A Tale of Two Waynes?

Wayne Allyn Root, February 14th, 2010:

“People ask me: "You're running for national Chair, will you run for President in 2012?' Let me give you an honest answer: I think this party right now is too disorganized to ever do well in a presidential election. And I don't think, until I can get elected chairman and build it and organize it and be CEO of this party for a few years, I don't think it’s worth it running for president, or senator, or anything else -- you'll get 1% of the vote. I want to seriously run for president, after I’ve been national Chair, in 2016, after I've built this party, and we really are structured and organized, and I have a chance to actually get 5, 10, 15 million votes.

That statement occurs at about 4 minutes, 30 seconds into this video, taken at the California Libertarian Party's 2010 state convention.



[hat tips -- Independent Political Report and California Freedom]

Wayne Allyn Root, date as yet undetermined:

I'm the Libertarian vice-presidential candidate, be the presidential candidate in 2012, and hope to be the Ross Perot of 2012.

Later in the same video ...

I was the vice-presidential nominee in 2008. I plan to be the presidential nominee in 2012.

The video above was uploaded to YouTube on March 29th, a month and a half after the California LP convention speech.

I've written to the video's creator to find out when the interview took place. It's possible that that was before the California convention speech -- possible, but not likely, and certainly not long before that speech.

How can I know that? Simple: In the interview, Wayne references the financial collapse of Greece, and he does so in a tone that indicates he expects the viewer to know what he's talking about. While there have been low-key rumblings about Greece's debt load and economy for years, the matter didn't become a major news story until late February or early March of 2010.

So, is Wayne Allyn Root running for the Libertarian Party's 2012 presidential nomination or not? There seem to two extant, mutually exclusive answers to the question floating around out there ... and unfortunately Wayne himself can't be trusted to answer the question truthfully.