Skip to main content

The Daily Beast: Why Ron Paul won't support Gary Johnson

First they pose the question,
Why won’t Ron Paul back Gary Johnson? On a campaign conference call today, campaign spokesperson Jesse Benton said that Paul would not back Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson under any circumstances.  This was the most definitive language used by Benton on a call laced with caveats.  Benton said that Paul was “not likely” to endorse Romney and was “extremely unlikely” to back any third party candidate. But, when it came to Gary Johnson, the answer was a quick and simple no.
And then they answer it:
Johnson may be the most ideologically similar candidate to Paul but there are major differences between the former New Mexico governor and the longtime Texas congressman. Johnson is far more rooted in modern libertarianism than Paul, who is many ways a candidate of what his biographer, Brian Doherty, calls the “Old Right.”  While Johnson is pro gay marriage and pro-drug reform, Paul is still wedded to bugaboos about gold money and combines his laissez-faire economic approach with a streak of social conservatism.
                The differences though aren’t just ideological. Johnson has abandoned the GOP as hopelessly wedded to big government conservativism and the Christian Right after his failed run in the Republican Presidential primary. In contrast, Paul is playing “a long game” to try to remake the Republican Party in his image.  On the call today, Benton stated that one of the major efforts of Paul delegates in Tampa would be to change the Republican Party rules to make it easier for “liberty-oriented” candidates in 2016. (He declined though “to get into the weeds” about what those changes would be.) 
So that's the answer to any folks who thought there was going to be some hedging about the difference between "endorse" and "support."

Comments

Walter D said…
The differences between Gary Johnson (was Republican, now Libertarian), and Ron Paul (was
Libertarian, now Republican) are minute compared to their ideological similarities.

Ron Paul supporters are being set adrift; get in your lifeboats and row wherever you want.

They want direction from their man, they will do what he recommends.

Why not row your lifeboats towards that ship that is on all state ballots, with a candidate with similar, if not identical views.

"Similar but not identical" is a better choice than "totally different and not even close".

"Ron Paul may be playing, 'a long game' to try to remake the Republican party in his image".

In the "short game", without his direction, he is throwing two million plus votes into
the brine.
September 5, 2012 at 8:46 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...
26 comments
Read more