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The electoral circus again: This guy could choose the next president – it could even be him!
ton could have 268 votes by winning the coastal states that Democrats usually win, and Trump could collect 267 from the pro-Republican middle and southern states – meaning no candidate has the magic 270. Johnson could also win Colorado, a pro-pot state, and make a deadlock even more likely.
And (it gets weirder) they must choose from the top three candidates, ie Clinton, Trump or Johnson. And this vote will be made by the Congress elected in November, so no-one knows how many Democrats or Republicans there’ll be in each state delegation. Given how much the Republican members hate Hillary Clinton and the fact that zero Democratic members would vote for Trump, they might just compromise on … Gary Johnson. The pot-loving dude who’s climbed the highest mountains on each of the seven continents (truly) and responded to Trump calling his rival Senator Cruz ‘a pussy’ by calling Trump ‘a pussy’. Just sayin’, Gary’s no dreamboat. And then there’s the possibility Bernie Sanders gets himself on the ballot in a few states, Vermont for example, and triggers the same deadlock, and then … well, all bets were already off, right?
Getting weirder
Wrong subs
Now Gary could take advice from his backers and hand over his crucial handful of votes to Clinton or Trump in exchange for … what? Making David Koch secretary of the treasury and Gary’s running mate William Weld vice-president (there is no law saying the prez and vice-prez must be from the same party), or something more vile and/or bizarre. But if the electoral college is deadlocked, the Constitution says the House of Reps has to decide and the decision will be made by each of the 50 states having just one vote. So California, with 53 members of the House, and Wyoming, with one, will each have one vote.
Meanwhile, we learned last week that the 12 French submarines Turnbull ordered, for $60 billion, are the wrong ones. According to the procoalition Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) last week, ‘the capabilities required for our future submarine would in many ways be better performed by nuclearpowered boats’. Turnbull & Co could point out that the very same poobahs at the ASPI said last year that people who argued we should have ‘gone nuclear’ were ‘hysterical’. Turnbull’s big fat business skills are not looking so good.
Phillip Frazer
According to all the latest polls, Gary Johnson is the choice of 11 per cent of Americans to be their next president, behind Hillary Clinton on 38 per cent and Donald Trump at 37 per cent. Gary is a former governor of New Mexico who is the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, presenting himself as a sane alternative to Trump and a chilled-out alternative to Clinton. Libertarians are against government interference in our personal and business lives. In the US, their emphasis is on letting the ‘free market’ run the economy, which is why most American libertarians are – or wanna-be – rich business people. Johnson is a business dude who took time out from his job as CEO of a company called Cannabis Sativa Inc to run for president. The company creates products made from weed as increasingly liberal laws passed across the USA allow them to. So how come a candidate hardly anyone knows is already over ten per cent in the polls? Because Trump and Clinton turn so many voters off, and because many of Johnson’s policies appeal to Bernie Sanders’ voters, so he picks up followers from all three of them. And how come Johnson might get even higher in the polls very soon? Because Libertarianism’s richest backers are extremely rich: David Koch, net worth over $30 billion, was Libertarian candidate for vice-president in 1980, and is considering committing hundreds of millions of bucks from his own bank accounts and his pals’, to back Gary and his running mate William Weld.
MU
Gary Johnson with a popular cash crop. Photo from A Libertarian Future interview http://bit.ly/garychoof
Weld is a rock-ribbed member of the American aristocracy and was governor of Massachusetts in the 1990s. If Johnson-Weld can get up to 15 per cent in the polls they will qualify to participate in the presidential candidates’ debates alongside Hillary and Donald, and if they can win just one state on election day (November 5), they could throw the election into new and uncharted waters.
Huge buts How could they win a state? Technically, Americans don’t directly elect the president – each state counts their citizens’ votes, and announces who won their state, meaning who got the most votes. Each state has a number of ‘electoral college’ votes equal to how many members they have in the Congress, and the candidate who gets 270 or more of these 538 votes becomes President, BUT… …the huge BUT this year is that if Johnson wins his ‘own’ state, New Mexico, he would have five electoral votes. It’s quite possible Clin-
LLU M V E T
Q Read more of Phillip Frazer’s work at coorabellridge.com.
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