Tag: Ron Paul

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political challengers

Ron Paul Switches Gears

The day before the official debut of Brian Doherty’s Ron Paul’s Revolution — the new book on the man, his crusade and his many enthusiastic supporters — Ron Paul slipped his 2012 presidential campaign into neutral:

Our campaign will continue to work in the state convention process. We will continue to take leadership positions, win delegates, and carry a strong message to the Republican National Convention that Liberty is the way of the future.

Moving forward, however, we will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted.

Ron Paul Revolution
The BBC puts Ron Paul’s delegate count at 104, with frontrunner Mitt Romney 178 short of a lock on the nomination — but that’s at present, before the upcoming primaries. As the BBC concisely summarized Dr. Paul’s campaign, he had some successes in “several contests, in states such as Maine and Nevada,” gaining “some delegates and sometimes a significant portion of the popular vote. But he was viewed by the Republican establishment as a candidate outside party orthodoxy, and he did not manage to win a single primary election.”

Talk to a Ron Paul organizer, and you can hear harrowing tales of how the Republican establishment treated Paul’s supporters as outsiders. Despite such ill treatment, chronicler Brian Doherty compares Ron Paul’s future influence on the party to that of the past influence of Barry Goldwater. “His fans understand that Ron Paul is not just out to win an election.”

Dr. Paul’s near-term influence, though, is less obvious. In his 2008 outing he was shut out, and held his own very successful parallel rally. What he hopes to accomplish at the upcoming nominating convention remains to be seen. He concludes his letter with promise of further elaboration of his campaign’s delegate strategy. But his main thrust, in this letter and elsewhere, has been to build a long-lasting movement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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video

Video: Ron Paul started the Tea Party movement

Brian Doherty, author of a new book on Ron Paul, talks about Ron Paul’s transpartisan political movement:

A very concise and yet broad view of what the congressman from Texas has been up to, what he believes, and his significance in contemporary political debate.

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national politics & policies political challengers too much government

So Goes the Ancient Chinese Curse

Election news from the weekend tells us that Ron Paul won the majority of delegates at Maine’s GOP state convention, with a sizable hunk of Republicans saying, yet again, “no” to Mitt Romney.

In France, Nicolas Sarkozy got ousted, as French voters put in a self-declared socialist for the second time since World War II.

Meanwhile, in beleaguered Greece, elections gave no clear majority to any party.

Since the new French president, François Hollande, has pledged to fight back against German “austerity” measures, and since Greece, too, resists those “bailout” procedures, it looks like the collapse of the European Union may be at hand.Stop Overspending

On one level, Greek and French voters seem to prefer to live in that special fantasy land where you can grow government and debt indefinitely and expect good times to roll on forever. On another, they are reacting, at least in part, to the idea that austerity is being pushed by foreigners, that they have been forced not by reality to reform, but by . . . Germans!

Americans wouldn’t be happy about having a policy shoved down their throat by France. Or Germany. Or (more likely) Beijing.

It’s not easy accepting less than one is used to.

Which is why, here in America, neither Obama nor Romney talk seriously about measures to balance the budget. Obama lives in la-la land, and Romney thinks that Rep. Ryan’s plan — which allegedly would balance the budget scores of years from now — is a responsible fix for the irresponsible reality of the day.

Only Ron Paul and Gary Johnson are really taking reality seriously. Perhaps that’s why they are still in the race.

Thus it is, in interesting times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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links

Townhall: Bad to Worst

Variation on a by now well-worn theme: “Bad to Worst” on Townhall.com. Please visit, then come back here to comment, and look for more links:

Note: These links are thematically related to this weekend’s Townhall column, not (like usual) source material upon which the column was based. The source material can easily be found by scrolling back through last week’s Common Sense.

Oh, and not covered in the Townhall column was Gary Johnson’s winning the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. Reason? The column was written in advance of Johnson’s Saturday win.

