Quotulatiousness

December 21, 2011

Gary Johnson to formally leave GOP race

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

As I reported last week, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson has been forced out of the GOP race and will seek the Libertarian Party nomination instead:

The former two-term New Mexico governor, whose campaign for the GOP nomination never caught fire, will make the announcement at a press conference in Santa Fe on Dec. 28. Johnson state directors will be informed of his plans on a campaign conference call Tuesday night, a Johnson campaign source told POLITICO.

The move has been expected for weeks — Johnson had run a New Hampshire-centric effort that never got him past a blip in the polls. He appeared at only two nationally televised debates, and only one in which other major candidates took part.

Johnson expressed deep disillusionment with the process as his libertarian message failed to catch fire and he received almost no attention for his bid. He soon began flirting with the Libertarians when it became clear that he was gaining no traction in GOP primaries.

December 19, 2011

Mark Steyn on the “Gingrich Gestalt”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:06

He’s willing to admit that he misunderestimated Gingrich earlier in the campaign:

I was wrong about Newt. Or, as Newt would say, I was fundamentally wrong. Fundamentally and profoundly wrong. I was as adverbially wrong about Newt as it’s possible to be. Back in the spring, during an analysis of the presidential field, I was asked by Sean Hannity what I thought of Gingrich. If memory serves, I guffawed. I suggested he was this season’s Alan Keyes — a guy running for president to boost his speaking fees but whose candidacy was otherwise irrelevant. I said I liked the cut of this Tim Pawlenty fellow, who promptly self-destructed. There would be a lot of that in the months ahead: Michele Bachmann ODing on Gardasil, Rick Perry floating the trial balloon of his candidacy all year long, only to puncture it with the jaunty swing of his spur ten minutes into the first debate. And when all the other Un-Romney of the Week candidates were gone, there was Newt, the last man standing, smirking, waddling to the debate podium. Unlike the niche candidates, he offers all the faults of his predecessors rolled into one: Like Michele Bachmann, his staffers quit; like Herman Cain, he spent the latter decades of the last century making anonymous women uncomfortable, mainly through being married to them; like Mitt Romney, he was a flip-flopper, being in favor of government mandates on health care before he was against them, and in favor of big-government climate-change “solutions” before he was against them, and in favor of putting giant mirrors in space to light American highways by night before he was agai . . . oh, wait, that one he may still be in favor of. So, if you live in the I-95 corridor, you might want to buy blackout curtains.

But, when you draw them, Newt’s still there, shimmering beguilingly, which is the one adverb I fundamentally never thought I’d be using for this most fundamentally adverbial of candidates. A year ago, we were still talking about Palin and Daniels and Christie and Jindal and Ryan, an embarrassment of riches. Barely a month ago, Cain and 9-9-9 were riding high, an embarrassment of a different kind, and Gingrich was still a single-digit asterisk. But, like Gussie Fink-Nottle, we are all Newt-fanciers now. On the eve of Iowa it seems the Republican base’s dream candidate is a Clinton-era retread who proclaims himself a third Roosevelt, with Taft’s waistline and twice as many ex-wives as the first 44 presidents combined; a lead zeppelin with more baggage than the Hindenburg; a self-help guru crossed with a K Street lobbyist, which means he’s helped himself on a scale few of us could dream of. For this the Tea Party spent three years organizing and agitating?

December 15, 2011

Gary Johnson’s GOP Catch-22 forces him out of the race

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:33

The difficulty of running for the GOP nomination is made that much harder if you don’t already have a lot of name recognition. Being the successful governor of a small state isn’t enough to get your name known, and the GOP’s party officials have concocted a lovely Catch-22 to prevent unknowns from breaking into the race: you can only be in the debates if you’re doing well in the polls, and you can only be in the polls if we decide you should be.

As a result of being frozen out of the race, Governor Gary Johnson is leaving the GOP and will seek the Libertarian Party’s nomination instead:

Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson has been “hung out to dry” by the GOP establishment and that is the reason he is likely to leave the party and run for the presidency as a libertarian, he says.

The former New Mexico governor tells Newsmax.TV he has faced a Catch-22 situation because his name has not appeared in the opinion polls that decide whether he has enough support to get him a place in the party’s debates, which means he has not been able to gain the exposure that could have lifted him in the polls.

[. . .]

