Who Is Gary Johnson?

I’ve been learning a bit about one of the candidates running for the Republican nomination. Gary Johnson polls about 2% and doesn’t get as much attention as Romney or Perry, but there are some interesting things about him so I thought I’d talk about him a bit here. Gary Johnson is almost like the reasonable version of Ron Paul for libertarian-minded people who are too cool to like Ron Paul because of the way he seems obsessed with the Federal Reserve and conspiracy theories.

1. Gary Johnson was governor of New Mexico for 8 years. He won election and re-election in a pretty Democratic state. That gives him some foundational credibility as someone who can govern and stay popular. (For comparison’s sake, Ron Paul has only ever won Congressional elections in his little red Texas district.)

2. Gary Johnson is an adventurer. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with his family. He climbed Mount Everest with a broken leg. He has climbed two of the other “Seven Summits” and wants to climb the other three. That’s just bada**. (For comparison’s sake, you can look at a picture of Chris Christie and see that he won’t be climbing any mountains anytime soon. No offense to Chris.)

3. Gary Johnson has a good “conservative” record as far as vetoing hundreds of bills and reducing the role of government in his state while overseeing good enough results that he stayed popular enough to get Democrats to re-elect him and leave office with a budget surplus. (For comparison’s sake, Mitt Romney veered left to stay popular in Massachusetts. For comparison’s sake, Rick Perry only had to stay popular with conservative Republicans in Texas, and he’s also often accused of only being able to balance his budget with federal stimulus dollars.)

4. Gary Johnson has a practical, common-sense approach to issues, as opposed to ideological views, along with a sense of no-nonsense openness and integrity that help him stay popular with conservatives and liberals alike. Consider these points from a discussion on Red State:

Gary Johnson made the healthcare plan he received as governor available to every citizen of New Mexico and transitioned the state’s Medicare program to managed care. This provided incentives for better care, cost control, and lowered the cost to the state of New Mexico by 25%….

Gary Johnson looks at drugs from a cost benefit analysis. Half of what we spend on the courts, prisons, and law enforcement is drug related and we have nothing to show for it except the highest incarceration rate in the world. 90% of all drug problems are prohibition related not use related. So he wants to legalize marijuana, control it, regulate it, and tax it as we do alcohol. Harder drugs he would treat as a health issue, not as a criminal justice issue. Gary Johnson doesn’t argue this as a individual liberty issue (which I think is how Ron Paul views it), rather as I said he looks at it as a matter of cost/benefit which I think is easier for most people to understand…

Gary Johnson is a neither a foreign policy hawk nor a foreign policy dove. On the one hand he supported invading Afghanistan and going to war when there are compelling national interests. On the other he does not believe we should have our military everywhere in the world, did not support invading Iraq, is against our involvement in Libya, and he wants to know what we are still doing in Afghanistan after ten years.

As he muses in this Eagle Tribune article, “I’ve lived my entire life thinking we don’t need to blow up the world 10 times over… Maybe six times will do.” Now of course Ron Paul has been saying we should bring home tens of thousands of troops sitting around in Europe. But Gary Johnson takes it a provocative step farther: “Europe can afford its health system, Johnson contends, because the United States is paying for national defense there.” Oh snap.

Gary Johnson has some liabilities, namely that he’s not a bedrock conservative on social issues. The Red State users say he identifies as “pro-choice,” believing that “abortion should be legal up until the fetus is viable,” which makes him about “80%” pro-life – just not 100%. Still, “he would have passed a late-term abortion ban as governor had it gotten past the state legislature. He supports parental notification and counseling. He is against public funding of abortion. On most abortion related aspects he is a firm ally of pro-life advocates.”

I will leave you with a long and excellent GQ article about Gary Johnson titled “Is This The Sanest Man Running For President?” It gives a nice sense of his personality, record, and interactions with people. If you want to see a quick video to get a sense of his speaking persona, check out this clip from the recent Republican debate at Classical Values. And finally, here’s the official Gary Johnson campaign website.