New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson didn’t get far with his 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, but that may not deter his immediate predecessor, Republican Gary Johnson, from seeking his party’s nomination as the jockeying for 2012 begins just after the 2010 midterms.
Johnson served two terms as governor from 1995 to 2003. While in office, he proposed legalizing marijuana. Some of the reaction led him to remark that he had gained “a sense of what the Salem witch hunts were about. And I’m the witch.”
He hasn’t officially announced, of course, but his name was floated recently in at least one Republican outlet, along with the revelation that he’d used marijuana for pain relief from 2005 to 2008.
Given today’s GOP orthodoxy, that may be enough to kill his prospects before he can get started. I’m not too sure why, though; the Republicans are always telling us that “You know how to spend your own money better than the government does,” and they’ve never explained why that doesn’t apply to leaves and buds.
Anyway, given Richardson’s poor showing in 2008, it made me wonder about a Westerner ever getting to the Oval Office. Barry Goldwater and John McCain, both of Arizona, got their party’s nominations in 1964 and 2008, but not the presidency.
Both George Bush the Elder and Younger made their political base in Texas, and Lyndon Johnson was about as Texas as you can get outside the Alamo. But even if Texans have been known to wear broad-brimmed hats and pointy-toed boots like Westerners, in political geography Texas is a Southern state. It has voted the same way as Mississippi in every presidential election since 1968.
Richard Nixon grew up in California, but by the time he gained the White House in the 1968 election, he was a New Yorker, and he’d been a creature of Washington for 22 years before that as representative, senator and vice-president.
There was Dick Cheney, a Wyoming product, but he was only vice-president from 2001 to 2009. So that leaves Ronald Reagan, president 1981-89. He was raised and educated in the Midwest but made his career out West in California. Reagan could ride a horse and looked comfortable in a cowboy hat, though I can’t recall any pictures of him in a string tie — which may disqualify him from being considered a Western politician. That, and he never said he was a fifth-generation descendant of a pioneer rancher, which is almost a requirement for office, at least in my part of the West.
Ed Quillen is a freelance writer in Salida, Colorado.
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