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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 didn’t 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 wasn’t running for anything, his name wasn’t 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 Lodge’s 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 year’s 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 Grindle’s 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.
It’s that same “do-it-yourself” spirit that Grindle showed 43 years ago that’s a part of Congressman Ron Paul’s 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 isn’t spending a lot of money right now because they don’t 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 Romney’s campaign has become a literal welfare agency in order to win votes.
Ron Paul supporters don’t need handouts to vote for him at local straw poll. They don’t 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 Paul’s 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 Paul’s 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. That’s how devoted they are. As Ron Paul himself said. “I didn’t 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 aren’t 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 weren’t 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 doesn’t 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 wasn’t 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. That’s 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 weren’t 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 it’s being left to dissipate on the sidelines and all that’s left is anger and bitterness at the authorities for their incompetence and their mismanagement? Well some have decided they aren’t 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 doesn’t 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. They’re 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 Paul’s, perhaps voters would feel that connection with politics again and would use that untapped energy for a cause they believed in and one they didn’t need to be “directed” at. And if all that happened in the future, then Ron Paul’s campaign will be a success well past 2008.
Sean Scallon is a freelance writer and journalist from Arkansaw, Wisconsin
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Ron Paul is wrong on the battle for Iraq, and the war on terror. Period. These are important things.
Can’t go for it, no, thank you.
Ron Paul is wrong on the battle for Iraq, and the war on terror. Period. These are important things.
Can’t go for it, no, thank you.
Yep.
You gotta admire the way the Paulie Girls keep coming ‘up the slope’ however....(chuckle)
I don’t consider myself a supporter of Ron Paul (or any of the other Republican candidates) at this point. But I have to admire his honesty and the way he is running his campaign. He’s the kind of candidate we need more of, instead of the horde of Larry-Craigs-Who-Haven’t-Been-Caught-Yet we are usually forced to choose from.
Yeah, the motley crew that showed up at the Pierce county GOP picnic to vote in the straw poll for Ron Paul were not republicans or conservatives for the most part. I think the ‘medicinal marijauna’ crowd has found their man.
You gotta admire the way the Paulie Girls keep coming ‘up the slope’ however....(chuckle)
Get used to it. LOL.
(chuckle)
I’m a vet of the internet wars in what were once more ‘open’ political forums. There really isn’t any difference between the Paulistinians and any other ‘sub set’ on the ‘net.
They are devoted to the extreme, they are always on the ‘net, and they’ll proclaim their view no matter what comes out of Paulies pea brain at any given moment.
Its impressive, when you step back and watch for a while.
Utterly worthless as it relates to gettin him beyond ‘fringe candidate status’ however.
Because they simply can’t overcome his own words.
I haven’t seen him distinguish himself in that regard yet.
>> Counting the seconds until the first keyword-spammers and assorted trolls arrive...
This was already posted, yesterday. Exact same article, same title, easy keyword search.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1888601/posts
Who’s spamming who, again?
I just “say no” to ALL surrender monkey, blame America first pols! Sorry... no sale!
LLS
Ron Paul is not wrong on the WOT. He voted to authorize military action in Afghanistan that would have killed or captured Osama Bin Laden and as many of his supporters as possible, by ANY MEANS NECESSARY, as quickly as possible.
Sadly, President Bush and the Congress have led us down the path of nation building, which is never good for our country, is not a traditional conservative issue, and which GWB campaigned against in 2000.
We are quickly approaching the Six Year Anniversary of the most deadly and horrific terrorist attacks in the history of our country and all we have to show for it is trillions of dollars of debt, thousands of American soldiers dead, a debacle in Iraq that we should not have gotten involved in, a stronger Al Queda, no Osama Bin Laden and an emboldened movement of Islamic theocratic fascists across the globe.
Meanwhile, our own borders are porous points of entry for drugs, illegal immigrations, and of course, homicidal theocratic Islamic fascists.
We should isolate and marginalize these fascist bastards but we need to recognize that we will destroy ourselves in the process if we neglect our own security and prosperity in the process.
Ronald Reagan said it best in his memoirs:
http://www.ronaldreagan.com/leb.html
In the weeks immediately after the (Beirut) bombing, I believed the last thing we should do was turn tail and leave. If we did that, it would say to the terrorists of the world that all it took to change Americans foreign policy was to murder some Americans. If we walked away, we’d also be giving up on the moral commitment to Israel that had originally sent our marines to Lebanon. We’d be abandoning all the progress made during almost two years of trying to mediate a settlement in the Middle East. We’d be saying that the sacrifice of those marines had been for nothing. We’d be inviting the Russians to supplant the United States as the most influential superpower in the Middle East. After more than a year of fighting and mounting chaos in Beirut, the biggest winner would be Syria, a Soviet client. Yet, the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there.
How do you deal with a people driven by such a religious zeal that they are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to kill an enemy simply because he doesn’t worship the same God they do? People who believe that if they do that, they’ll go instantly to heaven? In the Iran-Iraq war, radical Islamic fundamentalists sent more than a thousand young boys - teenagers and younger - to their deaths by telling them to charge and detonate land mines - and the boys did so joyously because they believed, “Tonight, we will be in Paradise.”
I’m not sure how we could have anticipated the catastrophe at the marine barracks. Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that make the Middle East such a jungle. Perhaps the idea of a suicide car bomber committing mass murder to gain instant entry to Paradise was so foreign to our own values and consciousness that it did not create in us the concern for the marines’ safety that it should have. Perhaps we should have anticipated that members of the Lebanese military whom we were trying to assist would simply lay down their arms and refuse to fight their own countrymen. In any case, the sending of the marines to Beirut was the source of my greatest regret and my greatest sorrow as president. Every day since the death of those boys, I have prayed for them and their loved ones.
You PAUListininans amuse the hell out of me. You display raving lunatic barking moonbat mental midgetry in support of an actual midget.
Welcome to FR. They even troll conservative sites.
Reagan was wrong on Lebanon. The blood of Christian martyrs in the middle east has unfortunately been spilled as a result.
You’re wrong, I’m sorry but I think Reagan was right. This is a job for Crusaders, not the US military.
Take care,
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