Johnson, who describes himself as fiscally conservative but socially liberal, is due in New York on Thursday and he is expected to announce formally that he is joining the Libertarian Party.

He has never managed to gain traction in the run-up to the Republican primary season. He says time is running out because of “sore loser laws” in some states that say a candidate cannot run in primaries and then stand on a different ticket in the general election.

December 14, 2011

“‘They’ve been very draconian,’ Gingrich said, meaning it as a compliment”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Jacob Sullum on the GOP’s current front-runner for the 2012 presidential nomination:

The first time Newt Gingrich disgusted me was in 1995, when the freshly installed speaker of the House proposed the death penalty for drug smugglers. Fifteen years later, I had a similar response when Gingrich demanded government action to stop Muslims from building a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center.

From the perspective of someone who wants to minimize the role of government in every aspect of our lives, Gingrich is bad in the ways conservatives tend to be bad—and then some. At the same time, he is generally not good in the ways conservatives tend to be good, which makes me wonder why anyone would prefer him to Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate.

Gingrich’s bloodthirsty enthusiasm for the never-ending, always-failing war on drugs is especially appalling because he casually dismissed his own pot smoking as “a sign that we were alive and in graduate school in that era.” Last month he expressed admiration for Singapore’s drug policy, which includes forcible testing of suspected drug users, long prison sentences for possession, and mandatory execution of anyone caught with more than a specified amount. “They’ve been very draconian,” Gingrich said, meaning it as a compliment.

December 13, 2011

Gary Johnson has been “hung out to dry” by the RNC

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

A profile of Gary Johnson in the St. Petersburg Times:

The wildly popular former two-term governor of New Mexico, who lost part of his toe to frostbite climbing Mount Everest on a broken leg, has been excluded from 15 of 17 presidential debates.

The 58 year old who was elected governor in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1 has virtually disappeared from major political polling. The governor who got rid of 1,200 state employees, vetoed 750 bills and left New Mexico with a billion-dollar budget surplus is not Republican enough for the GOP.

“They won’t return my calls,” he said.

That’s why he thinks you’ve probably never heard of Gary Johnson. Even if he grew a handyman business in Albuquerque from scratch to 1,000 employees. Even if he has ridden his bike across mountain ranges. Even if some see him as an electable version of Ron Paul.

“The Republican National Committee has turned their backs on a message that appeals more and more to the American public,” he said.

That message?

Less government is the best government. He wants to cut federal spending by 43 percent. He advocates throwing out the entire U.S. tax system in favor of a 23-percent fair tax on consumption that he says would create thousands of jobs overnight. He wants to abolish the Department of Education and the IRS, and he promises to submit a balanced budget in 2013.

Maybe those are ideas many Republicans can swallow. But his stance on social issues, Johnson knows, rub many the wrong way.

He thinks building a fence between the United States and Mexico is an awful idea; better to have a smooth and easy work-visa program. He supports gay marriage. He is fully in favor of a woman’s right to choose. He wants to legalize marijuana (and yes, he has smoked pot for pleasure and for medical purposes, but quit several years ago) and decriminalize drug use.

December 10, 2011

Nick Gillespie: Five myths about Ron Paul

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Nick Gillespie in yesterday’s Washington Post:

Ron Paul is the Rodney Dangerfield of Republican presidential candidates. The 12-term Texas congressman ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket back in 1988 and was widely seen as a sideshow in 2008, despite finishing third in the GOP field behind John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Why, despite a small but devoted set of supporters, does this 76-year-old obstetrician turned politician routinely get no respect from the media and GOP operatives? Let’s take a look at what “Dr. No” — a nickname grounded in his medical career and his penchant for voting against any bill increasing the size of government — really stands for.

1. Ron Paul is not a “top-tier” candidate.

At some point in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the mainstream media became more obsessed than usual with designating GOP hopefuls as “top-tier” candidates, meaning “people we want to talk about because we find them interesting or funny or scary.” Or more plainly: “anybody but Ron Paul.”

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has been accorded top-tier status from the start, but otherwise it’s been a rogues’ gallery. As their numbers soared, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and pizza magnate Herman Cain enjoyed stints in the top tier, and former House speaker Newt Gingrich is now ensconced in that blessed circle.

