Libertarian Debate: Candidates Unload On Donald Trump
Channel: Khan Lo
Date: 15/01/2017

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson got one step closer to the Libertarian Party’s nomination on Saturday, earning one of five places in Saturday’s televised debate and one of six slots on Sunday’s final ballot. He took the stage to “My Shot,” one of the themes from the musical “Hamilton,” a not-so-subtle hint that the party would blow an opportunity without him. “I am not an old white guy, and I am not Republican-lite,” said Johnson, rebutting a party activist who warned that the party risked looking staid and monochrome if it gave him the nomination. “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.” After most of the 907 eligible delegates submitted “tokens” for the candidates, Johnson led a ballot that would include party activist Austin Petersen, “Free State Project” activist Darryl Perry, software engineer John McAfee, physician Marc Allan Feldman and self-styled “average guy” Kevin McCormick.

Feldman and McCormick narrowly missed the cutoff for the TV debate; Johnson himself gave a plug for Feldman as a sort of consolation prize.

“Although he’s not my first pick, I’d like to put his name in nomination,” Johnson said, “because he says it like it is and does a damn good job of it.”

Not long after that, the party announced that Feldman would make the debate after all. The candidate ran down the convention floor, high-fiving delegates.

Libertarian presidential candidate Austin Petersen, left, poses for a photo with a supporter Friday. (John Raoux/AP)

 

Johnson was not overconfident about his challenge, a two-step process that will only end on Sunday when the convention decides whether to let his running mate, former Massachusetts governor William Weld, fill out the ticket. Johnson won 226 of the more than 750 tokens, far ahead of Petersen (106), Perry (104), and McAfee (97). While some of his supporters threw their tokens to other candidates, just to begin the process, Johnson was probably running beyond his support from 2012, when he easily won the Libertarian nomination.

[Experienced Libertarian ticket becomes a tough sell in Orlando]

Weld, Johnson admitted, was a heavy carry for some of the party’s die-hard activists. Ten years after his last bid for office, an unsuccessful campaign for governor of New York, Weld was meeting most delegates for the first time and occasionally bristling at negative questions. On Saturday morning, Johnson was scheduled to follow Weld with a speech at a small indoor rally for the ticket. Instead, Johnson stood beside Weld and took questions from the audience of 150 or so skeptical delegates.

“When I was a governor, I held Bill up as a model of who I wanted to be when I grew up,” Johnson said.

After that, Weld was game, and mostly won over the room. He high-fived a delegate who shared his support for term limits, and described how he’d fought Massachusetts Democrats to win spending cuts. “A lot of these programs don’t stand up in a light wind,” Weld said. When delegate forgot his last name, Weld joked that it was “because of how folksy I am.”

There were awkward moments. When one delegate asked about “the CIA’s secret work inside the Middle East,” Weld went for a joke that didn’t quite work.

“That was my great uncle-in-law, Kermit Roosevelt, who in 1953 came out of Groton and Harvard with a little walking-around money in his pockets and engineered Mossadegh’s overthrow,” said Weld, referring to the overthrown prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh. “So perhaps I'm not the best person to ask.”

Later, Weld was approached by Steven Nielson, a Libertarian candidate for land commissioner in Washington state. Several times, Nielson had told Weld that he came to the convention as a Johnson supporter, but went soft and needed to grill the candidates some more. Jim Gray, the party’s 2012 nominee, found Weld again and tried to reintroduce him to Nielson. The candidate turned and walked away.

In interviews over the course of the day, Johnson suggested that he would struggle to run if Weld was not nominated with him. Weld would help with fundraising — “that’s not in my marrow,” Johnson said — and Weld would be taken seriously by the media in a way his unknown rivals, all loyal party activists, would not be.