A little more than a month ago, after former Rep. Bob Barr
started to edge into the Libertarian Party’s presidential race, I
had an idea. Former Sen. Mike Gravel, a former Democrat, was
already gunning for the nomination. It wasn’t every year that
politicians of the Left and the Right ditched the parties they’d
spent their entire careers in to become Libertarians. I started
planning an event with both candidates, jokingly promoting it on
Facebook as a “great debate.”
I got a call from Wayne Allyn Root.
“What’s this I’m hearing about a Libertarian debate?” Root said.
“How are you going to have a Libertarian debate without the guy
who’s going to be the nominee?”
He laughed, but he was serious about this. When I wrote an early
prognosis on the Libertarian race, I said Root — a sports
prognosticator and gambling guru who’s hosted TV shows, radio
shows, and motivational speaking junkets — was running third
behind Barr and movement speaker and author Mary Ruwart. Root had
called to point out that he, not anyone else making a run at the
nomination, was on the phone with delegates every spare minute he
had. Every minute, at least, that he wasn’t spending with me. “I’m
calling up every one of these people who will actually be voting
for the nominee!” Root said. “I talk to 25 or 30 of them every
day!”
Root did talk to those delegates, missing only a handful,
leaving messages on their machines. And he charmed his way into the
forum I set up with Barr and Gravel. I watched as reporters flipped
out cameras and digital recorders to capture the wisdom of the
former senator and the lion of the Clinton impeachment, then saw
Root struggling to convince them that he, too was a frontrunner.
The day after the forum, Root called to laugh about the
Washington Post’s photo of the event, which cropped him
out. “I’m going to frame that and put it on my wall.” He laughed
again.
In Denver, as the LP settled on its ticket, Root got his
bragging rights. On the party’s fifth ballot, he fell short of the
party’s nomination but held a stockpile of delegate votes that made
more than the difference between Barr and Ruwart. He took the
stage, pumping his fists. “I want to spend the next year learning
from the master,” Root said. “Barr/Root ‘08! Come on, let’s bring
it home!” The guy the national media mostly ignored ended up on the
highest-polling (at this moment, at least) Libertarian ticket since
the Reagan years.
WAYNE ALLYN ROOT is a failure. He’ll tell you as much. He’s “the
world’s most successful failure,” a man who stumbled from job to
job, succeeding at none of them, before he found the one that made
him a millionaire. He used to be a Republican, then decided to
become the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee. When he fell
short, he threw his votes to Bob Barr and became the
ex-congressman’s running mate. What Wayne Root wants, Wayne Root
gets. Sort of.
The little attention that the LP’s ticket has received has
centered, mostly, on Barr. The evolution of a Republican drug
warrior into a Libertarian war horse is an odd, twisty story.
Root’s story is almost as entertaining. He is, in his own words,
“the world’s most successful failure.” His first general-interest
book (he’s written six of them, most about the art of gambling) was
titled The Joy of Failure, and it revealed how he’d
basically talked his way into a glamorous career with a bullish
sales plan papering over his lack of qualifications.
As Root tells it, he tried, and failed, at thirteen different
careers. He was rejected from law school. He failed as a realtor
four different times, blowing tens of thousands of dollars on
brochures for properties no one bought. He managed a Manhattan
restaurant, then “got bored and quit.” He became an entertainment
agent, signing one client, and snagging him one job — in six
months. His biggest innovation was “Ivy League Home Cleaners,” a
maid service staffed with college graduates, none of whom, quite
understandably, wanted to become maids.
Root’s breakthrough came when he realized what he really wanted:
to be a sports prognosticator. He decided to become “greatest
sports prognosticator in the world,” officially, sending out
hundreds of press releases with that tagline, assuring reporters
that they had to know about Wayne Allyn Root. Thanks to a few
newspapers with feature holes to fill, the P.R. offensive paid off.
Root founded a company (which failed) and wrote a book on risk
(also a failure), but every little piece of credibility got him
closer to TV personality status. Once he made it on TV, he was in:
No one could take his fame away from him. His formula for success,
he discovered, was something he could bottle and give to everybody.
He taught it to his wife when she put on 80 pounds during her
pregnancy. “She started living my program. The pounds started to
melt off!”
WITH ALL OF THAT behind him, how could Wayne Root not get into
politics, the domain of district attorneys and trial lawyers and
promotion-seeking chiefs of staff? “My entire life has been a
PERFECT preparation for politics,” Root told the Gambling Newswire
in 2005. “I’ve spent the last 20 years giving interviews with the
media. I’m on national TV more than any politician in the state of
Nevada!” (This was before the still-mystifying triumph of Sen.
Harry Reid.) In 2005, Root published a sort of sequel to his first
self-help tome dubbed Millionaire Republican, telling
readers that “thinking like a Republican,” taking risks and cutting
throats, was the surest path to success.
Some sections of the book didn’t hold up so well. “This
professional prognosticator,” Root wrote then, “believes that the
GOP will dominate American politics (on all levels) for the
foreseeable future.” But by mid-2006, Root was telling Republicans
that they were throttling their message and their voters by
building up big government, and by cracking down on gamblers. By
early 2007, he was exploring his Libertarian Party bid. And by the
time he took the stage with Bob Barr, on a national political
ticket at last, Root was crowing about making his old party
irrelevant, for reasons no other Libertarian had thought of.
Like:
“There are 50 million poker players in this country, and 12
million online poker players. For the first time, they have a
candidate they can support!”
And:
“I am the first small businessman to run on a national
ticket!”
And:
“I’m a home school parent, and education is, to me, the civil
rights issue of our time!”
The Pulitzer-winning historian Walter McDougall has diagnosed
the United States as a “nation of hustlers.” He means it in a good
way; Americans are Horatio Alger heroes, constantly scheming and
one-upping and finding new ways to win. If you’re a skeptic, you
might think see Root’s success as a confluence of lucky breaks,
impossible to repeat for anyone not gifted with superhuman
salesmanship or — as my colleague Jesse Walker has put it — “the
comportment of a Ronco pitchman with a squirrel in his pants.” If
you buy McDougall’s theory, stop rolling your eyes at the guy.
Wayne Allyn Root wants you to be able to become the next Wayne
Allyn Root. And you should take him up on it.
“I’m an S.O.B.,” Root likes to joke. “A son of butcher. America
needs an S.O.B. in the White House!”