Back in August, Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) was designated “top tier” after winning Iowa’s Ames Straw Poll.Paul was not, despite losing to her by only about 150 votes. And when Paul won the presidential straw poll of about 2,000 attendees at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit in Washington in October, the contest’s organizer pronounced him “an outlier in this poll.”

December 6, 2011

The GOP field, in brief

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Really, it’s no wonder that GOP voters are seriously unimpressed with the field of candidates they’ve got to put up with. L. Neil Smith sums up the “front-runners” on the way to explaining why Herman Cain’s bid was quashed:

I don’t write about race very often, because it’s unimportant to me. But allow me to preface this by admitting I never liked Herman Cain.

Not as a presidential candidate. It had nothing to do with his color, of course. I can think instantly of three black men (Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Richard Boddie) who would make excellent candidates, and Cain, for all his mercantilist baggage, would have made a better President than that crypto-Democrat Mitt Romney, or America’s answer to Benito Mussolini, Il Douchebag himself, Newt Gingrich.

I leave Rick Perry undescribed only because I can’t summon up an adjective adequate to deal with this dull-witted second-rate George Bush imitation, a walking, talking violation of the Law of Natural Selection.

Cain, however, did not find himself jettisoned from the American electoral process because of his opinions on policy (at least not directly), his past association with the Evil Menace of Fast Food, or even because of the naughty things he was accused of having done with women by three specimens of highly questionable believability and a million braying jackasses of the government-approved news-generating industry.

Cain got the boot because—well, let me tell you a story …

November 28, 2011

“Newt may be a poor fit for the role of ‘anti-Romney,’ but … he knows how to play the Washington Game”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Gene Healy isn’t a fan of Newt Gingrich as the GOP nominee:

Has it really come to this? Newt Gingrich as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney? That’s what many in the punditocracy have proclaimed as the former speaker of the House has surged recently in the polls.

Yet a look at his record reveals that Newt is hardly the “anti-Mitt” — he’s Mitt Romney with more baggage and bolder hand gestures.

Every Gingrich profile proclaims that he’s a dazzling “ideas man,” a “one-man think tank.” It seems that, if you clamor long enough about “big ideas,” people become convinced you actually have them.

But most of Gingrich’s policy ideas over the last decade have been tepidly conventional and consistent with the Big Government, Beltway Consensus.

Gingrich’s campaign nearly imploded this summer when he dismissed Rep. Paul Ryan’s, R-Wis., Medicare reform plan as “right-wing social engineering.” But that gaffe was a window into Gingrich’s irresponsible approach toward entitlements.

In 2003, Gingrich stumped hard for President George W. Bush’s prescription drug bill, which has added about $17 trillion to Medicare’s unfunded liabilities. “Every conservative member of Congress should vote for this Medicare bill,” Newt urged.

And in his 2008 book Real Change, he endorsed an individual mandate for health insurance.

In the same way that we now know that “Santorum” is also the name of an obscure US politician, we are reminded that, back in the 1990s, “Gingrich” wasn’t just the word for the dog turd you had to scrape off the bottom of your shoe.

November 26, 2011

Gary Johnson as the Libertarian Party candidate

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

Reason is asking their readers if they’d support Gary Johnson as the US Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate:

Former two-term Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.) tells the Santa Fe New Mexican that he feels “abandoned” by a Republican Party that shut him out of all but two of GOP presidential debates so far. As a result, he’s mulling over the idea of running for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination.

[. . .]

There’s little doubt that Johnson — who unambiguously supports an end to the drug war, a non-interventionist foreign policy, reproductive rights, liberalized immigration policy, free trade, and many other libertarian position — would be the highest-profile LP candidate at least since Ron Paul hit the hustings back in 1988. As a pol who won election twice in a Democratic-heavy state and governed to bipartisan acclaim, he’d also be the first one who could point to administrative experience and success, which would surely help with publicity for the LP’s existence and positions.

November 22, 2011

Herman Cain and the most awkward anecdote so far

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

I suspect Herman Cain has managed to talk himself out of the GOP nomination race with little anecdotes like this one:

Cain speaks for nearly a half an hour and despite a couple fleeting “999” mentions, keeps his speech to topics of faith and his recent battle with cancer. He begins with a story about how he knew he would survive when he discovered that his physician was named “Dr. Lord,” that the hospital attendant’s name was “Grace” and that the incision made on his chest during the surgery would be in the shape of a “J.”

