Yeah, another cycle of all the "real libertarians" having no better qualifications to be president than I have and then having the party bailed out by somebody with an actual presidential resume who wants the ticket spot.
This argument is quickly becoming insufferable to me. Yes the LP has a habit of nominating former Republican governors and congresspeople.
But it sure seems to me like the fact that they're former governors and congresspeople is what's doing the work there, and it seems like motivated reasoning that libertarians keep not understanding that.
None of the "real libertarians" seem to want to do any of the work required to be a legitimate presidential candidate. And if you don't have a national platform or national name recognition or the capacity to raise mega millions to buy those things then you don't have any room to complain when the party nominates someone who does. There are threshold qualifications to be taken seriously as a candidate and nobody else who runs for this nomination has any of them.
It's a lot easier to just claim the fix is in than to do all that hard work to develop a worthy resume, and that's the whole point. They don't want to do the work. They don't want to get elected to Congress. They don't want to become a mayor, or a governor, or make millions of dollars, or develop a national media platform.
They just want to go straight from complaining on the internet to being President of the United States, and that is not how this process has EVER worked.
Do the work. If there were a bunch of Libertarian ex-governors and ex-congresspeople and ex-Senators lining up for this nomination and then the nod was still going to GOP people, you'd have an argument. But there aren't and you don't.
Politicians who've held high office; celebrity CEOs; generals who just won a major war.
That's pretty much it in terms of who Americans are willing to treat like a -- not even necessarily credible or viable, but facially plausible enough to even be noteworthy -- contender for the presidency.
There are exceptions to having first been congressman or governor or senator, but they're pretty narrow and specific and not that common. And one could argue that's unreasonably constrained and we should have more economics professors and aerospace engineers in the mix, but it's really not crazy that people think some kind of high-level political / executive / military experience is necessary for the nation's highest political / executive / military office.
