Analysis: Rigged election claims may leave lasting damage
Donald Trump keeps peddling the notion the vote may be rigged. It’s unclear whether he understands the potential damage of his words, or simply doesn’t care. Trump’s claim, made without evidence, undercuts the essence of American democracy, the idea that U.S. elections are free and fair, with the vanquished peacefully stepping aside for the victor. His repeated assertions are sowing suspicion among his most ardent supporters, raising the possibility that millions of people may not accept the results on Nov. 8 if Trump loses. The responsibilities for the New York billionaire in such a scenario are minimal. Trump holds no public office and has said he’ll simply go back to his “very good way of life” if Democrat Hillary Clinton wins. Instead, Clinton and congressional Republicans, should they retain control, would be left trying to govern in a country divided not just by ideology, but also the legitimacy of the presidency. As Trump’s campaign careens from crisis to crisis, he’s broadened his unfounded allegations that Clinton, her backers and the media are conspiring to steal the election. He’s accused Clinton of meeting with global financial powers to “plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” and argued his opponent shouldn’t have even been allowed to seek the White House. “Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “Instead she is running for president in what looks like a rigged election.” Trump is referring to Clinton’s use of a private email system while serving as secretary of state. Republicans, and some Democrats, have harshly criticized her decision to do so, but the FBI did not recommend anyone face criminal charges for her use of a private email address run on a personal server. Trump has offered only broad assertions about the potential for voter fraud and the complaints that the several women who have recently alleged he sexually accosted them are part of an effort to smear his campaign. “It’s one big ugly lie, it’s one big fix,” Trump told a rally in North Carolina on Friday, adding later: “And the only thing I say is hopefully, hopefully, our patriotic movement will overcome this terrible deception.” Trump’s supporters appear to be taking his grievances seriously. Only about one-third of Republicans said they have a great deal or quite a bit of confidence that votes on Election Day will be counted fairly, according to poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. During a campaign event Tuesday with Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, a voter said she was deeply concerned about voter fraud and pledged to be “ready for a revolution” if Clinton wins. Pence waved away the woman’s rallying cry, saying, “Don’t say that.” And on Sunday, in an interview with NBC’s “Meet The Press,” he said the campaign will “accept the will of the American people, you bet.” There is no evidence voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States. A study by a Loyola Law School professor found that out of 1 billion votes cast in all American elections between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 known cases of impersonation fraud. Trump’s motivations for stoking these sentiments seem clear. One of his last hopes of winning the election is to suppress turnout by making these final weeks so repulsive to voters that some just stay home. Trump advisers privately say they hope to turn off young people in particular. This group leans Democratic but doesn’t have a long history of voting and is already skeptical of Clinton. Trump is also likely considering how he would spin a loss to Clinton, given that he’s spent decades cultivating a brand based on success and winning. His years in public life offer few examples where he’s owned up to his own failings and plenty where he’s tried to pass the blame on to others, as he’s now suggesting he would do if he’s defeated. Clinton appears increasingly aware that if she wins, she’d arrive at the White House facing more than the usual political divides. “Damage is being done that we’re going to have to repair,” she said during a recent campaign stop. But that task wouldn’t be Clinton’s alone. The majority of Trump’s supporters are Republicans. If he loses, party leaders will have to reckon with how much credence they give to claims the election was rigged and how closely they can work with a president whom at least some GOP backers will likely view as illegitimate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s office wouldn’t say Saturday whether he agreed with Trump’s assertions the election is being rigged. A spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Ryan is “fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.” Republicans have already experienced the paralyzing effect of Trump stirring up questions about a president’s legitimacy. He spent years challenging President Barack Obama‘s citizenship, deepening some GOP voters’ insistence that the party block the Democrat at every turn. Jim Manley, a former adviser to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., recalled the skepticism some Republicans had about Obama. “I’m afraid a President Clinton is going to start off with far too many people raising similar questions,” he said.
