Years before ‘Aleppo moment,’ Gary Johnson showed little interest in details of governing SANTA FE, N.M. — For state lawmakers here who used to work with Gary Johnson, something is familiar about the former governor’s baffled looks, which have turned into an embarrassment for his third-party presidential campaign.
Longtime state Sen. Stuart Ingle (R) recalled how Johnson, soon after taking office in 1995, mostly shrugged and stared during their first meeting together. As Ingle asked Johnson questions about his agenda, Ingle said, Johnson’s most common refrain was, “I don’t know.”
At the end of the meeting, Ingle said, Johnson revealed the one position on which he would hold firm: The state’s budget should not grow. And if legislation to do so passed, the new governor added, “I will veto it.”
Over the next eight years, New Mexico lawmakers would struggle to work with a governor who paid little attention to details. Those who worked closely with Johnson, then a Republican elected as a political novice vowing to shake up the established order, recall a chief executive who would speed through meetings and often preferred to discuss his fitness routine than focus on the minutiae of policymaking.
Today, people here are not surprised that Johnson’s lack of interest in the fine points of governing has led to some high-profile stumbles in his Libertarian candidacy for president, such as his inability to name his favorite foreign leader, or when a question about the war-ravaged city at the center of the Syrian refugee crisis prompted him to ask, “What is Aleppo?”
Johnson dismisses the notion that a president must be immersed in the particulars.
“It’s amazing that somehow because you dot the i’s and cross the t’s that somehow you’re immune,” Johnson told The Washington Post in a recent interview, “and judgments are being made on me that I’m not qualified because I didn’t know something that could be answered in five seconds on an iPad.”
In a year of widespread discontent with the major-party contenders, Johnson pitches himself as a logical alternative who can bridge divisions by embracing conservative fiscal policy and left-leaning social policy.
That pitch has proved attractive to a small but significant sliver of voters, particularly young people, peeling support away from Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. Both campaigns fret that Johnson’s presence on the ballot could tilt a tight race.
At the center of Johnson’s candidacy is his tenure in Santa Fe, where he was quick to use his veto pen and argued that government should provide only the most basic of services, such as building highways.
But Johnson ended up unnerving lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, who complained that he rarely took their ideas seriously.
When the vetoes started to pile up that first year, legislators tried to make amends by inviting him to participate in discussions about how they should spend money, according to legislative notes in the state Capitol. Johnson’s reply, again, was “no.”
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/years-before-aleppo-moment-gary-johnson-showed-little-interest-in-details-of-governing/2016/10/03/f62a00fa-873d-11e6-92c2-14b64f3d453f_story.html?tid=hybrid_collaborative_1_na
