It was Monday at the Republican National Convention, and some of the best-laid plans were going awry: a carefully nurtured political spectacle was upended by nature. The convention itself had been postponed a day, in deference to then-Tropical Storm Isaac, even though it turned out that Isaac, like an overscheduled politician, skipped its own party—the storm had more pressing engagements, two hundred miles west. (By Monday afternoon, the sense of relief was giving way, once more, to a sick sense of dread: Isaac seemed to be heading straight for New Orleans.)

Meanwhile, Gary Johnson, the former Governor of New Mexico, and the Libertarian Party candidate for President, had made an unannounced change to his schedule, too. He had planned to spend much of the day at Indigo, a coffee shop in downtown Tampa. But then Johnson, who has celiac disease, heard about a nearby restaurant that offered gluten-free pizza. So he trundled over to Pizza Fusion, accompanied by his entourage, which numbers two. And after lunch, he talked about his Presidential campaign, which has been long and difficult—he has been running, now, for nearly three years, and yet he can still enjoy lunch in downtown Tampa, amid a Republican convention, without fear of being interrupted either by supporters or detractors.

[#image: /photos/5909543a2179605b11ad3d65]

Instead of citing poll numbers, Johnson talked, as he often does, about , a Web site and app. “One-point-nine million have gotten online, answered thirty-six questions,” he said. “It pairs you up with the candidate most in line with your views. Based on that Web site, I’m the next President of the United States.” Suffice it to say that other Web sites predict a different result. Last year, Johnson competed in the Republican primary, but he didn’t attract much money or attention, and he was shut out of many of the debates. In December, he announced that he was quitting the Republican race in hopes of running as a Libertarian, and this past May, he won the Libertarian Party nomination.

Throughout this process, Johnson has had difficulty escaping the long shadow cast by Congressman Ron Paul, whose enthusiastic and well-organized supporters helped make him a visible and troublesome presence in the Republican race. Paul and Johnson agree, broadly, that the government should slash spending, abandon the war on drugs, and avoid foreign entanglements. But the two candidates have a complicated relationship, one that can’t be explained merely by their relatively minor policy differences. (Johnson, unlike Paul, believes that humanitarian military interventions are sometimes necessary, and he doesn’t share Paul’s passion for a return to the gold standard.)

“I didn’t think Ron Paul was going to run,” Johnson says. “But if he did—and he might have, and he ended up doing it—I just thought it was going to really be a lot harder to marginalize two candidates saying the same thing, as opposed to one.” He says he sympathizes with the frustration of Paul’s supporters. “I think Ron Paul continued to be marginalized,” he says. “So for all those Ron Paul supporters that have worked really hard to reform the Republican party, I think what they have to show for it are knots on their head, from banging their head up against the wall.”

In recent months, Paul has disappointed some of his supporters by declining to pick a fight with the Republican Party, or with Mitt Romney. He has also declined, rather conspicuously, to endorse Johnson, who finds himself in the strange position this week: he is arguing Paul’s case more strenuously than Paul himself. Johnson was brought to Tampa by P.A.U.L. Fest, a three-day pro-Paul festival—the acronym stands for People Awakening and Uniting for Liberty—which Paul himself did not attend. (Paul held his own, overlapping rally on Sunday night.) On Monday, Johnson said that Paul deserved more recognition from the Republican Party. “If I were Romney, I would have Ron Paul speak at the convention,” he said. (Paul wasn’t given a speaking slot, but his son, Senator Rand Paul, is scheduled to address the convention tomorrow.) “Have him say what he wants to say. That, in and of itself, would be major: ‘Look, we are a big tent.’ But he’s shut out! So where does that support go?”

In some ways, this should be an exciting year for an eager budget-cutter like Johnson: there seems to be a growing appetite, especially among Republicans, for proposals to sharply reduce the cost of entitlement programs. At Tea Party rallies nationwide, calls for lower spending get even louder applause than calls for lower taxes. Johnson looks strikingly youthful (he is fifty-nine, though he could probably pass for thirty-nine), and he says that he considers himself an optimist. But he has been disappointed by President Obama, and says he finds little reason to be hopeful about Romney. “Right now, you’ve got the two parties arguing over Medicare, and the fact that each one of ’em is going to spend more on Medicare than the other one,” he says. “There’s an optimism that we might actually address these issues, but the reality is we’re not. We’re not! We’re just not.” He laughed. “And that’s terribly depressing.”

After three years on the trail, Johnson is trying to stay hopeful about his own campaign, despite the polls. (Johnson’s name is often omitted from Presidential polls, although a recent Rasmussen survey found that sixteen per cent of voters had a favorable impression of Johnson, while twenty per cent had an unfavorable opinion.) “You’ve got to have momentum, and you have to exceed expectations,” he said. “And I’m willing to suggest that on Election Day, I’ve got momentum, and that I think I will exceed expectation. Because the expectation is zero.”

_For more of The New Yorker’s convention coverage, visit The Political Scene. You can also read Jane Mayer on Republican women, Hendrik Hertzberg on the “We Built It” slogan, George Packer on foreign policy and the R.N.C., Amy Davidson on the floor fight, on the Romney love story, on Chris Christie, and John Cassidy on Ann Romney’s speech.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster. Illustration by Maximilian Bode.