On Wednesday, Chris Matthews at MSNBC deigned to have the Libertarian presidential ticket of Gary Johnson and William Weld appear at 7 pm Eastern time at a town hall at the University of New Hampshire. While the ticket did take some time to dispel a few strawmen (Johnson DOES believe climate change is man-made, and does believe we should have an EPA), events did not all turn out well. Not only was Johnson a bit… agitated (at one point predicting that Hillary Clinton could ‘press the button’ in a war), he didn’t seem to get Matthews’ question as to why marijuana is called dope (answer: it makes you a dope), and there was one point Matthews held a lightning round, promising “maybe you’ll make some news.” He asked, “who’s your favorite foreign leader?” Johnson said Shimon Peres of Israel – who has just died. Matthews specified it had to be a living leader. Johnson confessed, “I guess I’m having an ‘Aleppo moment’ in the former president of Mexico.” (Vicente Fox, by the way.)
So out of all the other things (good and bad) that came out of Johnson’s mouth, GUESS WHAT WAS THE ONE THING THE PRESS WILL. NOT. SHUT. UP. ABOUT.
In one respect, this just confirms it’s a bad idea for libertarians to appear on MSNBC (or as I call it, MSDNC), given that most of their hosts, including Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, love libertarianism the way an Orthodox rabbi loves bacon cheeseburgers, but really it confirms a point I’ve made here more than once: If a “third” party candidate wants to be taken seriously by the press, they need to ACT like a serious candidate and bone up. Again, you are NOT Donald Trump. People will not watch you do a spontaneous monologue from Ubu Roi on national TV and say, “Aw, that’s not fair, his mic was bad.”
Well, cheer up, liberals. If you’re a Clinton fan (or just someone who doesn’t want Trump to get elected and make his first executive order the restoration of droit du seigneur), Johnson’s apparent quest to destroy what credibility he might have had will greatly reduce the chances that a third-party vote will “spoil” a state for Hillary. But then, you won’t be able to blame Johnson if Hillary chokes anyway, so everything’s a tradeoff.
If however Johnson retains his previous poll numbers or actually increases them, it will mean that Gary Johnson has absorbed the primary lesson of the Donald Trump campaign, which is that people will vote for you if they identify with your ignorance. Either that, or Americans hate Hillary THAT FUCKING MUCH.
Meanwhile, the lesson I take from this, which the Libertarian Party should note for 2020, is that just because marijuana use should not be a bigger crime than armed robbery, that does not mean that you want a marijuana user to be your presidential nominee.
Just sayin’.