Hillary Clinton says she takes ‘no satisfaction’ in Donald Trump’s actions
With Donald Trump on the defensive, Hillary Clinton says she is taking “no satisfaction” in his actions and promising to repair the damage and project a message of unity during the campaign’s final weeks. Hours after her Republican rival furiously defended himself against multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, Clinton spoke Friday of the need for national healing in a Seattle fundraising speech that also saw her call upon Americans to help her govern if she’s elected president. “This election is incredibly painful. I take absolutely no satisfaction in what is happening on the other side with my opponent,” Clinton said while visiting a Seattle campaign field office. “I am not at all happy about that because it hurts our country, it hurts our democracy, it sends terrible messages to so many people here at home and around the world.” The Democratic presidential nominee said earlier at a Seattle fundraiser that while she understands many voters want to “turn away,” her supporters need to help her win the election to “demonstrate the positive, optimistic, confident, unifying vision of America that I believe in and that I think, together, we can demonstrate America’s best days are still ahead of us.” While President Barack Obama is ending his two terms with high approval ratings, Clinton’s struggles with high unfavorability ratings and questions about her honesty could undermine any electoral mandate she might achieve in November. So as Trump has dealt with a firestorm that started last week with the release of an 11-year-old videotape of him bragging about kissing and groping women, Clinton is increasingly aiming her message not only at Democrats but at disaffected Republicans and independents turned off by the spectacle. At her fundraiser at the Paramount Theatre, where Trump backers gathered outside on a blustery day, one bearing a sign that read, “Hillary for Prison 2016,” Clinton struck a tone of conciliation. She said she wanted people “to start looking after each other again,” and that while she would aim to pass laws and seek “some real national commitments,” people needed to support each other at the end of an acrimonious campaign season. “I will be asking for your help. I need your help not just to win this election but to govern and to heal the divides that exist in our country right now,” Clinton said. “I do believe there isn’t anything we can’t do once we make up our minds to do it.” The former secretary of state said those challenges extend across the globe, saying she had talked to many foreign leaders who complained about Trump’s praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin or her opponent’s calls for a temporary ban on foreign Muslims entering the country. “So make no mistake, we do have to repair the damage which he has done, which we will do. But on both domestic and national security grounds, repudiating his candidacy sends exactly the right message,” she said. Leading in many battleground state polls, Clinton’s team is assessing the possibility of expanding the map to compete in traditional Republican states like Utah, Georgia and Arizona. She is preparing for next week’s final debate in Las Vegas and then an intense stretch of campaigning. While she continues to call Trump unqualified to be president, much of her message appears aimed beyond November — and into a possible first term. “Bringing people together to solve problems is key to our democracy. There’s no question about it,” Clinton said. “And I want us to do that in a spirit of mutual respect, listening to one another, having each other’s backs.” Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Autherine Lucy Foster joining Alabama Educator Hall of Fame
The first black person to attend the University of Alabama, Autherine Lucy Foster, is among four people who are being honored as the newest members of the university’s Alabama Educator Hall of Fame. The group will be honored at a ceremony Saturday night at NorthRiver Yacht Club in Tuscaloosa. Foster became the first black person to attend Alabama in 1956. Campus riots broke out and the university removed her. Foster’s expulsion was reversed in 1988, and she graduated from Alabama with a master’s degree in elementary education in 1992. The other honorees are being inducted posthumously. They include former Alabama educator professor Adolph Crew; former state school board president Ethel Hall; and Judy Merritt, who was the first woman to serve as a college or university president in Alabama.
