Posted on 08/30/2007 5:50:52 AM PDT by George W. Bush
Bringing Politics Back to the People - The Do-It-Yourself Campaign of Ron Paul
Sean ScallonAugust 28, 2007
In 1964, just before the New Hampshire primary, an average Joe named Paul Grindle didnt particularly care for the choice of candidates running for the Republican nomination for President.
So he decided to run his own candidate for president.
With the help of a few friends and using the most sophisticated marketing techniques at the time, Grindle created a boomlet for Henry Cabot Lodge, former Massachusetts U.S. Senator, 1960 GOP Vice-Presidential candidate and then the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. Lodge wasnt running for anything, his name wasnt even on the New Hampshire ballot. Grindle and his friends mailed out postcards to New Hampshire Republicans to find out if there was support for Lodge which they found out there was. Then they mailed out fliers for Lodge, letters for Lodge and pamphlets demonstrating how to write Lodges name on the ballot. They even opened a headquarters for him in Concord.
All that postage spent for eventually paid off. Lodge won the New Hampshire Primary with a write-in vote, beating out that years eventual GOP nominee Barry Goldwater and former Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller despite all their money, all their TV ads and vast campaign apparatuses deployed in the Granite State.
Of course it helped Grindle that so many New Hampshire Republicans wanted someone other than Rockefeller and Goldwater, he just simply provided another candidate. But Grindles effort also goes to show that politics does not have to be game played only by a few professionals, or the hacks or even the wealthy. Sometimes, even the average Joe can play too if they have the knowledge, the gumption and a little luck.
Its that same do-it-yourself spirit that Grindle showed 43 years ago thats a part of Congressman Ron Pauls run for the White House today.
Forget the all internet activity, You Tube videos, or Facebook pages for a moment and focus on meat-and-potatoes politicking. Out of all the candidates running for President in 2008, who among them has supporters willing to hang signs on freeway overpasses, to stand with signs outside events whatever the weather, who will volunteer their time to make phone calls or write letters to voters or do lit drops as well? Who among the candidates has supporters willing to pay for advertising in newspapers and radio out of their own pocket or are willing to write scripts for cable TV ads? Who among the candidates has supporters so dedicated that they attend his rallies thousands of miles from home?
The Ron Paul campaign isnt spending a lot of money right now because they dont have to. The spending time, money and talent coming from Ron Paul supporters across the country is cash one cannot measure but has become important to the credibility of the campaign. You cannot write off Ron Paul because he has thousands of supporters in all 50 states willing to do things on their own initiative while other campaigns simply spend money on TV ads or give handouts to voters like free bus trips, straw poll tickets and meals. Indeed, former Massachusetts Governor Willard Romneys campaign has become a literal welfare agency in order to win votes.
Ron Paul supporters dont need handouts to vote for him at local straw poll. They dont need orders from the central campaign office either. Much of what is done for Ron Paul by his supporters is done upon their own ideas and their own initiative. For example, two weeks before the Iowa Straw Poll, Ron Paul supporters set up an account through Pay Pal.com to pool their money to buy advertising on Iowa radio stations and newspapers. One person made the ads buys, a few enterprising fellows came up with the idea for the ads (including a beautiful mosaic ad of Ron Pauls head made up of pictures from thousands of supporters across the country with the Constitution itself as a backdrop.) and before the official campaign came up with their own radio and TV ads, Ron Pauls message was being heard on the airwaves and in the pages. Plans are afoot to do the same in New Hampshire and Iowa again and to expand to television as well. All on their own they did this. Thats how devoted they are. As Ron Paul himself said. I didnt start a campaign, I joined a campaign. Like the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord of old, Ron Paul supporters do not need orders to shoot the Redcoats. All they needed were their rifles.
Candidates for President arent elected in vacuums. Powerful cultural forces pull them towards the White House. If Ron Paul wins the GOP nomination, goes on to win the Presidency itself, it will be because American voters begin to admire the plucky resolve and selfless determination of Ron Paul supporters, who created a campaign virtually from scratch of their own time, effort and resources and want to capture that spirit for themselves and recapture it for the nation.
