He’s a two-term governor who left office with a substantial budget surplus. A successful businessman who’s climbed Everest, Gary Johnson is refreshingly unconventional, supporting the decriminalization of weed, favoring a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants (the only solution, since they’ll never be deported) and ending our interventionist foreign policy.
That won’t fly with the fundamentalists and teabaggers who prefer self-aggrandizing moralists to unassuming thinkers. Hopefully Johnson can get some traction in the GOP primaries. Being the rational candidate has to count for something, even in the party of Limbaugh.
Never mind.
Rational isn’t enough, especially running against an incumbent. Some charisma also is necessary, and none of the Republicans has any. At this point, Obama will beat anybody they put up against him. But eighteen (18) months is a long time. At this point in 1967, LBJ appeared unbeatable for another term. The Republicans need a conservative Bobby Kennedy. Maybe Marco Rubio will step into the breach.