My Presidential Endorsement: The Text Version

Heavily edited and cleaned up from the audio version (beginning at about 12 minutes in to this week's podcast):

I admit that I was first stuck on None of the Above in my preferences for the 2016 Libertarian presidential nomination, primarily because I expected a "coronation" of Gary Johnson. I didn't necessarily believe that NOTA could win, but I thought that we could get more media coverage of the opposition to Johnson by having NOTA pull 30-35% of the delegate vote than by having some other candidate lose to Johnson.

I've become convinced that NOTA does not and will not enjoy that level of support. I'm still opposed to Gary Johnson, and I'll go into why there are candidates I can't support below, but first:

I endorse Darryl W. Perry for the Libertarian Party's 2016 presidential nomination, and for election to the office of President of the United States.

Disclaimer: Darryl is the primary sponsor of The KN@PP Stir Podcast, but that is not why I am endorsing him. In fact, I specifically told him that a sponsorship didn't buy an endorsement, and of course he didn't expect it to. He's not that kind of guy. He sponsors the podcast because he supports my work. It is reasonable to think, and I freely admit, that having known and worked with Darryl for many years does contribute to my reasons for endorsing him. All that said ...

I endorse Darryl, to begin with, from a simple premise: If the Libertarian Party is going to run a presidential candidate in 2016, it should run a libertarian candidate. And Darryl is a libertarian.

Depending on how big your definition of the libertarian tent is, you might also classify some of the other candidates as libertarians, and I won't contest that classification. But if we're going to talk about which candidate is most libertarian -- if we tick through the Libertarian Party's platform and Statement of Principles -- none of the other candidates is even in Darryl's league when it comes to representing what our party stands for. It's just that simple.

Secondly: Darryl speaks well. He acquits himself well in debate. He can defend libertarian positions. I believe that he will represent our party well on television and especially on radio, as he is a long-time co-host of one of the top talk radio shows in America, Free Talk Live, which ranks 38th on Talkers magazine's 2015 "Heavy 100" list and runs on more than 170 stations worldwide.

He has a good speaking voice. He knows how to use it. He knows how to debate. He knows how to argue. He knows how to present libertarian positions in an understandable, attractive and euphonious manner.

Hands down, Darryl is a good candidate.

Now, let's look at the other candidates.

The elephant in the room -- literally -- is Gary Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico. Governor Johnson defrauded the Libertarian Party.

In 2012, one of the issues hovering over his campaign for the LP's nomination was his campaign debt, which he reported to the FEC as $152,000, characterized as manageable, and told the party it could get him a government welfare check (FEC "matching funds") to defray. He lied. We nominated. Months later, after the nomination and after the general election, he amended his FEC report for April of 2012. His actual debt as of that time, it turns out, was $1.078 million, not $152,000. His 2012 campaign remains $1.4 million in debt and his "repayment" proposal is to just screw some of his creditors and "pay" others with uses of his mailing list.

Governor Johnson is horrible on media. He comes off like a young Rodney Dangerfield who isn't funny. He looks embarrassed, he looks tense, he looks sweaty, he has trouble talking ... he's not much of a mediagenic candidate.

And then of course there's his tax plan, the "Fair" Tax, which calls for every man, woman and child in the United States to be put on a federal government welfare check for life (the "prebate" scam). Not very libertarian. So scratch Gary Johnson.

Then we have Austin Petersen, who openly repudiates the Non-Aggression Principle, which is the Libertarian Party's lodestar, embodied in its Statement of Principles. You even have to certify to become a member of the LP that you do not advocate the initiation of force to achieve social or political goals. I just don't see how we can nominate a candidate who openly says he opposes what we stand for and expect anyone to take us seriously for any reason. So scratch Austin Petersen.

Then we have the back of the pack -- the various weirdos who show up wanting our nomination, like Derrick Michael Reid, who posts photos of himself in an 1870s US Army cavalry uniform, advocates having 10-year-olds view public executions so they grow up right, and insists that if we nominate him he'll sweep all 50 states in November. Yeah ... enough about those guys.

That leaves us with two.

One is Dr. Marc Alan Feldman. He's a good guy. I like him. He's been a Libertarian Party activist for several years. He's run for office as a Libertarian. I don't agree with all of his positions, I don't find him an especially dynamic speaker, etc., but if the Libertarian Party nominates him I think I can live with that. I don't find him embarrassing, anyway.

