Stossel: Who is Gary Johnson

John Stossel

Townhall - Someone was missing from last week's Republican presidential debate, and that's too bad. He's an announced candidate who was a two-term governor of New Mexico, and he makes a case for strongly limited government. Who is he? Gary Johnson. He was left off the platform because the sponsors say he didn't meet their criteria: an average 2 percent showing in at least three opinion polls. But I grilled him because I think people might want to hear from him. When he was governor, he vetoed 750 bills and shed a thousand state jobs. That made Republican and Democratic politicians mad, but in a state with a two-to-one Democratic advantage, this Republican was re-elected. "I got re-elected ... by saying no to the government," he told me.

Gary Johnson

"I was a penny- pincher." His political philosophy comes down to this: "The government has a role to protect me against individuals that would do me harm -- whether that be property damage or physical harm. The federal government has an obligation to protect us against foreign governments that would raise arms again us. But beyond that, government does way too much." What about education? "The number one thing that the federal government could do to improve education in this country would be to eliminate the Department of Education (and) give education back to the states -- 50 laboratories of innovation ... ."

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Stossel: Who is Gary Johnson