Email Insights: ‘Dump Trump’ anger sparks Becky Gerritson write-in campaign
There may be a case of buyer’s remorse going on in Alabama’s 2nd District, where earlier this year voters overwhelmingly voted for U.S. Rep. Martha Roby over primary challenger, Wetumpka Tea Party co-founder and President Becky Gerritson. Now it appears constituents of the 2nd District are a bit uneasy with Roby’s recent withdraw of support from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Roby made the decision to “dump Trump” following the release of the bombshell hot mic recording in which Trump brags about groping women without their consent to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. For Gerritson, that’s not a good reason to throw in the towel and abandon the GOP nominee. She says the 2nd District agrees, which is why, according to Gerritson, a write-in campaign has been mounted to oust Roby and elect herself on Nov. 8. Gerritson addressed the situation in the 2nd District in an email: The sudden “Dump Trump” movement last week has many people up in arms. Voters where I live, in Alabama’s 2nd district, are FURIOUS that Rep. Martha Roby was one of the first to “Dump Trump.” They are so mad, in fact, that they’ve burned up her phone lines and they have mounted a write-in campaign for her primary challenger. Yes, that would be me, Becky Gerritson. I challenged her in the 2016 Republican primary. I understand the frustration of voters who are fed up with politics as usual. Donald Trump represents hope for those individuals, and they are not about to give up that hope. Candidates like Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson were welcomed by disenfranchised Republicans because they pledged to break the cycle of the political elites and big-money lobbyists from controlling our politics. I do respect, yet disagree with, those who have been consistent in their opposition to Trump, such as Sens. Ben Sasse and Mike Lee, and even commentator Erick Erickson. But in the recent “Dump Trump” movement, a correlation is apparent … follow the money! The list of prominent names recently dumping Trump could be titled “The Chamber’s Bought-and-Paid-for RINOs.” In this campaign cycle, the pseudo-conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of our nation’s biggest supporters and financial backers of amnesty. I personally went up against the U.S. Chamber in my own primary in which they spent nearly $2 million promoting liberal Martha Roby. As you can imagine, such an amount allowed them to utterly control the airwaves for their establishment candidate — particularly in our rural Alabama district. No other conservative faced such a massive obstacle in their primaries — although the more limited spend by the Chamber is partially to blame for the toppling of conservative Tim Huelskamp. Many on the list of GOPers who have disavowed Trump reads eerily similar to the list of candidates the U.S. Chamber supports. Here are a few examples: Joe Heck: NV (beneficiary of $3,550,374 as of latest reports) Rob Portman: OH ($4,606,324) Kelly Ayotte: NH ($1,910,300) Mark Kirk: IL ($550,150) John McCain: AZ ($1,550,450) Martha Roby: AL (my primary opponent – $1,750,000) Pat Toomey: PA ($5,106,000 — has refused to say whether he will vote for Trump) Ron Johnson: WI ($750,300 — has been tepid in his support) It seems clear that the Chamber is using its massive war chest to compel opposition to Trump from within the party. And over the last week we have seen that it’s working. Martha Roby and other “Dump Trump”ers are listening to their biggest campaign contributors rather than their constituents. President Barack Obama has taken our country down a path toward socialism, unsustainable debt, and unprecedented threats to our national security. A vote for Hillary is a vote to continue Obama’s fundamental transformation of America. In this crucial election cycle, we must defeat Hillary Clinton. We must support the Republican nominee and the party platform that upholds conservative values. Despite calls for presidential write-in candidates, like Rep. Roby proposes, the reality of state election laws make a presidential write-in an impossible scenario for a Republican win. So conservatives, keep your eyes on the prize. Take a deep breath, pray, and vote.
In Donald Trump’s ‘Apprentice’ run, reality wasn’t what it seemed
The skyline shimmers, the music pulses and Donald Trump‘s helicopter swoops in for a landing. Oozing authority, the billionaire strides purposefully — in slow-motion, for added impact — toward some important matter of business in “New York, my city,” as Trump calls it. Week by week, year by year, 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” or “Celebrity Apprentice” served as a grand homage to all things Trump, running from 2004 to 2015. Donald Trump the actor made Donald Trump the businessman seem pretty fabulous. Americans never saw what was taking place behind the scenes. The show offered Trump the ultimate opportunity for product placement: Contestants fawned over Trump’s gilded-to-excess Fifth Avenue apartment, his casinos, golf courses, even his girlfriend and later wife Melania. They promoted his modeling company, his water bottles and other Trump-branded businesses, as the man himself spun out bits of business advice known as “Donaldisms” and bemoaned the daunting task of telling eager young dreamers, “You’re fired.” This picture of Trump as smart, decisive, blunt, benevolent, rich — really rich — and never wrong turned out to be the ideal launching pad for his improbable presidential campaign. That it didn’t always jibe with reality