Via Mike Munger, my department chair here at Duke and the Libertarian candidate for governor of North Carolina, there are rumors that Tucker Carlson may take a shot at the Libertarian presidential nomination.

I’m not sure if this is for real or not, but I’m not as surprised by the idea as you might think. Many people forget that Carlson was a conservative but non-dogmatic print journalist before he started doing shout TV. In particular, he wrote a Talk magazine story about George W. Bush in 1999 that got him in a lot of trouble with conservatives. Along the same lines, I had lunch with him once in DC when he was doing Crossfire and I remember thinking that his views were more heterodox than his TV work suggested (he might have even referred to himself as a libertarian). And he was also kind enough to blurb All the President’s Spin even though it wasn’t in his interest to do so.

In any case, I would love to see a debate matching Carlson against Bob Barr and Mike Gravel.

Update 5/23 5:41 PM: Via Tommy Christopher, Jake Tapper at ABC News is reporting that Carlson isn’t running:

Carlson tells me he was never running.

He’s right now with his family in Maine rather than in Denver with the Marijuana Policy Project and the like.

“I probably should have done it,” Tucker emails me. “Imagine the bus trip.”