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national politics & policies political challengers

Enemies, Bedfellows

The Ron Paul 2012 campaign’s caucus-state delegate strategy, discussed here before, aims to work around the candidate’s biggest hurdle: Republican voters. Though Ron Paul has a strong appeal to the young and to independents — constituencies needed to win against a sitting president — older, mainstream Republicans voters aren’t especially responsive to the maverick’s charms. Concentrating on selecting actual delegates at the caucuses, rather than the media-hyped (and electorally meaningless) straw polls, is a clever strategy.

But what’s good for the goose is great for the gander. A video from Washington State shows a self-proclaimed “mainstream” GOP activist offering caucus participants a slate of 31 delegates allegedly divided up amongst Romney, Santorum and Gingrich supporters, explicitly promoted to make sure that Ron Paulers don’t “take over” the party as they did, to his horror, in the Seattle area.

The Ron Paul supporters touting the video call it “election fraud.” Well, “caucus fraud” might be more to the point, considering that the slate offered was rejected by Rick Santorum’s  supporters as a con job. Since then Santorum folks and Paul folks have united. As one Santorum activist put it, “[i]n order for us to win the nomination in Tampa in August, we must deny Romney delegates to that convention. If . . . Romney receives 1,144 delegates before the national convention, it is all over for our campaign. That is the reason why the Senator himself directed us to coalition with the Ron Paul delegates to deny Romney any state delegates.”

Whether as a grand dialogue of ideas or a horse race, this time around the politics is interesting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom U.S. Constitution

A Serious Mistake

“I have signed this bill,” President Barack Obama said months ago about the National Defense Authorization Act, “despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”

Those provisions include the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial.The Fifth Amendment

Former President George W. Bush had tried that with Jose Padilla; now, courtesy of President Obama’s signature, the policy is codified into law.

“Let me be clear,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told a university audience yesterday, “an operation using lethal force in a foreign country, targeted against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or associated forces, and who is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans, would be lawful . . .”

Holder goes on to say that “a thorough and careful review” by the government would be required, and that capture must not be “feasible,” and that the hit be “conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”

But something is missing. There’s absolutely no check on this awesome power. No due process. No day in court to contest the government’s “thorough and careful review” and avoid an unjustified death by bullet or drone strike.

Moreover, these extraordinary powers, which obliterate all basic legal protections going back to 1215 AD, are for the execution of an undeclared war against a concept, “terrorism,” vague enough to provide a state of permanent war.

Asked about Holder’s position, presidential candidate Ron Paul warned, “If the American people accept that, it’d be a serious mistake.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies political challengers

Sorry, Santorum

In Wednesday night’s GOP debate, Rick Santorum, the new frontrunner, found himself apologizing for much of his political record.

“Sure I had some votes. Look, I think we’ve all had votes that I look back on I — I wish I wouldn’t have voted — No Child Left Behind, you’re right,” Santorum stammered.

Unmoved by Santorum’s mea culpa, Rep. Ron Paul offered, “I find it really fascinating that, when people are running for office, they’re really fiscally conservative. When they’re in office, they do something different. And then when they explain themselves, they say, ‘Oh, I want to repeal that.’”

Santorum sought to explain a second time: “I supported No Child Left Behind. . . . I have to admit, I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in, but, you know, when you’re part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake.“

Former Sen. Santorum’s biggest stumble may have been acknowledging that he voted for federal funding of Planned Parenthood.

“I’ve always opposed Title X funding, but it’s included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things,” Santorum began. “So while, yes, I — I admit I voted for large appropriation bills and there were things in there I didn’t like, things in there I did, but when it came to this issue, I proactively stepped forward and said that we need to do something at least to counterbalance it.”

Santorum’s counterbalancing act? Title 20 — yet more federal spending, this time for abstinence education.

How about abstinence on spending?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption political challengers

As Goes Maine

On Monday I reported on the Ron Paul campaign’s “open secret” strategy: Gaining delegates in the caucus states, while letting the caucus-night straw poll numbers basically take care of themselves. The “popular” vote on caucus nights in states like Iowa and Minnesota and Maine may show Santorum or Romney as a winner, but the Ron Paul folks are picking up the actual, nomination-effective delegates.

