him. "He says he has no close friends on Capitol Hill and usually sleeps in his office."

Barr upholds individual rights, but he doesn't think too highly of individuals: The first law of his nationally syndicated radio show, "Bob Barr's Laws of the Universe," is: "The world is full of idiots."

He reserves particular scorn for the Republican Party. In virtually every important area, he said, President Bush "told the American people one thing and did another thing": He promised to cap government spending but increased the federal budget from $1.9 trillion to $3.1 trillion. He promised to withdraw from "nation-building" but ended up mired in a lengthy occupation of Iraq.