“Come on, y’all. As in J-E-S-U-S! Yes! A doctor named Lord! A lady named Grace! And a J-cut for Jesus Almighty,” Cain boomed.

He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon’s name was “Dr. Abdallah.”

“I said to his physician assistant, I said, ‘That sounds foreign — not that I had anything against foreign doctors — but it sounded too foreign,” Cain tells the audience. “She said, ‘He’s from Lebanon.’ Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Cain, he’s a Christian from Lebanon.'”

“Hallelujah!” Cain says. “Thank God!”

The crowd laughs uneasily.

Oh, good. He’s not quite xenophobic, just religiously . . . cautious. At least he chose the right kind of place to tell this little story:

By the time Herman Cain took the stage, Jesus had already been crucified, resurrected and returned to Earth to collect the faithful once that day.

Cain made a campaign stop Friday at The Holy Land Experience, a Christian-theme amusement park in central Florida where visitors pay $35 to watch a reenactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ just minutes from Disney World.

In the park, which is run by the religious television station Trinity Broadcasting Network, employees dressed as shepherd boys, pharisees, Roman soldiers and merchants from first-century Israel lead the faithful on tours through the re-created streets of old Jerusalem, perform re-enactment shows and serve as baristas in the coffee shop. Over the course of a day at Holy Land, you can take communion — fed to you from the hand of a bearded actor playing Christ with flowing brown hair — browse an impressive collection of early Bibles, rock out to praise-song karaoke, get baptized and even have your picture taken with Jesus on a Harley.

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

November 19, 2011

The GOP’s dream candidate . . . for the Democrats

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

I’m still somewhat in shock that Newt Gingrich is taken seriously as a candidate by the GOP. I’m even more bowled over by the fact that he’s at least temporarily neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney. I’ve already suggested that someone do a “Santorum” on him, but Dan Savage would probably like to see Gingrich take the nomination, because it’d mean a landslide win for Barack Obama next year regardless of the state of the economy or how many other military adventures he takes on.

Doug Mataconis seems equally perplexed by the Newtmentum:

Newt Gingrich has pronounced himself a “co-frontrunner” for the Republican nomination. The polls bear him out. So, how did we get to the point where a fat, condescending, serial adulterer who left office in disgrace twelve years ago is the latest challenger for the conservative mantle?

[. . .]

Gingrich is a bright guy who’s voraciously interested in ideas and the world around him. He has his PhD in European history from Tulane. He served 20 years in Congress, the last 6 of them as Speaker. He’s written more books than some of his opponents have read. So, he’s by far the most plausible of the Not Romneys to emerge thus far.

The reasons most of us have written him off are manifold.

First, he’s got a long history of morally dubious behavior. The circumstances surrounding his two divorces are disturbing. While the first is the stuff of urban legend, I’m actually much more troubled by the second which occurred when he was a middle aged man serving as Speaker of the House and leading the impeachment of a president for minor crimes surround his own affairs. And then there is the flurry of ethics charges while he was in Congress and his questionable lobbying activities afterwards.

Update: Radley Balko reminds us that Newt is a huge hypocrite on drug policy, too:

While drug war realist Gary Johnson can’t get invited to the debates, and fellow realist Ron Paul got all of 90 seconds to say his piece last time around, Newt Gingrich has inexplicably risen to the top of the polls in the GOP primary. It’s worth reviewing again just how God-awful Gingrich has been on the drug war over the years.

Over at TalkLeft, Jeralyn Merritt notes that Gingrich once introduced a bill mandating the death penalty for drug smugglers. Gingrich’s bill would have required execution for anyone attempting to bring 2 ounces or more of pot into the country. Merritt also reminds us of this shameless, astonishingly stupid attempt to justify his policies with his own drug use:

    “See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”

There’s much more. In 2009, Gingrich agreed with Bill O’Reilly’s call for Singapore-style drug laws in America. In Singapore, the police can force anyone to submit to a urinalysis without a warrant. They’re permitted to search you without a warrant. And if you’re seen in a building or in the company of drug users, you’re assumed to have been using drugs as well, unless you can prove otherwise. They also have Gingrich’s favored mandatory execution of anyone possessing over a specified amount of illicit drugs. (And there’s little evidence that the policies are working.)

