Libertarians on tour: two weeks, three cities, and five interviews with L.P. nominees Gary Johnson and William Weld.

AuthorGillespie, Nick
PositionInterview

Gary Johnson reached into his pocket to make a point about the emancipating wonders of modern technology, and then panicked. "Where is my iPhone? Oh my gosh, where is it?"

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We were in the middle of an extraordinary scrum on 4th Street in Cleveland, 100 yards from the entrance to the Republican National Convention, interviewing the Libertarian Party presidential nominee live on Facebook while a crush of curious GOP delegates, cops, and lookie-loos pressed in closer to eavesdrop and take pictures. Johnson would later remark to a Politico reporter that the mob scene was the most attention he had ever received, but at the moment he was distracted and inconsolable. "This is a shocker to me, I gotta tell you," he said while the feed kept streaming to tens of thousands. "Uh, maybe I left it in the cab? Oh, shit."

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Over the course of two weeks, across reason's five wide-ranging interviews with the Libertarian Party presidential ticket from Las Vegas to Cleveland to Philadelphia, the Great iPhone Mishap was the moment people responded to most. And why not? Campaign 2016 has been the weirdest in at least four decades. "Is this the craziest election cycle or what?" Johnson is fond of saying. "You know how crazy it is? It's so crazy that I'm going to be the next president of the United States."

Voters have been clamoring for authenticity over the professionalized status quo, for plain speaking over slick speechifying--and if there's one thing you can say about the former New Mexico governor, he ain't slick. He's also not mired in the usual Libertarian polling ghetto of plus or minus I percent, which is the party's electoral high-water mark, achieved by Johnson in 2012 and Ed Clark in 1980.

The five polls selected by the Republican/Democrat-controlled Commission on Presidential Debates have measured Johnson at 10 percent all summer, giving him at press time a few remaining days to reach the steep threshold of 15 percent for inclusion in this fall's debates. "There's no way that you can get elected president without being in that game," the candidate told us in Cleveland.

Gary Johnson did end up finding his phone. But will he and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, really make a difference in this election and beyond? According to Gallup, historically low numbers of voters now identify as Democrats (29 percent) and Republicans (26 percent), suggesting an unprecedented opportunity for the Libertarian Party to redefine the political spectrum for the 21st century. Johnson and Weld stress that as social liberals and fiscal conservatives, they occupy the broad center of American politics while Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are way, way out there on either fringe. As the only ticket that is consistendy anti-war, anti-regulation, pro-abortion, pro-immigration, and pro-trade,Johnson and Weld are pulling voters from both major parties even as their seemingly wishy-washy positions on religious liberty, the Second Amendment, and carbon taxes alienate many hard-core libertarians.

We asked the two ex-governors about everything from their promise to submit a balanced budget within a hundred days of taking office to their picks for the Supreme Court to whether they would honor the North Adantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other treaty obligations. The following is an edited selection from those conversations, presented in chronological order. For video of the interviews, go to reason.com.

LAS VEGAS

July 15, Johnson and Weld at the libertarian confab Freedom-Fest, interviewed by Nick Gillespie for Reason TV

Gillespie: According to the most recent CBS/Afew York

Times poll, you're at 12 percent.

Johnson: Yeah!

Gillespie: Why is that happening, and where does it end?

Johnson: Well, it's happening because, first and foremost, arguably the two most polarizing figures in American politics today are Trump and Clinton. But secondarily: two Republican governors, two-term, getting reelected in states that are heavily Democratic. I mean, I think there's a lot here in the Libertarian ticket.

I think we're reflective of most Americans, which, speaking with a broad brushstroke, is being fiscally conservative and socially tolerant/liberal/whatever, as long as you don't force it on me. And a big unoccupied space, too, is nobody is standing up and saying, "Let's stop dropping bombs. Let's stop with the military interventions, that they're having the unintended consequence of making things worse, not better." There's no peace candidate.

Gillespie: What is the worst aspect of a potential Trump presidency, and what is the worst aspect of a potential Clinton presidency?

Weld: I'll start with Trump. You know, I don't think that Mr. Trump has made a great study of the issues. I'm not sure he's read deeply in history as it might apply to current political decisions. So I see a shallowness in his performance. I mean, there's just a few words; there's a lot of sentences that don't end. And his proposals run right into international agreements and the U.S. Constitution.

Gillespie: Isn't that what people want? They want to restrict immigration. They want to restrict Syrians or Arabs or Muslims.

Johnson: Having [campaigned] in New Hampshire and having been in the Midwest, what I have recognized is that 30 percent of Republican voters believe the scourge of the Earth is Mexican immigration. It was my voice in 2012 that said, "No, that's not the case," but I know that that group exists. When things are bad, you look for a scapegoat. In this case, "They're taking jobs that U.S. citizens could have!"

Well, no, they're not. They're not murderers and rapists. And the notion of rounding up 11 million undocumented workers, how's that going to work out in New Mexico, where 50 percent of the population is Hispanic? The federal government's going to start knocking on doors?

Weld: The other thing is the rule of law and the Constitution. We pride ourselves on the rule of law in this country, not only socially and in terms of our government, but also our economy, both domestic and foreign. Mr. Trump has suggested he would slap on a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, 35 percent tariff on Mexican goods, build a huge wall and make the Mexicans pay for it. Any number of things that would violate his duties under the Constitution.

Gillespie: You talk about protectionism. Hillary Clinton is talking down the North American Free Trade Agreement; she started doing that in 2008.

Weld: We're the only free trade ticket out there! We're the only ones!

Gillespie: Say something negative about Hillary Clinton. You are friendly with her, and you like her as a person, but--

Weld: Oh, I'm old friends with both Clintons, but at election time at the end of the day, there are no friends, OK?

The first thing I would say is the fiscal situation. I think it's something she truly believes, that she would like to raise the amount of social spending, raise the amount of government spending--called "investment" on the Democratic side of the aisle--and I think that would be bad for the economy, it would hollow out the economy. When President Obama leaves office, the national debt is going to be $20 trillion, doubled since not so long ago. You can't go on like that. It's all in the wrong direction.

We're small-government people. We cut taxes. We shrank government. The Democrats would go the other direction.

Gillespie: The federal government is spending about $4 trillion a year. In the first budget that is signed by a Johnson-Weld administration, how much are you going to spend, and where do you take it from there?

Johnson: Well, we're going to come out of the chute proposing a balanced budget, which would in fact target a 20 percent reduction.

Weld: It's not a bad goal, you know. I've been around government a long time for my sins, and I think between 10 and 20 percent of most budgets are overspent. People in Washington particularly do not understand there is no such thing as government money; there's only taxpayers' money. They think it's their money.

Johnson: And you can't do it without addressing military spending. You can't do it without addressing the entitlements: Medicaid and Medicare, Social Security.

Weld: But you know, we're not just saying this, we did it! My first...

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