I'd say Huckabee and Paul were seriously marginalized with 13-14% and 3% respectively of the votes in the first large state, diverse population, no independants primary.
Yeah, but Paul himself didn't campaign in Florida. He was stumping in Maine while his son was stumping in Montana. Caucus states.
What a waste of air time. Even at 1/2 the delagates (florida was penalized for moving its primary up in time) you could take 5 Montana's and Maine and they don't equal Florida. RP support as a candidate is a waste of time. His focus on ideas is valuable, but as a candidate that action is the ultimate statement of irrelevancy
Florida is 57. Maine is 18, Montana 25. Sure seems a better place to focus, being caucuses, rather than a winner-take-all he wasn't going to win. Yawn. He's playing a better strategy, not that it will work, but he's not stupid.
Florida's delegates are bound on the first ballot. If the Convention goes to a second ballot, there will be Ron Paul Florida delegates from that state. It's strictly resource management. 15% in Florida would not have yielded a better or different result. It's sad to see you acknowledge ideas, and at the same time deem them irrelevant. A very myopic view, and in my mind, a John McCain vs Clinton/Obama General Election is far from the best that America has to offer, so complaining about a wide field quite frankly, doesn't sound very democratic to me.
It appears, based on past performance, that 15% is a pipe dream. I didn't know anything about Ron Paul prior to the election. He is the totally iconic member of Congress. He has managed to maintain his position in Congress by being attentive to his constituents, charming, and charismatic while being an independant lone wolf on issues. His ideas are dramatically radical, IMHO and based upon his voting record, wherein he has at times been a minority of one or a tiny few. The past writings from his newsletters are astonishing and frankly IMHO he shouldn't be running. If he was a serious candidate he would be getting skewered about these writings. His excuses to date don't pass muster. He simply is getting a free ride. With regard to ideas I think some have merit and some are quirky possibly dangerous (again IMHO). I like the fact that he wants to debate the war in Iraq and foreign policy. That does deserve merit. I'm turned off by the constant reference to the constitution. What he is for is the strictest definition of the constitution as it is written. That has been debated for several hundred years now with a wide variety of interpretation. I'm certainly one who believes in interpreting the constitution to reflect the spirit of the documents that should be interpreted to fit with modern circumstances. A document written in the 1700's can't even begin to cope with a changing world. Strict interpretation of the constitution gave people the right to turn Blacks into slaves for close to a century. That makes strict interpretation pretty stupid in my eyes. I guess the several ideas I find attractive are debating the war in Iraq, continuing to question the scope of foreign involvement (not that I'm for his policy perspective, but simply that it is worthwhile to do so) and making an effort to control spending. Frankly I find his spending ideas pretty radical in their own light, but the effort should be made to focus on spending. There are lots of ways to control spending, his being one perspective. That is a worthwhile endeavor. In sum, I think it is a disgrace that someone who consistently published documents over a long period of time that were dramatically racist is running for President. The simple fact is though that he is such a marginal candidate that he isn't being put to the task on this issue. I'll be happy when he vanishes from the spotlight again.
He got 14% in Nevada. He'll better that in several states before this is done. The idea of a living Constitution is a fallacy. The Constitution is designed to be changed as needed. To start interpreting the law differently totally undermines the integrity and spirit of a nation of laws. The Constitution was amended to address slavery. That is how it is supposed to be done. You're making my point. Obviously. You favor the status quo. That's how we got here. People being oblivious to what their politicians were doing, admitting that they are corrupt, and then expect corrupt incompetents to solve the problems they created, in a system that encourages that same behavior. The next president is not going to cut spending and taxes to stimulate the economy. They are going to rack up enough entitlement spending and bailouts to make George Bush and the Haliburton Board of Governors blush. You can take that to the Federal Reserve Bank.