Meanwhile, GOP insiders continue to work openly and sub rosa against the Paul candidacy, as is now pretty clear in Maine. Business Insider reports that

  • “Mitt Romney’s 194-vote victory over Ron Paul was prematurely announced, if not totally wrong”;
  • “Washington County canceled their caucus on Saturday on account of three inches of snow (hardly a blizzard by Maine standards), and other towns that scheduled their caucuses for this week have been left out of the vote count”;
  • “nearly all the towns in Waldo County — a Ron Paul stronghold — held their caucuses on Feb. 4, but the state GOP reported no results for those towns. In Waterville, a college town in Central Maine, results were reported but not included in the party vote count”;

. . . and on and on and on.

The open conspiracy of deliberately under-reporting Ron Paul votes may be more than matched, however, by the open secret of the Ron Paul delegate strategy, with the Paul campaign now believing “it has won the majority of Maine’s delegates.”

Real change is, apparently, a messy thing. And preventing it . . . even messier.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access political challengers

Something Up His Sleeve

In 2008, Republican insiders in a number of states worked mightily to ensure that presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul met with no success. So, this time around, his campaign has trained supporters in the caucus states to act like insiders.

What’s the secret?

“There were no actual delegates rewarded in last Tuesday’s voting,” Greg Gutfeld clarified on Red Eye, his late-night Fox News show. The votes reported on caucus night are not the votes that count, the ones that elect delegates. Instead, the delegates — who go on to pick other delegates to go to the state convention and then the national convention, and ultimately choose the GOP candidate — are picked later, after many caucus attendees have gone home for the night.

Ron Paul’s supporters stick around. And vote themselves in as delegates.

“We do have to remember,” Ron Paul has gloated, that “the straw vote is one thing, but then there’s one other thing called delegates, yeah!”

News sources consistently report caucus night straw vote totals, but rarely mention that such caucus polling is relevant only for perceptions of “momentum.” The actual candidate selection mechanism? Something else again.

Indeed, it looks like a majority of Minnesota delegates, as well as surprisingly high percentages in Iowa, Colorado and Nevada, may actually end up supporting Ron Paul for President.

Un-democratic? Paul supporters are unashamed of their strategy, as campaign senior advisor Doug Wead happily explained to Rachel Maddow. As they see it, they are only acting according to the rules that usually serve to favor insiders in the GOP boys’ club.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom national politics & policies

Against Regimentation

On Monday, Senator Rand Paul got caught in a contretemps with the TSA. He was not in transit to or from his work in Congress, so he couldn’t enlist constitutional protection from being detained.

And detained he was.

Well, the TSA insists that he was not “at any point detained,” but what he says is this:

I was detained by the Transportation Security Administration . . . for not agreeing to a patdown after an irregularity was found in my full body scan. Despite removing my belt, glasses, wallet and shoes, the scanner and TSA also wanted my dignity. I refused.

I showed them the potentially offending part of my body, my leg. They were not interested. They wanted to touch me and to pat me down. I requested to be rescanned. They refused and detained me in a 10-foot-by-10-foot area reserved for potential terrorists.

Both Senator Paul and his father, Congressman Ron Paul, have criticized the TSA. They echo those 19th century classical liberals who had a word for the kind of treatment that modern security-obsessed Rand Paul makes a statementgovernments inflict upon a (too willing) populace: “regimentation.” What’s more regimenting than being forced to wait in lines, holding shoes in hand, emptying the contents of pockets into institutional-gray trays, submitting to a variety of scans and gropes?

There have got to be better ways of securing big ol’ jet airliners. Why not apply greater legal liability to airlines for safety, and let them figure out more customer-friendly methods of keeping terrorists out of cockpits?

Any government security effort ought to focus on spotting and stopping terrorists . . . without sacrificing everyone’s freedom and dignity.

It’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.