John McAfee, I believe, is our best bet for lots of media, lots of coverage, lots of attention. He seems to be a fairly solid libertarian. He has some deviations -- for example, he wants to create a new government "Office of Digital Transformation" to cover cyber war issues which I don't agree with -- but they're not nearly as bad as Johnson's "Fair" Tax hooey and weird obsession with sharia law and so forth. If McAfee is the nominee, I can support him, promote him, work for him if he needs my help, and vote for him in November.

But still: It all comes down to who is the best candidate.

When I go to Orlando as a delegate to the 2016 Libertarian National Convention and it comes time to decide who will represent the Libertarian Party on the national stage this summer and fall, I will proudly and unapologetically cast my first ballot, and any subsequent ballots until he wins or is eliminated from contention, for Darryl W. Perry. He's that good, both objectively and by comparison to the other choices we have.

If you intend to be a delegate, or if you know some delegates and believe they value your opinion, I encourage you to take a closer look at Darryl and throw your support behind his candidacy and campaign.

Nil Sine Troglodytarum?

Every four years, the Libertarian Party chooses a presidential candidate. And every four years a boatload of candidates show up looking for the party's presidential nomination. Some of those candidates are "serious" candidates, and some of them are, well, somewhat less "serious."

The $64 question for the people and organizations whose actions and events feed into the nomination process is: Which candidate is which kind of candidate? Which candidates should we pay attention to, invite to state party conventions and candidate debates, and otherwise offer a little bit of limelight (such as it is in LP circles) to?

Answers to that question range from "invite anyone who has declared his or her candidacy -- it's only fair to give everyone a look" to "invite only the candidates who meet some arbitrary set of standards we set" to "don't actually INVITE any of them, but if any do show up, give them a few minutes of speaking time and let whoever's interested set up candidate-centered events that don't get any kind of official recognition from our organization."

This year, at least one candidate has not been invited to the Colorado Libertarian Party's state convention (scheduled for this coming weekend). The non-invitation was not an oversight. It was an explicit decision by the Colorado LP's executive committee. Not only did they agree not to invite Austin Petersen, they agreed to, insofar as their official capacities are concerned, ignore him.

Here's a story on the non-invitation. Here's another.

I'm skeptical of the claim in the first story that "[t]his is the first time that a state Libertarian Party has refused to invite a Presidential candidate who has been recognized by the national party."

Why am I skeptical? Three reasons:

1. "Recognized by the national party" isn't a very well-defined term. Every four years the Libertarian National Committee argues over which candidates will be listed on the lp.org web site and why. The criteria change over time, and there's almost always a minority of dissenters from those criteria.
   
2. State parties have their own criteria for "recognition." For example, John McAfee was not invited to participate in last weekend's candidate debate at the North Carolina Libertarian Party's convention. Why? Because only the candidates listed on the ballot for tomorrow's presidential primary were invited, and McAfee declared too late to be on that ballot.
   
3. This is the Libertarian Party's 12th presidential election cycle. Given 50 state parties, that would mean 600 state conventions over the years. The total is not actually that high because there haven't always been Libertarian Parties in all 50 states, but "several hundred" is a reasonable, if vague, estimate. While I haven't dug through archives to prove it, I'm reasonably certain that some state LPs did not invite Daniel Imperato to their state conventions in 2008, or Jeffrey Diket in 2004, or Charles Collins in 1996. And so on and so forth. I picked those three because I remember their names and recall that they did attend the national conventions in the years they ran; Collins made the debate stage, Diket received speaking time (and yelled at the delegates, live on C-SPAN, that they were baby-killers and didn't deserve to win), and I am pretty sure Imperato at least got the minimal nominating speech time in Denver. All of those would seem to me to constitute some reasonable minimum of "recognition by the national party."

The situation with Petersen is somewhat different.

To the extent that there's any real polling in this LP cycle -- e.g. the post-debate straw poll at the Alabama/Mississippi convention -- Petersen is currently in third place behind Gary Johnson and John McAfee, from a fairly large field (12 candidates now? Something like that).

Petersen has a background with the Libertarian Party (he worked at LPHQ circa 2008).

Petersen's campaign is registered with the Federal Elections Commission and, as of end-of-year 2015 reporting, claimed to have raised and spent more money than the other campaigns.

And Petersen's explicit published platform is, in my opinion, the second "most libertarian" after Darryl W. Perry's.

