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GOP 2012: Paul, the
dynasty
Texas
Congressman Ron Paul announced on Monday that he
has now ended active campaigning for the
presidency against Mitt Romney, the only other
Republican Party candidate left in the campaign.
But Paul vowed he would fight on with his
so-called "delegate strategy". J BROOKS
SPECTOR looks deeper into the reasons why.
According to the most recent CNN delegate
count, Mitt Romney has secured 945 delegates
compared to 286 for Rick Santorum, 145 for Newt
Gingrich and 99 for Paul. A candidate needs 1,144
delegates to clinch the nomination at the
Republican convention. The next two primaries are
in Oregon and Nebraska, where the
results are likely to go
Romney's way.
But Paul didn't actually end
an increasingly quixotic campaign for the
Republican nomination. Rather, he announced he
would no longer seek support in the eleven states
still scheduled to have their presidential
preference primaries - including some real biggies
like Texas and California. The simple reason, of
course, is money. As Paul himself explained it:
"To do so would take many tens of millions of
dollars we simply do not have." As of 1 April, his
campaign had $1.8-million cash on hand, according
to its campaign finance filings at that point.
And just to show he remains a really
idiosyncratic electoral spoiler and to keep his
hand in despite no longer campaigning, Paul vowed
to fight on with his so-called "delegate
strategy." The main task here would be the
imploring, cajoling, badgering and browbeating of
as-yet-unpledged delegates wherever state
nominating conventions remain more important than
full or partial delegate selections by primaries
that have already taken place. In those states,
"beauty contest" primary elections have occurred,
but not the official confirmation of their
respective convention delegates.
In
dealing with such states, Paul's campaign has
actually been successful in carrying out minor
coups at Republican party conventions in some of
these states, gaining additional delegates - and
even removing some supporters of Romney in some
key state party leadership posts.
For
example, Paul's supporters in Maine, Nevada and
Iowa, among other states, have inundated state
conventions and even gained elections as national
delegates. In some cases, they remain required to
vote for Romney as the nominee at the convention
in Tampa since he won that state. But in others,
they are actually free to vote for Paul.
Curiously, despite Paul's pullback from an
active fight in the remaining primaries, his
supporters in California are pushing on despite
the candidate's espoused intentions. For that
state's 5 June primary, Paul's campaign leader in
southern California, Robert Vaughn, told the media
they were still campaigning vigorously and he
estimated about 2,000 people were participating
daily in phone banks, door-to-door canvassing and
other high-impact forms of campaigning in Los
Angeles. But that's southern California.
Still, since Paul's new delegate capture
strategy is doomed to failure in capturing the
actual nomination back here on Earth, despite the
dreams of his true believers, why bother? There
appear to be three theories about why he presses
on. One or another of them, or perhaps all three
simultaneously, may be the core of why Paul says
he is continuing in the face of certain defeat in
Tampa at the Republican presidential nominating
convention.
First, of course, is the
purely financial incentive of soldiering on. As
long as one is a declared candidate for the
nomination before the convention, a candidate can
continue to receive direct contributions from
citizens and even remain eligible for federal
matching funds under certain conditions. If the
campaign has more debts than assets, this is a
useful strategy so as to not leave vendors for
hotel rooms, travel costs, IT support, staff
salaries, per diem and media placements stuck with
all those unpaid bills. For some candidates,
paying one's outstanding bills remains the
honourable thing to do, and it may well figure
highly in Paul's thinking, given his homilies
about self-reliance and paying one's way.
Second is to have enough leverage to get
on the prime time television schedule of the
national convention. For Paul, this may be a point
of honour in which he bargains for an opportunity
to speak directly to the nation about his ideas on
government and his nostrums for fixing what he
believes to be broken.
This is effectively
a way of saying that if the American people only
knew the truth they would be making very different
choices in their leaders - and that he, Ron Paul,
has hold of that truth and he wants to give it to
the people straight from the shoulder - or heart -
or some other part of his anatomy. This campaign
is Paul's last roundup after all - he's not
running for Congress again and at his age he is
extremely unlikely to be contemplating an effort
to bear the rigours of a presidential campaign
four years hence - even if he had the physical
endurance to do so.
The third reason has
to do with his son, Rand Paul, the new Republican
senator from the state of Kentucky. Paul the
younger is already positioning himself for the
presidency in the future. The affecting, symbolic
nature of a handoff from one generation to another
- father to son - of the torch of liberty and all
the rest of that patriotic tapestry, might just be
enough to put Paul Jr into a preliminary kind of
limelight, four or eight years into the future.
If that happens, what some influential
political columnists like to call "the great
mentioner" begins to note that Paul the Younger
might be the right man to pick up the
conservative-libertarian cause for 2016 -
especially if Barack Obama defeats Romney in
November this year. That, in turn, would relegate
what's left of the old Republican establishment as
represented by Romney to the metaphorical woodshed
for long, cold years of self-examination and
punishment duty.
That, then, would set up
Paul Jr as a logical competitor against someone
like Marco Rubio (or former Florida governor Jeb
Bush or even New Jersey governor Chris Christie)
as the most plausible conservative standard bearer
- thereby getting things off and running for the
presidential race four years hence.
This
scenario, of course, depends on whether Romney
wins or loses, come November. If he wins, Rand
Paul better hope he has been picked as the
vice-presidential nominee so he can be well placed
to become the go-to candidate in 2020. Readers
should remember they read all this strategic
to-ing and fro-ing here first.
And as for
Ron Paul's own now-dwindling time in the public
eye? Well, one thing he hasn't done is what the
defeated usually do after they are pummelled in a
tough primary fight. Paul did not say he would
give his all to help Romney defeat that hated
Obama - perhaps because Paul's ideological
proclivities are virtually as distant from
Romney's pro-business economic policies and
jingoist foreign stance as they are from Obama's
multilateralist, Keynesian instincts. Or, as Paul
told CNN on 9 May, he doesn't see himself lending
support to Romney any time soon. Rather, he's
still in the fight to have a say on the party's
agenda. He added that reconciling himself to
Romney as his leader would be "pretty hard."
In his 14 May statement he wrote: "I hope
all supporters of liberty will remain deeply
involved, become delegates, win office and take
leadership positions. I will be right there with
you. In the coming days, my campaign leadership
will lay out to you our delegate strategy and what
you can do to help, so please stay tuned."
He went on to say that this latest
presidential nomination run has been "part of a
quest I began 40 years ago… [and that]… 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."
These are definitively not the words of a
candidate reluctantly falling into line behind his
party's new standard bearer, not even in the
growling-dog-in-the-manger,
nose-holding-against-the-smell-of-it, arms-length
fashion of recent rivals Santorum and Gingrich.
Instead, Ron Paul's statement is setting up the
table for Rand Paul to become the newest rallying
point for those radical fiscal conservative,
isolationist, gold-bug libertarians to have their
new champion in the coming political decade.
DM
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