Since 9-11, a whole nation wanted to do something, anything to help with the war efforts. A whole nation wanted some sense of pulling together and working together to help a country in distress. They wanted time to go back to World War II, where food was rationed, gas was rationed, rubber drives organized, scrap drives organized, where people joined the Red Cross or the USO, or civil defense organizations, all of this done to help with the war effort in any way possible. To be a slacker back then - if you werent fighting or doing something to help our boys overseas was as bad a form of treason as loose lips sink ships. And yet did we go back after 9-11? No. Care packages, yellow ribbons pen pal letters to troops and greeters at the airport are important and nice gestures, but one doesnt get the sense a whole nation has been mobilized to do so. No, instead, after 9-11, President Bush II told Americans they ought go out and buy more stuff. No calls for sacrifice were made. War wasnt declared in Congress; just a resolution calling for military action was passed. They also pass resolutions on Capitol Hill to the declare National Pickle Day as well. Thats how much importance they gave to this cause. No draft of any kind was issued, so the many millions who could fight instead stayed at home to watch the war on TV while those who did volunteer fought the war in their stead. Or when things werent going well, they could ignore what was happening overseas completely and go back to whatever it was they were doing on Sept. 10, 2001 as if time simply skipped over that day.
People wanted to help. They waited for orders to come from on high and yet such orders never came. Instead all they saw was a war turning sour because of the incompetence of the people in charge. Then they saw a great city destroyed by a natural disaster and saw that same government bumble the aftermath and reconstruction. That made it hard to help those who needed it and only wasted the energy of those who gave of their time and effort to help with the clean-up. So where does all that energy go when its not be used? When its being left to dissipate on the sidelines and all thats left is anger and bitterness at the authorities for their incompetence and their mismanagement? Well some have decided they arent going to wait for orders anymore. Some have decided on their own that they are going try and elect a man they believe is going to change things for the better. And whether or not Ron Paul could make such changes if he was elected President or get them through Congress really doesnt matter when you think about it. Just getting to that point will show that the nation has recaptured the do-it-yourself spirit that helped to found the country in the first place.
Many books have been written about how alienated the average voter is from politics with detailed explanations as to why. Yet all of them miss this essential point: People feel alienated to something when they believe that nothing they do concerning it matters because they are removed and remote to it. As politics has become a game played by rich people and slick hustlers and where the game board is a television screen, voters just watch it all from a distance. Theyre no longer a part of the process, just stage props for photos ops. Once upon a time an average Joe could be a precinct captain. He could stuff mailers or put up signs in his neighborhood working for the political machine or his wife could host a coffee klatch or baby-sit at campaign headquarters. Now people are paid to do things like this. Politicians all like to talk about grassroots support but very few campaigns use volunteer labor like they once did. Once upon a time the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George McGovern and Ronald Reagan were made possible by such grassroots support but in this day and age, only the late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone really had an army of average people volunteering their time for him with their undying loyalty. If more campaigns were as volunteer orientated as Ron Pauls, perhaps voters would feel that connection with politics again and would use that untapped energy for a cause they believed in and one they didnt need to be directed at. And if all that happened in the future, then Ron Pauls campaign will be a success well past 2008.
Sean Scallon is a freelance writer and journalist from Arkansaw, Wisconsin
Oh, he’ll go deep into the primaries. Without winning any delegates.
Paul won 10 terms in Congress, all the while the GOP establishment kept supporting the RINO candidates and in some cases even the Dems.
I predict he’ll go deep in the primaries, to the chagrin of the GOP establishment.
I’ll bet a $1,000 dollars payable to Free Republic with you on this if you like.
And yes, I have the cash to back this up.
You game?
The bet; Ron Paul doesn’t win a single primary.
He knows he will never be the GOP nominee, he knew that well before before he got into the race.
Ron Paul knew that there was a lot of money in being anti-war in the 2008 election cycle.