didn’t seem to matter to the millions of Americans who turned “The Apprentice” into a national phenomenon. Or to NBC, which reveled in the show’s sky-high ratings early on, and kept tinkering with the formula in an effort to revive them in later years. It turns out that the unseen side of “The Apprentice” was darker: Show insiders have told the AP that in his years as a reality TV boss, Trump repeatedly demeaned women with sexist language, rating female contestants by the size of their breasts, and talking about which ones he’d like to have sex with. And one former contestant, Summer Zervos, said Friday that Trump made unwanted sexual advances toward her in 2007 when she met with him at a Beverly Hills hotel to talk about a potential job. Zervos, who had competed on the show in 2006, said Trump became sexually aggressive during their meeting at the hotel, kissing her open-mouthed and touching her breasts. Speculation about what kind of Trump conduct might be lurking in video out-takes from the show has swirled in recent days, since the release of “Access Hollywood” footage showing Trump joking about grabbing women by the genitals and kissing them without asking. But the owners of the “Apprentice” production company say they cannot legally release footage from the show. Trump’s boorish behavior toward women wasn’t apparent to viewers of the reality TV show. And for all of the snickering about the silliness of reality TV, pop culture expert Robert Thompson says, the show was “very, very important to shaping, framing and establishing the person of Donald Trump who would then go on to become the GOP nominee.” “If ‘The Apprentice’ had never happened, I don’t think Donald Trump would be where he is right now politically,” says Thompson. Trump already had an outsized reputation when he launched “The Apprentice” in January 2004. By that point, the businessman with a knack for self-promotion had already soared high, fallen from grace, become something of a punchline and was back on the rebound, more focused on licensing his name than building things. He’d eagerly done any number of cameos in movies and TV shows to promote himself as a titan of business. “My name’s Donald Trump and I’m the largest real estate developer in New York,” Trump declared as he launched Season 1, Episode 1 of “The Apprentice” with trademark immodesty. “I’ve mastered the art of the deal and I’ve turned the name Trump into the highest quality brand. As the master, I want to pass along my knowledge to somebody else.” That was a fact-check-worthy way to start things off, and Trump’s hometown newspaper, The New York Times, obliged by pointing out that while the audacious star of “The Apprentice” might have had the highest profile among the city’s developers, plenty of others were doing more and bigger deals. Trump had been approached with reality TV proposals before, but nothing clicked until “Survivor” producer Mark Burnett came to him with the idea of a show set in the “urban jungle” of New York. The original idea was to have a different business executive serve as host every season, with Trump the first, says Jeff Gaspin, head of program strategy at NBC Entertainment in 2001-2002 and later chairman of NBC Entertainment. “His role was originally fairly small — introduce the challenge then appear in a brief boardroom scene,” Gaspin said in an interview. “Donald turned out to be a natural and really loved being on camera. The boardroom scenes were expanded to almost one-third of the show.” People gravitated to Trump’s persona as a tough, decisive, and irreverent boss who offered “at least the illusion of a pathway to success,” says Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an associate dean who wrote public critiques of the show for newspapers. He got to know Trump after the businessman called to complain about the academic’s harsh reviews of Trump’s on-air business practices. To many Americans, says Sonnenfeld, Trump represented the “embodiment of the American dream,” harking back to the “Daddy Warbucks” imagery of decades past. It made for good TV — never mind the reality that Trump got ahead with inherited money, that his casinos were headed for more bankruptcies, that his deals often weren’t as lucrative as he’d suggested or that his projects left behind a trail of contractors saddled with unpaid bills. Beyond of all of that, there are the new revelations about Trump’s vulgar comments about women contestants and crew members, and Zervos’ allegations that Trump made sexual advances toward her. Trump himself initially seemed almost gob-smacked by how quickly the show took off. “I go into the boardroom, I rant and rave like a lunatic to these kids, and I leave and I go off and build my buildings,” Trump told CNN’s Larry King in 2004. “And then it gets good ratings, and they pay
Gender unescapable, in unexpected ways, at campaign’s close
