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.
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