He also knew that there are plenty of fringe groups with donor lists that are able to bring in donations year in and year out - he was a former Libertarian presidential candidate, for goodness' sake.
So he put together a campaign calculated to appeal to the maximum number of fringe donors - a campaign that has found favor among radical libertarians, John Birchers, 9/11 Truthers, loony tax protestors, Bev Harrisers, the Liberty Lobby, Stormfronters, Henry Georgites, goldbugs, etc.
He is the great new hope of every random whackjob in the USA - and he will take all their donations, make as many ambiguous comments as he needs to in order to hint to them that he supports their various agendas, and then count their money.
He will spend next to none of it, depending on all the saps he attracts to spend their own cash on rallies, meetings, flyers, t-shirts, etc.
Then, when the charade has gone as far as it can go (the GOP Convention), he will do the math and see how much more he can raise by running 3rd party.
If the numbers don't work, he will bow out with millions of donations still in the kitty.
And he will have accomplished the goal he was working toward in the first place: raising enough cash to finance his next three or four Congressional campaigns.
One year of stumping as an anti-war candidate in a hot election cycle for anti-war loonies will save him years of future work raising money to keep his Congressional seat.
Ron Paul is laughing all the way to the bank while the poor clowns who actually believe he could ever have a shot at the nomination do all the work.
Scenario.
Paul wins POTUS with Mike Huckabee. Paul, with a huge economic and states’ rights agenda recognizes an obligation for the US to finish what we started in Iraq, beacuse that’s what the American people want and he is not immune to the will of the people. Paul would face a Democratic Congress eager to see him fall on his face in Iraq so suddenly Democratic support for the war edges up and we escalate. Anti-war liberals go nuts, which is what the more extreme Democrats hope for as a trump card for futuure elections. Anti-war GOPers take a wait-and-see stance.
In the meantime, Paul puts two strict constructionists on the Supreme Court and gains passage of the FairTax. Roe v. Wade is struck down and the matter returned to the states which, with a handful of exceptions, promptly begin introducing legislation to restrict or ban abortions altogether. The balance of trade begins to reverse and economic activity explodes. The gay marriage issue goes the way of the dodo.
Paul, making it clear the US will uphold treaty obligations, nonetheless declines to invade Iran; however, Iran facing a unified and renewed military begins to negotiate with the US and its nuclear program is abandoned.
Paul will have failed to end NAFTA, GATT, WTO and CAFTA, but the gains are enormous and the country is better off after two terms of President Paul.
Paul will have been criticized for failing to live up to his non-interventionist reputation but a stable government will have been installed in Iraq and at the end of his second term, all that’s left in Iraq is an air base.
In the meantime, global support for the US begins to rebuild and the US and its again emboldened allies make it clear to Syria that the nonsense won’t go on and strategic air strikes to bring Syria to its knees are still a possibility.
In the meantime, a new GOP emerges, renewed in a commitment to genuinely smaller government, collegial trade among nations, with a strong US dollar, rapidly declining deficit, increased savings and robust, renewed industries. A young crop of GOP candidates emerge with a vision to continuing increasing the stature of that beautiful city on a hill known as America.
Also with regard to World War II, how could we have taken down the Soviets had we followed General Patton's advice? The Soviets outnumbered American and British forces and were well-equipped, due in great part to American aid. Their chief commander, Marshal Zhukov, was very competent, and was tolerated by the paranoid Stalin only because he was so successful. The Red Army would have gone clear on to Ireland and only the Atlantic Ocean would have stopped them. Eisenhower and Marshall were far wiser than Patton in not provoking the Soviets. Recognizing our limits is an important step in exercising power.