Hillary Clinton is the country’s most famous working mother. For 40 years, she’s been at the center of countless conversations about gender and politics. Even her pantsuits have been debated for decades. With her at the top of the Democratic ticket, gender was always going to be an inescapable part of the presidential race. Still, no one expected this. In its final weeks, the 2016 campaign is awash in charges and countercharges of assault and groping, sexist slurs and graphic language. Several women have accused Republican nominee Donald Trump of sexual misconduct and assault. The New York billionaire, meanwhile, has argued that Clinton “viciously” ”attacked” the women who said her husband, former President Bill Clinton, committed rape and sexual impropriety. Trump supporters commonly wear T-shirts with slogans such as “Hillary sucks but not like Monica” and “Trump that Bitch.” At several Clinton rallies this past week, hecklers interrupted her speeches with shouts of “Bill Clinton is a rapist.” Trump ended the week by pantomiming the descriptions of his alleged assaults, mimicking pawing at a women’s chest and reaching under a skirt. It’s an election, Clinton said, that “makes you want to unplug the internet or just look at cat gifs.” Her longtime supporters see the White House as nearly within their grasp. But the nasty tone of the contest has tempered their joy at shattering what Clinton once called the “highest and hardest glass ceiling.” “It distracts from it enormously. Who ever dreamt this would be the way this campaign would turn out,” said Cynthia Friedman, who co-founded a Democratic National Committee effort to support women in politics with some help from Clinton in 1993. “Watching Hillary at the debate, I actually got almost physically sick to see somebody abused and spoken too so rudely to their face.” Advocates worry that Trump’s impact goes beyond Clinton, and potentially could undo decades of progress on issues such as sexism and sexual assault by normalizing violence against women. “Would there have been sexist mudslinging? Absolutely. But not like this,” said Nita Chaudhary, a founder of the women’s advocacy group UltraViolet. “We’ve made progress on rape culture and on sexism in the last two years ago. It feels like the Trump candidacy is undoing all of that.” Some Republicans are equally dismayed, seeing Trump as a force that will alienate women from their party for years to come as polls indicate the political gender gap has reached historic levels. This weekend, Clinton’s campaign is trying to capitalize on that divide, with events focused on contacting female voters, including Republicans. “If Donald Trump had set as his mission the destruction of the Republican Party, it’s hard to imagine what he’d be doing differently,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, a Republican strategist and former deputy campaign manager to presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina. “It will be an uphill battle to win back all of the voters Trump is losing in this scorched earth campaign.” From the moment Clinton began plotting her first run for president, her advisers debated how she should handle her gender. In 2008, Clinton largely ignored her history-breaking potential and focused on her experience, concerned about research showing resistance among voters to a female president. More than a year before she officially announced her second run, Clinton’s future campaign manager Robby Mook wrote in an email, “Running on her gender would be the SAME mistake as 2008, ie having a message at odds with what voters ultimately want. Injecting gender makes her candidacy about HER and not the voters and making their lives better.” Replied future campaign chairman John Podesta, “Gender will be a field and volunteer motivate but won’t close the deal.” Podesta and Mook discussed the matter in a 2014 email exchange made public this past week by the WikiLeaks organization following the hack of Podesta’s emails. Clinton’s campaign has blamed the hack on Russia. Clinton’s gender did become a part of her 2016 campaign message, with references to her roles as a mother and grandmother becoming a mainstay of her stump speech. “I realize I might not be the youngest candidate in this race,” she’d often say during her primary campaign. “But with your help, I will be the youngest woman president.” That message has been largely replaced by a broader pledge to be a president for all Americans, even those who do not support her candidacy. Aware of Clinton’s own unpopularity, her campaign is focused on giving voters a reason to back her, focusing on her policies and credentials. “It’s been a high wire act for some time,” said Ann Lewis, a longtime Clinton adviser. “You have to deal with what’s happening, but this can’t take over the presidential campaign.” While Clinton may be able to ignore Trump’s taunts, voters have not. The negative tone of the campaign has exasperated deep national divides, prompting anxiety across political lines about how Clinton and congressional Republicans can unite the country should she win the White House. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to recover from this,” said Mary Deutmeyer, 70, a retired teacher from Iowa who cast her ballot early for Clinton on Wednesday. “It’s almost like walking in the gutter.” That’s not a concern to Trump supporters such as Shelli Simontacchi, who attended a Trump rally Friday night in North Carolina. She stressed she didn’t condone or even like Trump’s language about women, but argued there are “bigger issues at stake.” “It doesn’t mean you’re against women if you vote for Trump,” she said. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Possible Election Day problems worry civil rights advocates
