Oh come on. For one, the only real libertarian is someone that doesn't want to use coercion to achieve political or social goals, thus only a voluntaryist or anarcho-capitalist would be a legitimate version of a real and true libertarian. Politics, voting, what have you by default is participation in government and using it for your end goals. Salon, out of all places, is some far out progressive fish wrapper of a website and they are scared that Rand can appeal to many true progressives on things like foreign policy, reigning in wall street/banker bailouts, civil liberties reforms - all of which Hillary is terrible on and is equal to the likes of Dick Cheney on.
Things are stacked against third parties so the only political means of bringing real liberty into the discussion is injecting libertarians as republicans into local, state and federal offices and building coalitions. Furthermore, as so-called real libertarians that have nothing going for them, you need higher level mouth pieces like Rand to get these issues out into the public mindset.