We'll Never Forget Ol' What's-His-Name

I was shocked to hear that former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is leaving the Republican primaries. Almost as shocked as I was to find out that he had been in the Republican primaries in the first place. He was not so much a dark horse as an invisible horse. He will leave the GOP and run as a candidate for the Libertarian Party. I wonder if they know about it yet.

Johnson was regularly excluded from the Republican candidate debates because he couldn't get enough apparent support to justify adding yet another unexciting candidate to the already-full panel. So Johnson decided to pick up his marbles and leave. The GOP's loss is the Libertarians' loss, er, gain. Johnson is the most exciting candidate to come along since John Huntsman.

Maybe the Republicans should have taken a little better look at Johnson before excluding him from the debates. Republicans harp on the idea of future presidents having some business experience. Johnson built businesses from the ground up. In 1976, he founded Big J Enterprises (a construction firm), starting with one employee--himself. He built the business rapidly, and within a few years landed a lucrative $38 million contract with Intel to build its adjunct facilities in New Mexico. He sold the company in 1999, at which point the company employed over 1,000 workers.

In 1994, largely self-funded with $500,000, Johnson entered politics. He ran against a popular Republican in the gubernatorial primary, and eked out a narrow victory. That was his last narrow win. He won the Republican nomination for governor, and defeated the Democratic incumbent by ten percent. In the next gubernatorial election, he ran against a Latino Democrat in a state with one of the largest Hispanic populations (percentage-wise) in the nation (40 percent). Again, he won by over ten percent. In fact, he was so popular in his first term that the New Mexico term-limits legislation (one term only) was modified to allow him to run for a second term.

Republicans want candidates with executive experience. Johnson has that experience in both the private and public sectors. But what about fiscal responsibility? During his first term alone, he vetoed 200 out of 424 spending bills, and gutted many others using his line-item veto. He kept his promise to reduce the state's budget by 10%. He attempted to cut taxes deeply, and succeeded in many of his fights with the Democrats in the legislature. Yet he also managed to increase spending on core subject education while fighting the good fight for school vouchers. When test scores improved only marginally with the public school expenditures, he went full-bore for the voucher program.

Among his accomplishments in office were shifting state Medicaid to an efficient "managed care" system, fired over 1200 public employees, set a record for budget vetoes, balanced the state budget for 6 out of 8 years, and left New Mexico with a $1 billion surplus. He was less successful with his school voucher program, but he never stopped trying. He vetoed or line-item vetoed nearly 2000 bills during his eight years in office, and of those, only two were overridden by the legislature.

His Libertarian side also showed during his two terms. He attempted to decriminalize and legalize marijuana use and distribution. He pointed out that half of New Mexico's law enforcement resources were devoted to drug-related offenses, and said that the problem should move from the criminal arena to the medical/social arena. That is a Libertarian stand, but one that was also supported by such notable conservatives as William F. Buckley.

In the 2000 elections, the Libertarian Party attempted to recruit him to run for president, but he demurred, saying that he was a lifelong committed Republican. Nevetheless, in 2008, he endorsed Ron Paul for the presidency, seemingly setting up his own status as a Republican/Libertarian. That now seems to have come to full fruition with his abandonment of the run for the Republican nomination in order to court the Libertarians.

This could get interesting (or not). There have been strong rumblings of a Ron Paul third-party run at the presidency on the Libertarian ticket. How Paul would treat a rival who previously endorsed him is entirely unknown at this point. In any event, it certainly raises the specter of a "spoiler" election in 2012. How badly that might hurt Republicans remains to be seen. For the time being, Paul has said he will not run on a third-party ticket because it might hurt his son's political future in the Senate.

In a third-party scenario, absent Ron Paul as a candidate, Johnson's is one of three candidate names proferred with name identification between 1% and 10%. Public Policy Polling puts him at 9%, as opposed to New York City liberal mayor Michael Bloomberg at 8% and Independent/Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In the same poll sampling, without Johnson, Republican Mitt Romney beats Obama by 47% to 45%. With Johnson in the race, Romney beats Obama 43% to 41%.

At this early stage, I have no idea what to make of that. It's certainly well within the margin of error in what promises to be a much closer general election than most people think. New Mexico's five electoral college votes could determine the outcome, either giving Obama a victory or throwing the election into the House of Representatives, thereby giving the Republican the victory.

To add to the confusion, New Mexico is one of nine states (along with Illinois, Hawaii, New Jersey, California, Washington, Massachusetts, Washington DC, Vermont, and Maryland) which may enter into the "national popular vote" compact which gives its electoral college votes to the candidate who wins the most votes nationally even if a different candidate wins the popular vote in New Mexico. The bill passed the New Mexico House, but has been hung up in the Senate. The other nine states have already passed the bill in both houses and it has been signed by the respective governors.

Johnson's entry into the race as a third-party candidate may have an effect that is more apparent than real. Still, this will be a general election in which almost anything could happen, and small shifts in voter preferences could make for some wild results.