Garrett Quinn breaks the news* that Judge Jim Gray will serve as Gary Johnson’s running mate if/when the latter wins the Libertarian Party’s presidential nod. (The convention takes place this weekend.) In the process, Gray delivers an assessment of the LP’s chances that manages to be both wrong and realistic.
I agreed to run only if we were going to run to win. I am not going to do this “Let’s have a moral victory” stuff. I believe, and I think [Johnson] agrees, that we have a good, solid 1.5 percent chance of winning this election.
Maybe the ticket can get 1.5 percent of the vote. A 1.5 percent chance of victory is a whole ‘nother thing, and for electoral purposes, it is totally phantasmagorical – only a pedant or drea mer would doubt that the next president will be a Republican or Democrat. Still! A Johnson-Gray ticket would unite two of the most-respected men in the libertarian sphere. Johnson’s more famous, but Gray’s built a reputation as the drug decriminalization advocate who doesn’t sound loopy when he talks about it. His candidacy statement (coming out officially in a little while) leads with a boast about his work on issues from “drug policy reform to competition and choice in education.”
*If you think that the arrangement of a third party’s ticket isn’t news, I humbly ask you to examine what counts as a “headline” in the Obama-Romney race.
