YOU won't be seeing Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, in tonight CNN's debate forum for aspirants to the GOP presidential nomination. Why not? Here's what it took to get invited, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader, a sponsor of tonight's debate:

The New Hampshire Union Leader and its debate co-sponsors invited every candidate who met any one of the following three standards: - An average of at least 2 percent voter approval in at least three national polls released in April by ABC, The Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, FOX, Gallup, Los Angeles Times, Marist, McClatchy, NBC, Newsweek, Pew, Quinnipiac, Reuters, USA Today or Time. - An average of at least 2 percent in at least three national polls released in May by any of those organizations. - An average of at least 2 percent in polls of New Hampshire voters conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center and released in May.

The organisers of the event maintain that Mr Johnson fell short, but his supporters beg to differ, citing three of the designated national polls in which the governor averaged 2%. The organisers reply that one of the polls did not include all potential candidates, such as Rudy Giuliani, and that in "unrestricted" polls, Mr Johnson averages a meagre 1.3%. The Union Leader concludes:

[O]rganizers defended the criteria, saying that without using polling results as a standard, there would be no objective way to determine who among the field of 144 presidential prospects who have already filed with the Federal Election Commission should receive invitations.

This seems silly. Is there an objective way to determine who among those not, or not yet, running must be included in the relevant polls? Mr Giuliani, has not announced his candidacy, nor has he been seen hitting the hustings in Iowa and New Hampshire in clear anticipation of a run for the nomination. The whimsical choice to exclude from consideration the polls that would qualify Mr Johnson for participation in the debate hardly seems objective, or fair. In any case, the 2% threshold seems wrongheaded once you consider that Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Clinton all polled at 1% around this time in nomination campaigns they went on to win. Or so says Mr Johnson's campaign in a video protesting his exclusion from tonight's debate.

Perhaps 2% should be a sufficient but not necessary condition for inclusion. If the ex-CEO of Chucky Cheese can pull 2% in national polls, sure, let him in. But there's something wrong with a set of criteria that excludes a former governor who won election to his second term by a 20% margin and left his state with a fat budget surplus. As I've argued before, I think Mr Johnson's level-headed pragmatic libertarianism is a tough sale to a Republican Party less interested in governing than in the posturing politics of American exceptionalism. Still, I once heard Mr Johnson speak at a small event, and I found that his no-bullshit demeanour and impressive record of executive success has a way of sneaking up on you; about a week later you realise you were pretty impressed. I'm sceptical he can win the nomination, but it remains that Mr Johnson is a more qualified and credible candidate than Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, or Ron Paul, and I suspect that once the organisers of nationally-televised debates stop arbitrarily applying arbitrary criteria and start applying a little sense, a healthy number of Republican voters will find Mr Johnson's experience and low-key charm quite appealing, and the polls will start to show it.