Gary Johnson wages an eccentric GOP campaign

LOS ANGELES - As campaign stops for Republican presidential candidates go, the International Drug Policy Reform Conference in downtown Los Angeles seemed like a strange choice.

There was reggae music booming from big speakers, lapel pins shaped like marijuana leaves, and a speech by California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the liberal former mayor of San Francisco who is famous for granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Yet there Gary Johnson stood last month, drawing cheers from a crowd of drug decriminalization activists.

Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, has promised that if he wins the Republican nomination and is elected president, he'll issue a pardon for anyone serving prison time for a nonviolent marijuana crime. He has also pledged to overhaul the tax system and cut federal spending by 43 percent.

What Johnson's shoestring presidential campaign lacks in resources and media attention - which is a lot - it has made up for in eccentricities. Consider when the candidate showed up to talk economics with protesters at Occupy Wall Street. Or his 458-mile barnstorming tour of New Hampshire - on a bicycle.

In October, Johnson rented a house in Manchester and decided to focus his campaign efforts entirely on New Hampshire, where he hopes his candid style and libertarian leanings will appeal to GOP primary voters famous for their independent streak.

"My entire career, everything has always been different," said Johnson, a former building contractor and self-made millionaire who won the governorship in 1994 with no political experience. "And isn't that what people want these days? Something different?"

But eight months into his campaign, Johnson has yet to climb higher than 3 percent in polls of voters' preference for Republican primary candidates. He has been left out of most such polls and been excluded from all but two of the televised Republican debates. That has made an imposing challenge out of fund-raising and expanding his name recognition beyond his small but ardent core of supporters.

"I'm basically a nonentity," he said.

Hurting his cause may be competition from a more established small-government Republican with libertarian allure, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

Johnson campaign adviser Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard University economist, said poll data suggested that in the Republican field, "there may not be room for more than one libertarian candidate."