Gary Johnson: The High—and Low—Times of a Presidential Candidate

Last week, on MSNBC, Gary Johnson flunked what may have been his most prominent appearance in this campaign to date. A simple question on the Syrian civil war from commentator Mike Barnicle—“What would you do, if elected, about Aleppo?”— elicited the following stunned, and stunning, response from the Libertarian Party candidate: “And what is Aleppo?”

That gaffe makes Johnson the latest victim of what I call the “Bush-Perry Syndrome.” This ailment, which invariably leaves the victim abashed, even stricken, occurs when a candidate’s inability to grasp either the policies or people he’ll encounter in the Oval Office occurs in a particularly high-profile setting. The syndrome is named for two Texas governors who, despite their common wilting under blinding scrutiny, do not seem to have had much affection for each other.

In November 1999, facing an interrogator from a Boston TV station, George W. Bush came up with only one of four international statesmen recently in the news—a pop quiz that his father could have aced. 

Fortunately, Bush had a vast retinue of retainers and other supporters from his father’s days as a politician—along with a reputation of his own that was not yet sullied by a mismanaged war—which allowed him to survive, though it was a portent of the inattention to detail that would plague him in the Oval Office.

Rick Perry, however, was not as lucky in the 2012 primaries. He had just boasted of his tax plan when he segued into how he’d reduce the number of regulations and the size of government by eliminating three government agencies: Commerce, Education, and—oh, what was the third one? The best he could come up with after a minute, in front of a moderator, his opponents in that November 2011 debate, and an audience that would make his flub go viral before the world, was “Oops!”

These were, according to a Washington Post story last September, moments that would “forever define his brief time as a national figure”—effectively ending not only Perry’s first campaign for the Presidency, but fatally overshadowing his second one, four years later.

Which brings us back to Johnson, who—at least till last week—was being eyed by a not-inconsiderable part of the electorate as a viable alternative to the two wildly polarizing Republican and Democratic candidates. Barnicle couldn’t hide his astonishment over Johnson’s blank response: “You’re kidding, right?” In short order, through the commentator and a host of news articles, Johnson was reminded (or, some might be less charitable in thinking, informed) that, as Syria’s largest city, Aleppo had become the epicenter of that sad country’s ferocious free-for-all.

Others might believe that Johnson might have gotten around to learning about its sad plight, except that, instead of reading Steven Coll’s signed commentary in The New Yorker about the crisis, the former governor of New Mexico had been reading (and maybe re-reading) in the same magazine something that is always a politician’s favorite subject: an article about himself.

The Ryan Lizza article, in the July 25 issue, depicted Johnson as an amiable politico willing to go off the Republican reservation when it came to issues such as abortion, gay rights, and immigration. 

Oh, yes, and willing to make an eyebrow-raising concession to political norms: If elected President, stated this recent C.E.O. of the marijuana-branding company Cannabis Sativa, Inc., a marijuana-branding company, “I will not indulge in anything. I don’t think you want somebody answering the phone at two o’clock in the morning—that red phone—drunk, either.” He last ingested a pot edible a few months ago, he said.

For Johnson, his new-found abstinence also robbed him of the only plausible explanation besides lack of intellectual substance for why he had royally messed up his answer to Barnicle’s question: i.e., that he was too high to grasp it.

“Candor” is a politician’s word for nothing left to lose. At this point in the campaign, Johnson’s surge in the polls resembled nothing so much as the New York Yankees after getting rid of much of their high-priced older talent at the end of July: the younger talent brought aboard, with no expectations on their shoulders, promptly reeled off a string of victories until some tough losses brought them back to earth again.

With yesterday’s news that Johnson’s sub-15% share of polls has led to his exclusion from the first Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the Libertarian standard-bearer may rue what might have been but for his response to Barnicle. At the same time, his new-found freedom to speak could make him an even more credible alternative to the Democrat and Republican Presidential nominees among voters who want to register their chagrin with current politics without doing something completely insane.

After all, nuttier things have already happened in this election—just about every day.

Quote of the Day (John Dryden, on the 'Careful Devil')

“But when to sin our biassed nature leans,
The careful devil is still at hand with means,
And providently pimps for ill desires;
The good old cause, revived, a plot requires.
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.” --John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, Part I (1681)

The 17^th-century poet-playwright John Dryden was such a skilled satirist that he’d probably disdain Texas Governor Rick Perry as too obvious a target for someone of his gifts. Still, it’s hard to read Absalom and Achitophel, published 430 years ago this month, and not sense the contemporary relevance of Dryden’s demonstration of how false words can sway a populace and undermine a head of state’s legitimacy.