November 17, 2011

Can someone do to Gingrich what Dan Savage did to Santorum?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

I was pretty sure that the GOP had gotten rid of Newt Gingrich back in the 1990s in the same way you’d scrape dog poop off the sole of your shoe, but through some totally inconceivable twist of fate, he’s back:

Republican voters’ esteem for Newt Gingrich has been rising fast. At this rate it might someday equal, though not surpass, his regard for himself. Gingrich is not a person with an ego. He’s an ego with a person.

Just listen to his explanation of why it took him a while to catch on with voters: “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate and what I’m trying to do.”

Other GOP candidates sound like they are merely campaigning for office. Gingrich, however, hurls verbal thunderbolts like Zeus, as the lights flicker and the earth shakes. Hopelessly in love with the sound of his own voice, he exhibits a stern, overbearing self-assurance that gives his pronouncements weight even when he is uttering nonsense.

[. . .]

Still, it’s hard to believe his campaign will survive extended scrutiny. One reason is his know-it-all personality. George W. Bush was the guy you’d like to have a beer with. Gingrich is the guy you wouldn’t want to be stuck next to on a long flight.

[. . .]

It’s not just this administration that causes him to shoot blood out of his eyes. He said Muslims should not be allowed to build a mosque near Ground Zero “so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” He said that “our elites are trying to create amnesia so that we literally have generations who have no idea what it means to be an American.” Newt loves to conjure up terrifying monsters that only he can vanquish.

At moments like these it’s hard to know whether he suffers intermittent derangement or simply will stop at nothing to demonize political opponents. Either way, he bears no resemblance to anyone Americans have ever entrusted with the presidency. Gingrich is, as he says, unique. That’s just the problem.

November 4, 2011

Reason profiles Gary Johnson

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

I took the “scientific* survey” at the Reason web site and it matched me up with Gary Johnson as the GOP candidate who most closely matched my interests:

Aliases: Gov. Johnson, Iron Man, that libertarianish guy who’s not Ron Paul

Experience: Johnson founded his construction company Big-J Enterprises in 1976 and ran it for nearly two decades before becoming the Republican governor of the overwhelmingly Democratic state of New Mexico in 1995. Big-J, which Johnson sold in 1999, remains a leading construction firm in the Land of Enchantment. Johnson was re-elected governor in 1999, his tenure marked by a record number of vetoes, a winning struggle against tax increases, and prosperity in the state.

Hangups: low name recognition, severe soundbite challenges, Ron Paul’s prior claim on the uncoveted “mild-mannered libertarian” position

Spending/size of government/entitlement reform: Along with Ron Paul, Johnson is part of a fairly recent phenomenon: Republican candidates who take their small-government rhetoric seriously. In the New Mexico statehouse, he vetoed 750 bills, fired 1,200 state employees and left the state with a billion-dollar budget surplus. His presidential platform includes cutting Medicare and Medicaid by 43 percent and turning them into block grant programs. His budget cutting plans extend even to the bipartisan sacred cow of defense, which would also come in for a 43 percent cut. Tells ConcordPatch, “I believe that less government is the best government.”

October 2, 2011

Tyler Cowen on why “no new taxes” won’t work this time

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Almost everyone (except Warren Buffett) agrees that higher taxes are a bad thing, and the GOP candidates are all singing from the same hymn book about not imposing higher tax rates. Under normal circumstances, this might work. Tyler Cowen explains why these aren’t normal times and how “no new taxes” isn’t a serious way to deal with America’s financial problems:

Consider the example more closely. Cutting $10 in spending for every $1 in tax increases would result in $9 in net tax reduction. That’s because lower spending today means lower taxes tomorrow, and limiting the future path of government spending does limit future taxes, as Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate and conservative icon, so clearly explained. Promising never to raise taxes, without reaching a deal on spending, really means a high and rising commitment to future taxes.

Furthermore, this refusal to contemplate a tax increase — which I’d characterize as an extreme Republican stance — has brought what seems to be an extreme Democratic response: President Obama’s latest budget plan is moving away from entitlement reform and embracing multiple tax increases on the wealthy. We may be left with no good fiscal options.

The problems with a no-new-taxes stance run deeper. Because it’s unlikely that spending cuts alone can balance the budget, politicians who espouse extreme antitax views often end up denying the scope of our long-run fiscal problems.

