The Libertarian Love Affair with Gary Johnson
With the National Convention now approaching, more and more
Libertarians are coming out in favor of making Gary Johnson our
candidate for president, so much so that it seems to be a foregone
conclusion that he will be our candidate. Thus, the only question
seems to be who will be his running-mate.
Gary Johnson seems to be in many ways the ideal candidate. He is seen
to be extremely conservative on financial matters, which is good from
the Libertarian point of view. He supports marijuana
decriminalization, which is also good. Better yet, he was twice
elected to high office. He was twice elected Governor of New Mexico.
Most Libertarians have never been elected to anything. Moreover, his
record as Governor of New Mexico is solid. He vetoed more spending
bills than any governor anywhere and he greatly reduced the rate of
increase in government spending.
So, it seems that in just about every way, he is the ideal candidate.
This explains the mad rush by Libertarians to endorse his candidacy.
I want to ask the question of whether we should not take a closer look
at Gary Johnson and, more importantly, at ourselves.
What is our goal in running candidates for election? I believe that
our goal is or should be to win elections or, failing that, to convert
others to our cause.
How does running Gary Johnson as our candidate promote these two goals?
Right now it looks like Romney will be the Republican Candidate. Faced
with the choice between Obama and Romney, I believe that most
Libertarians would prefer for Romney to be the president. In addition,
Romney is electable. Obama has been a big disappointment in the eyes
of many who voted for him.
We have to know that nominating Gary Johnson will hurt Romney's
chances for election, because almost every vote that Gary Johnson
would get would otherwise go to Romney. Also, Gary Johnson has no
chance himself of being elected. He was at the bottom of the polls
when he was running for the Republican nomination.
Still, if Gary Johnson can win converts to our cause, it might be a
worthwhile to run him anyway.
I think we should take a look at other times we have run Republicans
as Libertarian Party candidates.
Take, for example, running Bob Barr as our candidate for president in 2008.
We made Bob Barr as our candidate for one reason only: Name
recognition. Bob Barr was famous primarily for two things: He led the
proceedings to impeach Bill Clinton as President and he was one of the
sponsors to the Defense of Marriage Act which was to deny gay and
lesbian couples who had gotten married in one state from having their
marriages recognized in other states.
However, both of the things for which Bob Barr was famous were
anti-Libertarian. I believe that most Libertarians will agree that the
President of the United States has a constitutional and human right to
get a blow job, provided that a consenting female (or male) is
available to give him one.
In spite of these negatives, those Libertarians who voted to nominate
Bob Barr felt that due to his name recognition he would get more
votes.
The end result was that Bob Barr did not get more votes. He got about
the same number of votes percentage-wise that non-name candidate
Michael Badnarik had gotten in the 2004 election. More than that, Bob
Barr did not stay with the Libertarian Party. He went right back to
being a Republican after the election.
The end result was that the Libertarian Party got nothing, zero, from
having Bob Barr as our candidate, plus we lost a wonderful opportunity
to run a real Libertarian as our candidate. Mary Ruwart was a pure
Libertarian, as pure as the driven snow. She campaigned hard for the
nomination. She got into trouble for taking an extremely Libertarian
position on one issue. (Some of you will remember what that issue was.
I will not repeat it.) So, we sold our souls down the river by
nominating an anti-Libertarian, Bob Barr, rather than a pure
Libertarian, Mary Ruwart. Plus, I am sure that Mary Ruwart would have
gotten more votes than Bob Barr did plus Mary Ruwart has continued to
work for Libertarian causes ever since. She has never left our party.
Now I want to cite another example: Warren Redlich.
Most of you will not have heard of Warren Redlich. There is a good
reason for that. He is truly a nobody. However, he was an “elected
official”. When his campaign manager asked the New York Libertarian
Party to ask him to become the Libertarian Party Candidate for
Governor, many Libertarians were impressed by the fact that he had
actually been elected to something. That qualification had not been
exceptionally strong, as he had just been elected to the town council
of an unincorporated village and he had been elected as the running
mate of a popular person.