New ID requirements. Unfamiliar or distant polling places. Names missing from the voter rolls. Those are just some of the challenges that could disrupt voting across the country through Election Day. While most elections have their share of glitches, experts worry conditions are ripe this year for trouble at the nation’s polling places. This is the first presidential election year without a key enforcement provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, and 14 states have enacted new registration or voting restrictions. Adding to the uncertainty is a call by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for supporters to monitor the polls for voter fraud and concerns by the federal government that hackers could try to disrupt the voting process. All this has civil rights advocates on guard. “There is going to be a lot going on in this election that we are going to have to watch out for,” said Penda Hair, a civil rights lawyer who represented the North Carolina NAACP in its bid to overturn that state’s voter ID law. With no national standards for voting, rules vary widely across states and even counties. Voting experts and civil rights groups are encouraging voters to do their research before heading to the polls. That includes checking to ensure they are registered and finding their voting location, as well as understanding their rights if they face any problems. “People should not leave without casting a ballot,” said Wendy Weiser, head of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s School of Law. “If you are an eligible voter, you should be able to have your vote counted no matter what anyone is saying.” Adding to the potential for confusion are new voter ID laws in nine states as well as reduced hours for early voting and changes to polling locations in some states. In North Carolina, at least two counties no longer offer Sunday voting. Deborah Dicks Maxwell, 60, said she is worried that — along with early voting hours largely limited to between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. — will make it harder for people to cast ballots in her home county of New Hanover. She said Sunday voting was popular during North Carolina’s primary in March. “With the short hours we have and the high turnout that generally occurs in a presidential election year, someone is going to be in line,” said Dicks Maxwell, president of the New Hanover County branch of the NAACP. “Why penalize the citizens when you could have extended the hours and made it easier for them?” State officials have said the county didn’t offer Sunday voting in 2012 and that the current plan represents an increase in evening hours available during early voting. Long lines led to frustration during Arizona’s March primary, when some voters in the Phoenix area waited hours to cast ballots after county election officials opened 60 polling stations — fewer than half what is typical. Melissa Dunmore, a 26-year-old social worker from Phoenix, still doesn’t know if her primary ballot was counted. She waited an hour to vote, only to be told she wasn’t registered despite checking her status before heading to her polling place. She said she won’t be deterred and plans to vote early this time. “If we stop voting every time it was hard or it was denied, women wouldn’t have the right to vote, black people wouldn’t have the right to vote,” Dunmore said. Meanwhile, some 33 states have accepted an offer from the federal government to check their voter databases and reporting systems for vulnerabilities after hackers attempted to breach systems in two states over the summer. Trump’s warning that the election might be rigged along with his call for supporters to monitor polling places has alarmed some advocacy groups who say such comments threaten to undermine voter confidence in the election. “We are deeply concerned about the chilling effect this call might have on the electorate and minority voters in particular,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “And we are concerned about the disruption this will cause for election workers.” Clarke and others say Trump supporters at the polls could lead to intimidation at a time when the U.S. Department of Justice has had to make substantial changes to its federal election monitoring program following the 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act. For the 2012 election, more than 780 federal observers and Justice Department staff were sent to 51 jurisdictions in 23 states. Now federal election observers can be sent only to those locations where there is a court order, which exists for only a small number of places in five states. With fewer federal election observers on hand, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said last week that Justice Department employees will be sent instead to at least as many states as 2012. But she did not say how many officials will go and how much access they will have. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Libertarian’s Gary Johnson has never been the typical politician
Ronald Reagan won a historic landslide victory in the 1984 election, taking 49 of 50 states. But he failed to win the vote of a young Republican businessman in New Mexico whose willingness to go against the political grain has made him this presidential campaign’s X-factor. Outraged at the GOP president’s budget deficits, Gary Johnson for the first time voted for the Libertarian candidate. Ten years later, Johnson became New Mexico’s governor, and was known for vetoing bill after bill before he became a national curiosity for advocating legalized marijuana. Now, at age 63, he’s the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, a marijuana-promoting fitness aficionado who summited Mount Everest and now climbs a political mountain with tough odds of reaching the top. Though Johnson has grabbed more attention for his stance on drugs and difficulty answering foreign-policy questions, fiscal conservatism remains his animating force. “I always pushed the envelope,” said Johnson, who’s proposed deep cuts to military and other government spending as well as elimination of the federal departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Education, and