2012 Presidential Election (free for all edition)

[NC_Skins]

Who Is Gary Johnson? And Why Is the GOP So Mad at Him? | TIME.com

The GOP isn’t ignoring him anymore. Now that Johnson is threatening to siphon votes from Mitt Romney in close elections in Colorado and Nevada (he’s also on the ballot in 46 other states and Washington, D.C.), Republicans are doing whatever they can to limit his appeal. Michigan party officials kept him off the ballot because he filed his paperwork three minutes late. In Pennsylvania, the GOP hired a private detective who went to canvassers’ homes and flashed his old FBI badge before questioning the signatures they collected, a lawyer for Johnson’s campaign alleged. The state GOP and the investigator denied doing anything improper. (On Oct. 10 a judge decided that Johnson will be on the Pennsylvania ballot.) The experience has left Johnson, 59, alienated from some of his old comrades—which, it turns out, he doesn’t mind at all. “Going to Republican events, as I did a zillion times, I listened to Republican candidates do their spiel. I cringed at a lot of what they said, whether it was abortion, the terrorist threat, the homophobia, the ‘illegal immigrant is the source of all our problems’—man, that stuff made me crazy. The kook element of the Libertarians gets up, and I don’t cringe.”

“Ron Paul is a social conservative,” he says. “I’m not. Ron Paul would talk about legalizing marijuana, but he’s never smoked marijuana.”

Brilliant.