Roemer, staying true to his campaign message, is only accepting individual donations of a maximum $100. His last FEC filings were for just $231,532; his campaign said he raised about $50,000 this month. He wasn’t able to get on the Florida ballot, and this is the first time he’s been to the state this year. He flew here alone, met his volunteer coordinator (who happens to live in Jacksonville), and had a cup of minestrone soup and a half a BLT at the IHOP on the way over.

"You still in?" Johnson asks Roemer.

"I’m still in, still trying. I’ve always been hard-headed," Roemer replies, chuckling.

When he’s done here, Buddy’s flying back up to New York for a taping of Morning Joe. "We’ve been on four or five times and we raise large sums of money every time, $25, $50 a gift," Roemer says. The best shows for fundraising, though, are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, where the candidate has appeared to critique the campaign finance system. We are walking under prefab thatched huts, on a little footpath under rustling palms in the hotel courtyard, to a small, musty hotel room the ACLU has given him to rest before the speech. He promises his ACLU host we’ll only be thirty minutes, but the interview takes more than an hour. In his first answer he touches on almost all of my questions, hop-scotching from issue to issue with the enthusiasm of a breathless child.

He declares pretty much everything—his support base, the Occupy movement, a speech he gave in front of the Chinese Embassy, to be awesome. ("It’s awesome!" or "It was awesome!" or "Just awesome!") He is sitting on the edge of his seat, blue eyes flashing, his greying eyebrows arched high above his wire-framed glasses, so emphatic that every quote ends in exclamation. His breadth is both exhaustive and exhausting, and we continue on like this, unspooling bits of information as we go.

On Romney: "The one percent!" And Gingrich: "The lobbyist for the one percent!"

On his first legislative priorities as president: "HB 1 campaign reform, HB 2 fair trade, HB 3 energy independence, HB 4 tax reform!"

On his cabinet: "It’d be white and black, man and woman. It’d look like America—it’s young and old, people who know how to tweet, people who don’t know how to spell it!"

On the Occupy Wall Street movement: "I love young people, I learn so much, I went to Occupy Wall Street, Occupy DC, Occupy New Hampshire, Occupy Boston—just to listen! I didn’t call them up and say here I come, I just went to listen, and they gathered around. It was awesome!"

We run through a brief biography: born in Shreveport, went to Harvard at age 16, graduated from the business school, ran for Congress without taking PAC money, and won. Then ran for Governor without taking PAC money, and won. Switched mid-term from Democrat to Republican—and lost reelection. Made another go of it in 1995, and lost again. Decided to come out of retirement to protest the massive influence of moneyed interests in Washington.

He snatches the complimentary copy of USA Today and starts drawing a Venn Diagram—Republicans in the right circle and Democrats on the left, a little space overlapping between them. "These are the Dems—I used to be a Dem—these are the Repubs. This is 30 years ago. See this space in here where they overlap? That’s where you pass bills! That’s where you got it done. That’s where Reagan led."

He draws two circles, far apart. "That’s where we are now. The Dems are pulled to the left—no, wait, I got ’em on the wrong side." He scribbles out and redraws. "Dems pulled to the left by this wing, Repubs are pulled to the right. NO ACTION! GRIDLOCK!" he bellows, though I’m only a few feet away, on the hotel room sofa. "That’s all that’s changed. Here’s where I am." He draws himself in the middle. "I’ll have Democrats and Republicans. I’ll have a Democratic running mate. It will be a unity ticket."