He is mushy, and seems to have no core principles beyond 'fiscal conservatism', that I was able to reason from. He has a cost benefit analysis for everything which is sort of 'as much as the other side will let me get away with without screaming too much' which of necessity always drops the crucial issues if the establishment screams too much. He doesn't seem to have an interest in sovereignty, which as government becomes more and more 'international' and removed from the dictates of individual citizens is a bad posture to have as president, imho. He was for NAFTA for example, then when running for president after it was unpopular partially retracted that, etc. Clearly, he is not a strict Constitutionalist. He believes in 'compassionate war' (not the right term, but going places with rich tactical or natural resources, where governments are also doing bad things to their people and bombing them to Kingdom Come to point out that killing people is bad.)
This is another thing I saw, people criticizing him for a cost-benefit analysis. Why is that a bad thing, it's just common sense, something you do before evaluating any situation that will always end up siding with liberty.
I don't agree with him on humanitarian wars, but that's major nitpicking and there is a distinct difference between GJ style humanitarian war and your typical humanitarian war. He would be doing it through the congress with a declaration for genuine humanitarian reasons, not to overthrow a government a few people at the top of the food chain don't like, like in Libya or Syria which he opposed.
I don't know how you can say he doesn't have core principles beyond fiscal conservatism because he has always shown to have strong core principles on free market education and health care, civil liberties, 2nd amendment and drug policy and to a lesser extent foreign policy and I say that because he didn't talk much about that compared to the other issues as governor as it was a national issue but he was against Iraq from the start, against Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Libya, drone strikes and wants war through the congress with a declaration so I really can't understand how you can have beef with his foreign policy unless you're nitpicking, he is better than 99.999999% of all US politicians in that area.
He isn't as strict a constitutionalist or as principled as Ron, but he's still very constitutional and principled especially compared to every other politician. This is the problem - people act hostile towards someone who goes around the country speaking for the cause of liberty because he isn't as perfect as Ron.
Gary Johnson should be considered a hero by the movement and it's really sad that he not only isn't considered a hero but gets shit on by people here and called things like "Scary Johnson" and is met with a complete lack of enthusiasm. The guy is rich - he didn't have to run for governor twice or form the Our America Initiative in 2009 and travel across 30 states, speaking at over 150 events about the ideas of the liberty movement or go all across the country campaigning for the ideas of the liberty movement when he ran for president in 2012 but he did it because he cares about the exact same things we care about.