Housing and Urban Development. “I wasn’t a wallflower when I was governor and I do think government spends too much money in areas that don’t make a big difference in people’s lives.” Before he came out for legalizing marijuana shortly after his re-election as New Mexico governor in 1998, Johnson was nicknamed “Governor Veto.” He piled up a record 700-plus vetoes during his two terms in Santa Fe. Admirers liked his dedication to limiting the size of government. Detractors considered him narrow-minded and incurious about the outside world. “He just does not believe government should be involved in dealing with social problems,” said state Sen. Jerry Pino y Ortiz, who ran two social service agencies during Johnson’s administration and feels the former governor let down his achingly poor state. “It’s like the dad who’s proud that his kid gets by on the smallest allowance at school, but the kid’s shoes have holes in them.” Rod Adair is a Republican political strategist and former state lawmaker who agrees with Johnson’s small-government philosophy. The problem, Adair said, is that the former governor knows relatively little beyond that. He says Johnson prefers to focus on his obsessive fitness routine — he’s an ultramarathoner and triathelete who summited Mount Everest in 2003 after leaving office as governor— rather than learn about unfamiliar areas like foreign policy. “Running for president, I don’t care where you’re governor, it’s very different and you need to have a degree of intellectual curiosity,” Adair said. “He doesn’t have that.” Supporters and admirers in New Mexico agree that Johnson was an unusual politician. He didn’t horse trade or hold grudges, they say, and was generally direct and honest. Those are attributes that have won him an unusually wide swath of support in the current presidential race, helping him appeal both to some disaffected liberal Bernie Sanders voters and more traditional libertarians. He and running mate Bill Weld, Massachusetts’ former GOP governor, are the only third-party ticket on the ballot in all 50 states Johnson has fallen short of the 15 percent threshold in national polling needed to enter the presidential debates, polling at about 8 percent for several months. If he receives 5 percent of the vote in November, that would be a bonanza for the Libertarian Party, assuring it of a valuable place on state ballots in the 2020 election. Johnson’s deer-in-the-headlights response to a question from a television interviewer about what he’d do to deal with the crisis in the Syrian city of Aleppo — “What’s Aleppo?” — earned him derision in September, though he quickly apologized. Weeks later, Democrats feared Johnson was pulling enough young voters from [Hillary] Clinton to throw some swing states to [Donald] Trump. Johnson’s campaign put out a lengthy statement urging Republicans disgusted with Trump’s taped boasts about forcing himself on women to vote Libertarian instead. Johnson says he’s happy to criticize Clinton, even though his running mate says his focus is solely on Trump. In an interview at a hotel near his Santa Fe home, Johnson predicted the national debt would more than double to $50 trillion should Clinton implement her various plans. She’s proposed spending that would be paid for by $1.4 trillion in tax increases on the wealthy. Johnson said those would doom the economy. “If those tax hikes go through, I think the recession of 2008 is mild by comparison,” Johnson said. Johnson was born in North Dakota, but his father moved the family to New Mexico when the future governor was 13. Raised by a school teacher and an accountant for the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, Johnson founded a construction company while he was still at the University of New Mexico. The firm grew and became a major contractor on Intel’s chip factory in Albuquerque, making Johnson his fortune. In 1994 he entered a competitive four-way Republican primary for governor. Johnson squeaked through with just over 30 percent of the primary vote, then defeated an incumbent Democrat whose party was so badly split that his own lieutenant governor ran against him. The new Republican governor confronted a Democratic-controlled legislature and it was ugly. Johnson vetoed more than half of the bills that came to his desk that first year and kept rejecting ones afterward. “When you have both houses of the legislature in the opposite party you’re always going to have a lot of sparks that fly, especially on financial issues,” said David Harris, Johnson’s longtime finance secretary. “He always applied the same test to everything,” Harris added — veto it “if it didn’t improve the government or it raised taxes.” Over the years Johnson routinely shot down efforts to create commemorative license plates that would collect extra money for wildlife preservation, firefighters or West Point graduates. He vetoed a proposal for a state holiday recognizing Hispanic labor icon Cesar Chavez. He vetoed a $2 hotel room fee increase in the city of Las Cruces. He even vetoed the entire budget in
Guest lineups for Sunday news shows
Guest lineups for the Sunday TV news shows: ABC’s “This Week” — Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; former CIA Director David Petraeus. ___ NBC’s “Meet the Press” — Vice President Joe Biden; Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence. ___ CBS’ “Face the Nation” — Pence, Kaine ___ CNN’s “State of the Union” — Rep. Nancy Pelosi; former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. ___ “Fox News Sunday” — Pence, Kaine ___ Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