If current American politics is a bloodsport (and it is), you should have seen the political scene in Dryden’s lifetime (1631-1700). Nowadays, involvement in politics can bankrupt you, leave you beholden to the Jack Abramoffs of the world, even make your mom wonder whether the guy every senator of a particular party is denouncing could really be the same boy she raised years ago.

In Dryden’s time, backing the wrong political horse could deprive you of position, force you into exile, land you in the Tower of London, provoke attack by thugs, even get you killed. Dryden either saw this happen to friends and relatives or, in a few cases, even experienced it himself. (He was assaulted two years before publication of Absalom and Achitophel, and lost the poet laureate position when he backed James II, the last of the Stuarts to sit atop the English throne.)

If Governor Perry knows his Bible as well as he assures evangelical voters in the GOP primaries, then he’s probably familiar with the source material for Dryden’s poem: the story in 2 Samuel of the revolt of Absalom, illegitimate son of King David, as urged on by David’s trusted counselor Achitophel.

But Dryden put that original tale in a much different context (more on that last word shortly). His readers construed his verse in the manner he had hoped: ancient Israel represented 17^th-century England; King David, King Charles II; Absalom, the bastard son of England’s merry monarch, the Duke of Monmouth; and Achitophel, the Duke of Shaftesbury.

Dryden’s poem was published only days before Shaftesbury went on trial for treason. Instead of venting his own views in an editorial or blog post, as the overwhelming majority of commentators would do today, Dryden did so in verses of biting and elegant brilliance.

Restoration England was as rife as 21^st century America with “Plots, true or false,” as well as with frustrated heads of state and demagogues who could disrupt the nation's stability with lies and innuendoes. A couple of years before the poem appeared, Titus Oates had sent the nation careening through a McCarthyite series of wild accusations, with Catholics the object of fear rather than Communists.

With the 2012 election growing ever nearer (less than a full year away!), the GOP candidates are coming up with their own plots and charges. Perry has become a major contributor to this campaign. President Obama, he charged in a recent TV ad, had called Americans “lazy.”

"Can you believe that?” Perry asked in the ad. “That's what our president thinks is wrong with America? That Americans are lazy? That's pathetic. It's time to clean house in Washington."

Can I believe that? Well, actually, no.

And now, we come to what I mentioned earlier: Context.

Campaign observers mystified why Perry had previously claimed Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke had committed actions “almost treasonous” were positively astonished by the governor’s pitiful debate performances, including the “Brain Freeze” spread everywhere by cable TV and YouTube. Now, they’re even more likely to ascribe his words to a case of swinging from the heels, in the desperate hope that he might strike a home run with the party’s conservative base.

But there’s a secondary meaning of “context”: President Obama’s own words. One of the wonders of the Internet and YouTube is that you can find somewhere, unfiltered, a nearly verbatim statement by a public official. On the White House homepage, you can find the news conference at the Sheraton Hotel in Honolulu last week in which Obama’s words were spoken. To wit:

“I think it’s important to remember that the United States is still the largest recipient of foreign investment in the world. And there are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity -- our stability, our openness, our innovative free market culture.

“But we’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted -- well, people will want to come here and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America. And so one of things that my administration has done is set up something called SelectUSA that organizes all the government agencies to work with state and local governments where they’re seeking assistance from us, to go out there and make it easier for foreign investors to build a plant in the United States and put outstanding U.S. workers back to work in the United States of America.”

There’s a lot more of that in a similar vein—the kind of boring professorial stuff that Obama can do in his sleep, and, judging from the dismayed tone of those who voted for him in ’08, the kind he has done that way all too much the last couple of years.

But find anything in the above where the word “lazy” specifically applies to American workers. If anything, the “lazy” parties in question are state, local and federal governments asleep at the wheel as their competitive advantage was undercut because of their refusal to promote the the USA. In fact, it’s the kind of claim that Perry, that longtime foe of government bureaucracy, has seldom been reluctant to make himself.

Perry’s refusal to back off his claim proved too much even for Bill O’Reilly, here trading his mad-dog persona for that of an unexpectedly more thoughtful truth-teller, much as he did when, at Roger Ailes' strong suggestion, he began to throw cold water on the birther controversy. The Fox News ringmaster asked this time if Perry wasn’t being misleading with this ad. Not at all, responded Perry. In fact, he said, he thought Obama was a socialist.

You have to wonder why Perry persists in such nonsense. Well, one could believe he’s a liar, as raving and rangy as the state he’s been elected to serve as its leading official three times now. Or we can accept his claim of authenticity at face value and believe he’s just really, really stupid.

Hmmm…Now we may be getting somewhere.