So, why doesn't Colorado want him?

Well, apparently the other Colorado LP board members agree with Caryn Ann Harlos that Petersen is not a legitimate candidate for the nomination because he openly repudiates the Non-Aggression Principle as codified in the LP's statement of principles.

Harlos believes that nominating Petersen would violate the statement of principles and would therefore, as an action of the national convention, be valid for appeal to the party's Judicial Committee. And she further believes that the LPCO treating Petersen as a legitimate candidate would be a violation of both the national bylaws and the state party's bylaws.

I agree with Harlos on the import and meaning of the Non-Aggression Principle and the statement of principles. I disagree with her legalistic interpretation of the national bylaws and believe that the delegates have the rightful power to allow Petersen's name to be placed into nomination, to listen to what he has to say, and to nominate or not nominate him.

But where the invitation is concerned, hey -- who the Colorado LP invites to its convention is the Colorado LP's business and no one else's.

And I think there's a good case that Petersen falls into the same category as Imperato, Diket, Collins et. al, even though he's so far proven more persuasive and successful than any of them.

The category in question is: Troll. Per Wikipedia:

In Internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion, often for their own amusement.

Does the definition fit the candidates I'm describing? Not perfectly. But better than that glove fit OJ Simpson's hand by a damn sight.

Until Austin Petersen decided to run for president as a Libertarian, he was an adamant "I Stand With Rand" Republican.

His campaign so far has been  a smirky, smarmy, patronizing, one-liner-laden troll stroll.

For example, last month, over the course of less than a week, he went from 1) claiming that unless contributions came in NOW NOW NOW, he might not be able to make it to several state conventions, to 2) claiming that he had offered to charter a private jet to take himself and two other candidates (McAfee and Johnson) to Washington for a debate (Johnson declined in favor of existing commmitments). Does anyone really believe he went from too broke for Greyhound to so flush he could charter a G-4 in a week?

So far as I can tell, Petersen's entire angle is using the LP's presidential nomination contest to build his name recognition and personal brand. He's not the first person to do that (we've had actual nominees do it), but his motivations and public statements make his motivations clear enough that it's at least understandable that one or more state LPs might decide "we're here for the real candidates, not the publicity-seeking also-rans."

Still, I do have to say that if I sat on a state LP's executive committee and the question came up, I'd vote to invite him to participate. To the extent that this campaign has "tiers" of "seriousness," while he may not be a former governor or an eccentric multi-millionaire, he's also not just some weirdo running around in an 1870s cavalry uniform and babbling about how children should be made to attend public hangings to l'arn them somethin'.

I doubt that Colorado's executive committee will reconsider its decision at this late date, but I hope they do. And if they don't, I kind of expect (and kind of hope) that Petersen will show up anyway and, if denied time on a stage with other candidates, just spend time talking one-on-one with likely national convention delegates.

And I guess that's my two cents on the subject.

Looks Like Johnson is Actually Going to Throw in

Gary Johnson resigned today as CEO of Cannabis Sativa, Inc. "to pursue political opportunities" (hat tip -- Bruce Majors). Which, of course, means he's planning to go after the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination again.

As J. Wilson points out at ALibertarianFuture.com (in a mis-titled post implying that it's "official" -- it won't be until and unless Johnson actually declares), Johnson has some real problems.

He drove his 2012 Republican presidential campaign six figures into debt, then hit up the Libertarian Party to get him a government "matching funds" welfare check. Then he drove his general election campaign seven figures into debt, where it remains as of now. Also, in a year-and-a-half as CEO of Cannabis Sativa, Inc., he managed to tank its stock price -- down by about 93% from $10.75 a share to less than 70 cents a share.

Of course, his most likely "main" opponent, John McAfee, also managed to lose considerable money, going from a net worth of about $100 million (after selling his eponymous anti-virus software company) to $4 million or so in the 2008 financial collapse. On the other hand, McAfee's latest project has already raised five times its goal on IndieGoGo, so he seems to be on the way back up, unlike Johnson.

I'm still with None Of The Above, with Darryl W. Perry as my second choice, but I think McAfee has great potential if he gets back to his earlier, more libertarian roots and away from some of the deviations in his campaign site boilerplate.

Johnson, not so much. He's yesterday's bad news. The LP should have nominated R. Lee Wrights last time and would be stump-stupid to make the same exact mistake twice in a row.