Former N.M. Gov. Gary Johnson is considering running for president in 2012, according to a writer for The American Conservative.
In an article published Monday, Bill Kauffman starts with a conversation he had with Johnson at Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic in Minneapolis last year, an event that coincided with the GOP nominating convention.
From Kauffman’s article:
“At breakfast the morn of the rally, I sat across the table from a friendly dude wearing a peace-sign T-shirt and looking like an affable old surfer. He introduced himself as Gary Johnson, the former two-term governor of New Mexico. Over the next day, I spent a fair amount of time chatting with Governor Johnson: mountain-climber, triathlete, vetoer of 750 bills.
“He told me that he may take a shot at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 as an antiwar, anti-Fed, pro-personal liberties, slash-government-spending candidate– in other words, a Ron Paul libertarian.”
Kauffman also writes that, as the current issue of The American Conservative went to press, “Governor Johnson told me that he was keeping his options open for 2012.”
Before that, Johnson’s last public comment about the 2012 presidential race came earlier this month, when he told the Albuquerque Journal that it “couldn’t be more inappropriate to be talking about” whether he will run in 2012 so soon after a new president took office. He said the Journal could ask him again in “about 18 months.”
In November, Charles Frohman wrote on the Gary Johnson 2012 Facebook group that he met with Johnson “and got confirmation of his interest in running for the 2012 presidency.”
The Facebook group currently has 956 members.