Libertarian vice presidential candidate William Weld said Thursday he does not believe that a slip by his running mate, Gary Johnson, will have much of an impact on their chances to be included in televised debates this fall.
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The gaffe occurred during an MSNBC interview about the continuing battle for Syria’s biggest city, Aleppo, which has been divided for years into government and rebel sectors and has been in the news frequently.
Weld, who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign policy think tank, was in Boston on Thursday talking to students and reporters at Emerson College. But hit with “What about Aleppo?”, I immediately was thinking about an acronym, not the Syrian conflict.
Johnson, the former GOP governor of New Mexico, is seeking to get his polling numbers up to 15 percent nationally – the threshold to make the presidential debates that begin later this month. “You can’t fly into crisis mode every time that something happens that excites some people”.
The gaffe has drawn considerable media attention and could make it even more hard for Johnson to build the support needed to participate in the upcoming presidential debates.
“You’re kidding”, replied a stunned Barnicle.
Johnson, a former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico, has been campaigning for a spot on the stage at the first presidential debate September 26.
“JOHNSON: “OK, got it, got it”.
He added, “Can I name every city in Syria? No”.
“You do occasionally blank”, Weld said in response to a student’s question.
“You hear that? That’s the sound of Gary Johnson’s campaign coming to a crashing halt”, one user posted as another speculated that Aleppo “was one of the Marx Brothers, right?”
He also suggested that the United States should “join hands with Russia” to bring an end to the conflict in Syria. “Well, with regard to Syria, I do think that it’s a mess”.
Here’s the thing: If you are a third party candidate, you might get one or, at most, two moments in the course of a campaign in which you move from the fringes of the coverage to the center of it.
“No one is taking this more seriously than me, I feel awful”, he said. “Not remembering or identifying that that’s Aleppo – guilty”, he said.
Johnson is at 7.4 percent and Stein at 3.1 percent, according to a RealClearPolitics average of polls that include them.
As Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin noted, Johnson probably is not the stronger half of the Libertarian ticket when in comes to foreign policy.
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“I understand its importance”.