[. . .]

The more cynical interpretation of the Republican candidates’ stance on taxes is that they are signaling loyalty to a cause, or simply marketing themselves to voters, rather than acting in good faith. It could be that candidates are more worried about having to publicly endorse tax increases than they are about the tax increases themselves. If that’s true, it is all the more reason to watch out for our pocketbooks; it means that the candidates are protecting themselves rather than the taxpayers.

The final lesson is this: Many professed fiscal conservatives still find it necessary to pander to voter illusions that only a modicum of fiscal adjustment is needed. That’s an indication of how far we are from true fiscal conservatism, but also a sign of how much it is needed.

September 24, 2011

Gary Johnson’s authenticity is not mere “authenticity”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

An interesting profile of Gary Johnson at The Economist:

The truly strange thing about Mr Johnson, qua politician, is his authenticity. But as Andrew Potter argues in his fascinating book “The Authenticity Hoax”, authenticity has lately acquired scare quotes, has become simply another marketing ploy. Rehabbed exposed brick is “authentic”. Buying your certified organic mangoes out of wooden crates in shops with buffed concrete floors is “authentic”. In American politics “authenticity” is a put-on populism, a regular-joe, bible-thumping bonhomie, an American flag lapel-pin persona. Rick Perry’s drawling, alpha-male Christ-love is fearsomely “authentic”. That’s his supposed advantage. But Gary Johnson’s authenticity seems, well, authentic. The media especially doesn’t know what to do with Mr Johnson and his indifference to optics, other than to ignore it. Because how can a man dispositionally allergic to pandering get ahead in politics? Yet his anti-charismatic charm seems to have worked in New Mexico. I know it has worked on me. I very much doubt Mr Johnson will get anywhere near the Republican nomination. But if he stays in the debates and keeps getting attention from the press, I think a lot of people are going find themselves surprised by the way the governor’s guileless can-do competence sneaks up on them.

It also links to Lisa DePaulo’s recent GQ profile:

A few things you need to know up front about Gary Johnson. There is nothing he will not answer, nothing he will not share. For six straight days, we spent virtually every waking hour together, which might have had something to do with the fact that there wasn’t another reporter within ten miles of the guy. Or that when you’re polling in the low digits and your campaign fund is less than Mitt Romney’s breakfast tab and your entourage is Brinck and Matt, you tend to be more forthcoming. But in fact, Johnson is fundamentally incapable of bullshitting, which is one of the many, many things that make him so unusual for a presidential candidate. (When a reporter asks him, after he gushes about how great New Hampshire voters are, if he says the same thing in Michigan, he replies, “No, Michigan’s the worst.”) He finds presidential politicking of the sort we’ve grown accustomed to—slick, scripted, focus-grouped, how-does-the-hair-look—to be “absolutely phony.”

Another thing you need to know: He was never supposed to be the fringe candidate, and his campaign is no lark. Before he officially declared, he visited thirty-eight states — on his own nickel — to get a sense of whether he’d be a viable candidate. He was the first GOP candidate to announce, in early April, and for about twenty seconds seemed like a contender. The wildly popular (still) two-term Republican governor from a state that is two-to-one Democrat. A guy who’s confident that he knows how to manage the purse strings and balance a budget because he did it — eight years in a row — in New Mexico. His fiscal conservatism is unmatched by anyone in the race. And his socially liberal cred — the only pro-gay and pro-choice Republican candidate — is unmatched even by some Democrats. (Of course, while this could be an asset in the general election, it’s a bitch of a liability in the GOP primary.) Even the backstory had a self-made charm: Born fifty-eight years ago in Minot, North Dakota, the son of a tire salesman turned teacher and a mom who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Johnson started a one-man handyman operation when he was 21, grew it into a construction company with a thousand employees, and sold it in 1999 for about $5 million. Oh, and he named it Big J (for Big Johnson). “It didn’t have the same connotation at the time,” he swears.

But still. Do not confuse his Zen-like quality for a lack of cojones. The guy has brass ones. He’s a five-time Ironman triathlete. He paraglides and hot-gas balloons. (Not hot air, hot gas.) He biked across the Alps. And from the right angle, he looks like Harrison Ford.

So what on earth is so radioactive about Gary Johnson? And how did he become Nowhere Man in a field as chaotic and uninspired as this one?

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