Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson wasted no time in self-promotion on Tuesday night when he pleaded in his closing statement to Americans to “waste your voter on me.”
Johnson was one of four politicians to attend the Free and Equal Elections Foundation’s debate of third-party candidates in Chicago.
The former governor of New Mexico said he owes a lot to Ron Paul who ran in the Republican Party earlier this year despite running as a Libertarian in years before.
Johnson’s platform consists mostly of reducing government spending both domestically and abroad.
Host Carmen Russell-Sluchansky talked with Johnson just minutes before the debate.
How are you doing? You’re extremely popular here, I have to say!
It’s a debate among third parties, anyway.
Speak it off! I imagine you’ve watched a lot of the other debates.
I have! I watched them all!
Weren’t there some issues missing?
Last night, foreign affairs. How about the notion of no military intervention? How about the notion of Syria and Libyan Embassy? How about not having dinner in the first place?
But would that take away diplomacy? The opportunity for diplomacy to have the relations?
See, diplomacy sounds wonderful. But what it amounts to – is that we give money to new dictators to take over from old dictators. That’s our diplomacy! We pick new winners. And the new winners rule in ways that we don’t agree with. And yes, we put them in the power and make it better than that was there. But if you take Mubarak as an example, all over a 20-year period he’s pretty bad!
And if we consider we supported Mubarak, we actually supported original Taliban, we supported a lot of these people in history.
We’re supporting the Syrian insurgents. Quarter of them are jihadists. We haven’t learnt anything!
Chickens come home to roost, eventually.
Chickens come home to roost. And when Romney says we want to align ourselves with friends of the U.S. – you know what? Friends of the U.S. may not be friends of the people in the country that they resided!
Bob Schieffer actually asked about Romney. It’s interesting and a bit of surprising. But at the same time, I guess, it was less surprising than both candidates didn’t touch upon the issue of drones, that drones were unacceptably used in foreign policy.
I don’t want to say “never” on anything, but our drone strikes have epitomized why the world hates us. We’re killing innocent people in foreign countries by remote control. We take out the target, but we’re also taking out a lot of innocent people.
I imagine foreign policy is an issue that you and the other three people you’ll be on stage with tonight agree, to some degree.
I think there’ll be a difference up there with regard to one of them.
At least, everybody seems to agree that some cutting of military budget would be a good thing.
I speak for myself – that’s the biggest threat to our national security.
Going back to the debates between Romney and Obama – what are some domestic issues that seem to be missing there? They both did talk about cutting the federal budget, reducing the deficit – that kind of thing.
They both said that. And then they followed it up immediately with who’s going to spend more money on medic care? Medic care is a program that you and I contribute 30,000 dollars to and get a 100,000 dollar benefit! Meaning we contribute less than 1/3 of what we receive! That’s absolutely unsustainable. That ought to be the raging debates – is how we provide a safety net for those truly in need over 65, but still avoid what will be a monitory collapse, because of the fact that we borrowing and printing money to tune of 43 cents out of every dollar we spend.
You were involved in some the Republican primary debates. But I don‘t think you were the one who asked, “If a young person was in an accident and needed a medical care, is it something that the government should provide or should them let them die?” I think Ryan Paul seemed to reply that, “For now, you let them die.” He was obviously expressing that private charity should be more involved. But in the case if there isn’t – you’d be with that concept by Ryan Paul?
No, I wouldn’t. I think that maybe he just misspoke the notion. There are those who are truly in need and there’re systems. And, the federal governments are never going to deal with the dying kid because he was in a car accident. That’s going to be local government, that’s going to be state government that would have set up. And, to my knowledge, there’s never an individual denied healthcare. Healthcare is rendered. Who pays for it – ends up to be the story!
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