The differences between Germany post V-E Day and Iraq post the fall of Baghdad are several. Allied forces utterly crushed and interned the entire German armed forces: Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Waffen SS, etc., in POW camps. We did not do so with the Iraqi forces. The guerrilla resistance of the Werewolves was eliminated with extreme prejudice. No such measures were taken with regard to the guerrilla resistance. Some soldiers who were overly aggressive against the terrorists were subject to courts martial. The Allies practiced de-Nazification in re-establishing civil government. We have not done so with regard to radical Islamic groups or the Ba'athist Party. There are three nations inhabiting the artificial country of Iraq, plus several minorities. In spite of regional dialect differences and the Catholic/Protestant split, the parts of the German nation were basically culturally unified. Additionally, Germany is, like Britain and the United States, historically a Christian and a Western nation. Despite the Nazi veneer, Germany did have traditions that supported human rights, representative government, and a market economy. Iraq has an entirely different history and tradition, much less conducive to the establishment of a Western style government and society.
In spite of these clear differences, our policy after the fall of Baghdad should have been far more aggressive in eliminating all potential resistance in the Iraqi military. Places like Fallujah should have been utterly destroyed after the terrorists killed and mutilated the bodies of American contractors. Iraq should have been divided into three countries: Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish. (Granted, an independent Kurdistan would not have pleased Turkey, but that nation provided no help in our defeat of the Sadaam Hussein regime.) Application of maximum force and ruthless treatment of resisters would have worked. We should not have insisted on democracy. Strong men may not be the ideal, but in the words of Eisenhower (referring to a Latin American dictator), they would have been "an SOB, but our SOB."
This Administration seriously mishandled events after the fall of Baghdad. The surge may be effective in weakening the enemy, but in the long run, we must scrap the idea of limited warfare or pretending the Iraqis are the same as Germans or even Japanese.
Ed Wood wrote more realistic scripts than that one...
Paul wins POTUS with Mike Huckabee.
************
There. Now it makes sense.
Paul is just a demagogic fraud and his fans are fools.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292334,00.html
Ron Paul’s $400 Million Earmarks
Dividing Iraq in 3 would require the US Military to stay in Iraq forever both to enforce the partion and to keep Iraq’s oil supplies out of the hands of it rapacious neighbors. This “Partion Iraq” is an idiots dogma sung by mindless fools who are just desperate for some simplistic easy answer on Iraq. There is just no nice way to say it. This "Partion Iraq" dogma of the Know Nothings is total idiocy.
Partion Iraq and you force the US military to stay for decades policing Iraq.
One can argue that we should not be so dependent on ME oil, what cannot be argued is we are depended on it. Like it or not, the free flow of oil from that part of the world is a vital US National Security Interest. Our economic well-being, and thus our national security, depends on it.
Iraq sits on anywhere (depending on whose figures you use) from the second largest, to the fifth largest, oil reserves in the world. No US Administration is going to be able to walk away from Iraq. That is just reality.
Ron Paul is a nice quirky guy who will make a good back bencher as he wins his Rep. seat again. He is not ready for even Senate primetime. I truly wish that all but the top 4 would simply quit, support someone else and get ready for their own local elections.
Looks like we lost 1689LBC. Too bad. Seemed like an interesting guy. Anyone know what he said? Looks like his comments were all removed too.
I hate to tell you this, but Paul's antiwar stance is an absolute trump card. Throw in his double standard on earmarks, and he is a legitimate target for all the scorn we can heap on him.
And most of his supporters I see on FR are antiwar as well.
Of course not. And he would never write an earmark, either.
The notion that you would spend so many keystrokes on such a bizarre fantasy contrary to the facts indicates the sort of bitter loser you really are.
LOL! Let's check in on the Ron Paul campaign a year from now and see who the bitter losers actually are.
Iraq is an artificial state created out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire by the British and French in 1920. Following the fall of Babylon in the 6th Century BC, what is now Iraq was never independent, having been occupied by numerous empires: Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, and Turkish (Ottoman). The current area not only contains three major ethnic and religious groups, but others, such as Turkmen and Persians, who have ties to neighboring countries, as well as Chaldeans, Orthodox Christians who are the survivors of the pre-Arab population of Mesopotamia.
