Almost every time the Junior Rove Society launches yet another of its websites in the hopes of copying the Democratic party’s success, they have to safeguard against the rabid Ron Paul fans online. Why is it that seems to be the only faction of the right with any real online activism chops?
I caught a bit of Ron Paul’s gathering on C-SPAN. My friends, that is where the energy is on the right. Bush, Fred Thompson, and Lieberman were presiding over a funeral dirge in a spectacularly empty auditorium, while the Paul faithful – as nutty and simplistic as they may be – had some actual life to them.
This is like your middle school teacher, the one who you liked, weaving a conspiracy theory. His voice and tone is so soothing, you want to believe the nonsense. I want to believe.
Yes, Paulites, stand up against the oppresors! Show them you won’t be silenced by the GOP establishment. You will be heard!
According to a recent Boston Globe tally, Paul has a grand total of 19 Republican delegates to Romney’s 260, Huckabee’s 286 and McCain’s 1,413.
In the last three months, Paul’s forces, who donated $34.5 million to his White House effort and upward of a million total votes, have, as The Ticket has noted, been fighting a series of guerrilla battles with party establishment officials at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi. Their goal: to take control of local committees, boost their delegate totals and influence platform debates.
Paul, for instance, favors a drastically reduced federal government, abolishing the Federal Reserve, ending the Iraq war immediately and withdrawing U.S. troops from abroad.
They hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot. Paul, who’s running unopposed in his home Texas district for an 11th House term, still has some $5 million in war funds and has instructed his followers that their struggle is not about a single election, but a long-term revolution for control of the Republican Party.
Remember guys, make lots and lots of noise in prime time. Make sure those TV cameras see you and make sure you’ve got your talking points down about how the Republican party has failed you and America.
If you’ve read Rick Perlstein’s Before The Storm, this increasingly regular infiltration of the Republican party at the state party level as well as getting involved in arcane ways with the national platform is right out of the same strategy the Goldwater faithful used to take over the Republican party. They didn’t have the power to get their candidate into viability, but I sense that they are on the verge of throwing a small but disruptive wrench into the workings of the well-oiled GOP machine.
Conservatives have regularly had to do a song and dance to cover up the fact that their policies are not favored by most Americans (and conversely liberals have done a suck job at selling their majority positions) but I like the idea of Paul’s brand of unabashed yet tone-deaf conservatism getting louder in the Republican party. Especially in the next ten years.
Sweet lord. (via)
