Libertarian gubernatorial candidate shares platform

HOUSTON Four days from Election Day, Libertarian Glass is still introducing herself to Texas voters, many of whom never knew they had a third choice.

"They're always interested, sometimes they're agitated like, why didn't I know about you? And I say, why didn't you know about me?" Glass said.

She's run a bit of a shadow campaign -- not by choice, but by necessity.

While her opponents have spent big bucks flying around the state in private planes, Glass spent months putting miles on her SUV.

"We've put like 15,000 miles on that car," Glass said.

Dollar for dollar, she's getting the most out of her $80,000 shoestring campaign.

Her Libertarian live-and-let-live platform is true to her party's ideals but seems far from the mainstream candidates. She wants to deploy the Texas guard to the Mexican border -- armed.

"That may seem like an old-fashioned notion for a governor to be commander in chief of the state's military, but the time's come around again," Glass said. "We have the need for them to act."

But that's not the biggest difference.

While the other candidates won't really say how they'll close the budget cap in Austin, Glass has a simple plan, and she laid it out for everyone on a radio interview.

"One word: cut. Cut taxes, cut spending. I would cut the budget in half," Glass said in the interview.

She'd kill the school property tax, allowing local districts to raise a sales tax if they wanted to, and she'd nullify the federal health care reform, a controversial but popular move among Tea Party loyalists.

But as she and her campaign manager husband look at this race from their headquarters at the kitchen table, they realize they're running out of time.

"We're just doing the most we can as fast as we can with what we have to work with," she said.