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
More like the Kook-it-yourself campaign, but what-the-hell, Ross Perot had supporters too....
Tell that to the Swiss.
I wouldn't go around calling other people ignorant of history, Wallyboy.
There are two reasons Switzerland has held together. The first is the respect for the sovereignty of the individual cantons, which tend to be dominated by one of the four major ethnic groups: German, French, Italian, and Romansch, in the Swiss Constitution. The Swiss Constitution's preamble indicates that both the people and the cantons form the government, unlike the U.S. Constitution, which refers to "we the people." Citizenship in Switzerland is defined as inuring from one's status as a citizen of the canton, whereas our 14th Amendment defines American citizenship as deriving from being born or naturalized in the United States. As a practical matter, the Swiss cantons exercise at least as much, if not more, self-government as do the American states. Ethnic self-government in a context of generally limited government seems to be a major element in the continued existence of Switzerland. Socialistic regimes, where different nationalities fight over state-distributed benefits, tend to inflame ethnic conflicts. Many Flemings and Walloons want to divide Belgium, and similar sentiments are held by Englishmen and Scotsmen in Britain, and English Canadians and French Canadians to our north. The tensions and calls for independence have increased since these nations have moved in the direction of a welfare state and a socialistic economy.
The second element is the fact that the four national groups and two major religious groups of Switzerland share the common heritage of the Christian religion and Western civilization. Modern day Christianity, Protestant and Catholic, is strongly respective of the right to freedom of conscience and the worth of the individual, and Western civilization, as far back as Ancient Greece, has emphasized both the rights and the duties of the individual. Despite its Nazi period, West Germany had enough of the underlying Western values to permit establishment of a representative government in relatively short order. We are witnessing a reasonable return to a civil society and representative government in nations like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic despite 40 years under the Communist jackboot. Even in Japan, the powers that be were strongly admiring of the West, and after World War II, reconstructed the society after the American model, rather than the Prussian model favored by the militarists who dominated the Japanese government in the 1930s.
This crucial elements of Western civilization and the Christian religion are entirely lacking in Iraq. Have you not noticed that there is only one stable democracy between Greece and India? Israel is the also the only non-Muslim nation in the region, and has strong historic ties with Western civilization. Turkey, the most Westernized of the Middle Eastern nations, is the least objectionable from a standpoint of personal freedom, due ironically to the influence of Kemal Ataturk, a secular strongman who ran that nation for several decades. But the Turks have had several military coups, a strong faction supporting establishment of sharia law, and a restive Kurdish minority. Lebanon had a representative government and a civil society when it had a Christian majority. That majority is long gone, and that nation has become a satellite of Syria.
It is unrealistic, and reeking of Wilsonian idealism, to assume that all you have to do is declare a democracy is in place, and expect people to abandon their religious beliefs and culture that are inherently inimical to human rights and liberty of conscience. Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations have had two main factions: a secular faction, like the Ba'athists, whose ideology is a combination of fascist and Marxist principles, and the Islamic militants, both Sunni and Shia, who want an authoritarian theocracy. To expect such people to have some sort of yearning for democracy is as realistic as thinking you can grow bananas in Alaska outside of a hothouse.
Anyone who ignores these facts and insists on the continued pursuit of an unsuccessful policy in the administration of post-Saddam Iraq is indeed ignorant of both history and reality, Wakeyboy.
The larger problem is that our man didn’t insist on an American style Federal republic, born as the idea was of the bloody birth of a disunited nation.
Ron Paul is not on the Appropriations Committee, and therefore inserts no earmarks.
And you people wonder why we call you "terrorism bedwetters".
Damn right. It's nearly up to 30%!
‘And you people wonder why we call you “terrorism bedwetters”.’
Nope, I don’t consider kooks seriously, let alone what they call me.
Says the guy who thinks America is on the verge of being conquered by the Muslim hordes.
Nope, I don’t consider kooks seriously
Says the guy who thinks America is on the verge of being conquered by the Muslim hordes.
You make sure to ping me if you EVER come up with something to support this statement.
I won’t hold my breath.
You make sure to ping me if you EVER come up with something to support this statement.
Translation - "Ahhhhh!!!! If we don't kill some muslims we'll all be dhimmies!!!!"
Says the guy who thinks America is on the verge of being conquered by the Muslim hordes.
You make sure to ping me if you EVER come up with something to support this statement.
How bout you? You going to kneel five times per day facing Mecca in worship of Allah...to avoid this fight?
Translation - “Ahhhhh!!!! If we don’t kill some muslims we’ll all be dhimmies!!!!”
Hire a translator, you suck at it, is my advice. And since its my comment, I think I know better than you what I said, and the intent behind it.
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