The only way multiethnic nations have survived is through the rule by a ruthless tyrant: Tito in Yugoslavia, Sadaam in Iraq, for example. The only way the Tsarist Empire held together was through the numerical majority of the Great Russians and the much smaller size of the various subject nationalities. The same was true with the USSR, only adding the ruthlessness of Communist rule. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was the only case of a relatively stable multinational empire that ruled without excesses of brutal force and arbitrary power, and even it collapsed under the pressure of World War I. Prior to Sadaam's rise to power, the three major groups were constantly fighting. The British had to intervene twice, in 1920-22 and 1941, to quell the rebellions. The same was true with former Yugoslavia, which did not hold together as a constitutional monarchy, and only reunited when Tito became dictator. As bad as the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s was, the only way that nation could have held together was with constant ruthless force wielded by a dictator. The same could be said for the partition of Ireland in 1921 and of India in 1948.
Are you then proposing a new, pro-American Sadaam Hussein? The only nation with a government and society relatively close to our own in the entire Middle East is Israel, the only non-Muslim nation between Greece and India. The Middle East will not, at the present time, sustain any society, much less a multiethnic one, that has representative government, civil liberties comparable to those in the Western democracies, and a market economy. Woodrow Wilson believed in the transforming magic of democracy and freedom and hoped that the breaking up of the old empires would lead to a new birth of freedom in Europe and around the world. Wilson died a broken, and disillusioned man, who was fortunate, for his own sake, to have died before the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and the Japanese militarists. Unfortunately, the policies of the Bush Administration, at least until recently, were predicated on a misguided optimism similar to those Wilson held.
Had Britain compelled southern Ireland to stay in the UK in the 1920s, or had we not placed the Philippines well on the course to independence, the Irish would have risen en masse to support the Germans, and the Filipinos would have been at best neutral upon the Japanese invasion. When the Nazis invaded the western, non-Russian Soviet republics, the natives were enthusiastic about their liberation from Communism. Only after Nazi racial ideology was enforced, wherein Slavs were treated as inferiors, did the locals turn against the invaders.
As for American involvement, unless we adopt a Ron Paul type policy and withdraw to our shores, we are stuck in the Middle East and Southwest Asia indefinitely. There has been for over 150 years a conflict between Soviet/Russian interests and British and American interests. Since the slow motion collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s, Russia and Britain attempted to fill in the void. The Russians wanted (and still want) a warm weather port to project naval power unimpeded by another country, such as Turkey or Denmark. The British wanted to protect and expand their Indian empire, thus moving them to block the Russian expansion. Iran is today a client state of Russia and China; their military and nuclear programs bear a distinct "Made in Russia" label.
The Russians under Putin want to re-establish their superpower status. The Chinese are a superpower wannabe. Radical Islam, the international Left, and Russia and China share a common goal: the toppling of American world hegemony. If we withdraw, the Middle East and its huge oil and gas reserves will fall into the Russian and Chinese spheres of influence. At that point, Europe, and perhaps even Britain, South Korea, and Japan, will want to work out a modus vivendi with the new dominant powers. We will be confined to our hemisphere, which has an increasing presence of Communist and leftist nations hostile to our interests, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil. The current Administration has been amiss in seeing the larger picture of world politics and has mishandled the occupation of Iraq, although the initial decision to invade Iraq and topple Sadaam Hussein was sound.
Stable client states, such as independent Kurdish, Sunni, and Shi'ite nations, are the best safeguard against long term involvement by American ground forces. Our naval and air forces are likely to be in the area for the foreseeable future.
I don’t like him for pres, but he’s not stupid or crazy enough for the Senate.
In questions I have posed in various places this is the most reasoned, thoughtful thing I’ve seen on a website that fares little better than a chat room full of teens. Thank you for your thoughtful, well reasoned observations. They are a breath of fresh air in this arid land generally bereft of conservative thinking.
Ron Paul says that earmarks return more power to the people since voters elect their representatives who choose where the money is spent rather than having bureaucrats, who are unelected, decide where the money goes.
I suppose he is correct to certain extent.
Why shouldn’t the 14th District of Texas get some of their “stolen” money back.
I think he is hypocritical though in submitting his earmarks.
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