The three scariest words I’ve heard in awhile--the three words that most liberals might regard as the scariest in the English language--were ones I read applied several months ago, in an Irish Voice article, to Perry: “Bush without the brains.” That would account for the Great Debate Brain Freeze, as well as for this new incident.

According to two New York Times articles that dealt, at one point or another, with his grades, Perry was voted Most Popular in his high-school class, but he never made the honor roll, and his marks were as bad, if not worse, at the Texas A & M Corp of Cadets.

If, at any point, Perry wasn’t paying attention in English class, he might have missed an all-important session on antecedents. That might explain why he erred so badly in identifying the “we” in Obama’s talk quoted above.

At the start of this post, I speculated that Dryden might find Perry too obvious a target for his pen. But perhaps the poet really did grasp the nature of this fading Republican supernova. After all, how else to explain this Dryden rhyming couplet:

“Behold him setting in his western skies,
The shadows lengthening as the vapors rise.”

Quote of the Day (Michele Bachmann, Revealing Maternal Instincts Toward Rick Perry)

"All of us felt really bad for him tonight."—GOP Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, after Texas Governor Rick Perry stumbled mid-debate to name the third Cabinet department he would eliminate if he wins the Presidency, quoted in Luke Johnson, “Rick Perry'Oops' Moment: Newt Gingrich Jokes About GOP Candidate,” The Huffington Post, November 10, 2011

Campaign observers accustomed to Bachmann assailing her primary rivals as “frugal socialists” are liable to have done a double-take when the Minnesota Representative commented on the Texan’s tangled two-step the other night at the debate.

There are two ways to react to her sudden attack of compassion. The first is the puzzled, wry comment of James Bond upon learning that Pussy Galore had come to his aid in Goldfinger: “I must have aroused her maternal instincts.”

The other is a variation, substituting “Washington” for “Hollywood” and “candidate’s” for “producer’s,” on the immortal quote by the great radio comedian Fred Allen: “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.”

Guess which notion I subscribe to?

Quote of the Day (Rick Perry, with Loose, “Treacherous…Treasonous” Talk)

"If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don't know what y'all would do to him in Iowa. I mean, printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous – or treasonous, in my opinion.”—Texas Governor—and new Presidential candidate—Rick Perry, on Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, quoted in Abby Phillip, “Thrust and Perry: W.H. to Texan: Watch Your Mouth,” Politico, August 16, 2011

I know what you’re thinking: It’s been a long day, and you’re tired. You don’t want to wade through all of this Texas-sized bullchip.

Well, neither do I. But when a newly announced candidate--one, be it noted, from a large state, with a considerable war chest, amid an uncertain economy and, therefore, not only with a terrific chance of winning his party's nomination but of taking the general election in 2012--comes out with the kind of blathering above, we’d all better sit up straight and try to make sense out of it all.

If Texas Governor Rick Perry believes every word of this stuff, all the time, he’s an idiot. If he doesn’t, he’s the worst kind of demagogue. If he starts out not believing it but persuades himself, while delivering it, that he does, he should forsake the stump for the stage immediately.

What does Perry mean by “playing politics”? Is he implying that Ben Bernanke wants President Obama re-elected? Why would that be?

Start out with a fact, a not unimportant one: Ben Bernanke was appointed head of the Fed by George W. Bush. You remember him, right, Rick? A Republican? Not just that, but a conservative one? Oh, and one more hint: your predecessor as governor?

In other words, Bernanke’s appointment was pushed by a President not only dedicated to free-market principles, but one who barely displayed any interest in appointing Democrats to any office during his two Presidential terms, particularly in as high-profile as the one at the Fed. Maybe it was Bernanke’s academic background that led Perry to suspect Bernanke of being a crypto-liberal Democrat.

But there’s another little matter in Perry’s statement: those words “almost treacherous--or treasonous, in my opinion.” Some would question the wisdom of exciting the fevered brain of some talk-radio-addicted yahoo in a state with laws that look kindly on concealed handguns (like Texas!). Just imagine if said yahoo gets anywhere within the vicinity of Bernanke the next time he appears in the Lone Star State. Better yet, don’t.

But leave aside all of this. If Bernanke’s actions at the Fed are close to “treasonous,” what do you say about a governor who has speculated that his state could legally secede from the Union? That he is unworthy to follow in the footsteps of the first (great) GOP President, who told an audience that “as a nation of freemen we must live for all time, or die by suicide”? That he is summoning a dark past of anti-majoritarianism, recalcitrant racism and endless effusion of blood? That those 19th-century advocates of secession, Confederate Lost Cause mythology to the contrary, were guilty of treason? That thus, even before he can run in a single primary, Governor Perry has called into question whether he intends to fulfill the traditional Presidential inaugural pledge to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States“?