We did not know that he had since become hated and indeed despised by
a majority of the residents of the town that elected him and he was on
the verge of being driven out of town. He actually left town and moved
to Florida shortly after the election, vowing never to return.
Warren Redlich had refused to lower himself to join us or to ask the
Libertarian Party to nominate him. Rather, his campaign manager asked
us to beg him to become our candidate, saying that we should tell him
how greatly honored we would be to have him as our candidate.
I have before me a flyer saying that we Libertarians should ask Gary
Johnson to become our candidate for President. This flyer looks
exactly like one taken from the Warren Redlich non-Campaign.
When the word got out that Warren Redlich was asking us to ask him to
become our candidate, there were several Libertarians that had come
over from the Republican Party who knew Warren Redlich from there.
They knew that Warren Redlich was a bad guy and they told us so. They
should have been listened to, but they were not.
The result was a disaster for the New York Libertarian Party. In the
first place, the nomination convention was rigged. Warren Redlich had
never paid his dues to join the Libertarian Party, yet he was allowed
to enter the convention hall late and was given the right to vote. It
was announced before the convention that it had already been decided
that he would be the candidate and other would-be candidates need not
bother to come. Unknown persons were allowed to throw handfuls of
votes into the hat that was passed around. Warren Redlich was never
asked hard questions about his political views, and did not
participate in the debates or in the meetings that were arranged for
him.
Having secured the nomination without making any real effort to do so,
Warren Redlich did no campaigning other than to participate in a
televised debate, where even there he dis not really participate in
the debate but just read from his same stump speech.
More than that, the National Libertarian Party was told that Warren
Redlich was a “great candidate”. They did not know that in reality
Warren Redlich was nothing more than an Internet scammer who had
posted a huge number of Internet websites and domain names mostly for
the purpose of impersonating famous people and getting donations, fees
and ad revenues from those who mistook his websites for the legitimate
websites for those famous people.
Because of this scam, the National Libertarian Party donated $50,000
of your dues money to the Warren Redlich Campaign. Thus, we party
members became the latest victims of the many Warren Redlich scams
Here is what Republican Party operative Roger Stone has to say about this:
“In the 40 years I have been in American politics, I have never met a
more obnoxious or distasteful individual than Albany lawyer Warren
Redlich”.
http://stonezone.com/article.php?id=444
I realize that it is unfair to compare a scumbag lowlife like Warren
Redlich to somebody who seems to have served with distinction like
Gary Johnson.
Nevertheless, I think we should look closer at Gary Johnson. For
example, right now the great political debate is going on over what to
do about Iran.
Most Republicans are saying that we should nuke the mullahs right
away. This should be done to protect Israel from Iran because, they
say, in five years Iran may have the A-Bomb and they might drop it on
Israel, so therefore we should bomb Iran now.
The contrary view, held by most Democrats, is that we should not bomb
Iran right away. We should wait a little while and squeeze Iran more
tightly with economic sanctions such as for example by stopping Iran
from building a pipeline to Pakistan (which would benefit millions of
impoverished Pakistanis). If these economic sanctions do not work,
then we should bomb Iran, perhaps in a year or two. This is what the
Democrats say.
However, the Libertarian view is we should not bomb Iran at all. Not
this year. Not even next year. As far as defending Israel is
concerned, our job is not to defend Israel. They should defend
themselves. They have been getting billions of dollars from us every
year and they already have every weapon of mass destruction known to
man, including the A-Bomb, so they should be able to defend
themselves.
Here is one of the many areas where Gary Johnson is weak. Gary Johnson
seems to be vacillating between the “bomb them right away” view and
the “wait a little while before bombing them” alternative.
This will become a problem for our party if we nominate Gary Johnson
and this or his many other anti-Libertarian views becomes known.
Sam Sloan