Polls don't matter. Delegates do. Even the results on CNN for delegates are projections, not real counts (at least for almost all states). He's doing much better than you would think, when you look at it based on delegates. We're infiltrating every state in the Union. Not really any disagreement here. People like him, and he stands up for them and they like what he has to say. Which examples where he was a lone voter do you disagree with his stance, and why? Everyone here should know my stance on the newsletters. I don't think he wrote them, although I do believe he knows who did and doesn't want to bury that person. It would probably save a bit of face for him to at least tie a different name to whoever wrote them. I give him a pass on his writings based on his voting record and 30 years of speeches and writings to the contrary of what was written in the newsletter; aside from that, half of the stuff in the newsletters is off the cuff and politically incorrect, but not racist. A lot of it, but not all of it. Such as? Why don't people ever say which parts they disagree with, and instead just expect us to know? Agreed. If you were like him and saw the Constitution as something to be only narrowly interpreted, compared to the other candidates, you WOULD think you were the only one who stood for the Constitution. I personally side with Paul here, if only because the way we've been heading (i.e. loose interpretation of the Constitution) is not working so well for us. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again expecting different results. It's time to throw a Jeffersonian curveball into the system, because the Hamilton style of government just allows for too much damned crud. Most if not all of the other candidates seek to slow spending, or cut the growth of spending, but Paul has by far the solution that most significantly cuts spending. The Taxpayers Union, I believe, just released something to this effect, that of the remaining Republicans, only Paul has proposed changes that would bring spending down; with each other candidate, the net effect is a raise in spending. And that's from the party of fiscal conservatism; I won't even begin on the Democrats. Look at his website, he released a comprehensive reform plan for our economy. With which parts do you find issue? To each their own. I can't wait to support all the people now starting Congressional campaigns as Ron Paul Republicans.
Getting 14% in Nevada was an anomaly, I'd bet. He probably got close to 100% of the hooker vote. Did either of you guys get access to his newsletters. I read that they are both obscure and hard to find. My reading of the article on it is that there were lots of references to racist comments over many years. When a guy publishes something directly under his name, he is responsable. I'll repeat a concept again. Imagine a Guerilla or Fletsch newsletter going out under your names. Imagine GTech is a ghost writer and writing exactly as he writes here. Imagine moreover that the Fletsch and Guerilla newsletters make Fletsch and/or Guerilla money. Who is responsable for the newsletters. Its that simple. And that is the best case. On the other hand suppose he directly wrote most of the articles that are in question. Again, the issues I find worthwhile to debate are a focus on the war in Iraq, the focus on the scope of International involvement and spending, and the overall issues of spending. There are lots of ways to attack spending. Here are two examples: 1. The FTA (Federal Transit Administration) has a pool of money for the development of transit systems (subways, buses). There is a system in place for evaluating proposals for the pool of money every year. In this system, each transit system is forced to try and develop a system that best merits the funds. Evaluations are based on hard money issues and other considerations (that are softer). In so doing this the pot of money is moved into the merit based systems, based on the evaluation criteria. Imagine if that was in place for the great scheme of moneys for bigger packages of health issues. Imagine if funds that were provided by Bush for medicines for the elderly were evaluated on value. Do you think they would have written something into the law that provided for govt programs to not be able to negotiate drug costs as was done? That was a horseshit add on program that was simply added to the drug benefit program to help out drug companies and add costs to tax payers. Alternatively, imagine if that program was put up against and in conjunction with the more recently debated issue of increasing monies for families who need help to get insurance for kids. Don't you believe that if financial and other merit based evaluations were added into the mix best financial decisions would make a difference? The govt does stuff like this in at least one program but never does it in larger programs. The govt should be doing this across the board. 2. In a similar vein of merit based evaluations during the early 2000's Paul O'Neill (then Secretary of the Treasury) and Bono toured Africa. O'Neill strongly felt and did research to suggest that aids programs that would show the strongest benefit might involve drilling for water where it wasn't available at costs in the million dollar range versus proposals from contractors for the same things in the billions of dollars range. There was no follow up effort to determine the validity of this approach. Sh!t, they could have experimented with this 10 times over to ascertain its worthiness and it would have been worthwhile to see the merit of the million dollar efforts versus the billion dollar proposals. Govt should take on more of the premises of business. It would cut costs like crazy and dramatically change the cost structure.
Lame Earl. I expect this kind of fluff from the usual suspects. What group are you attributing the 10% in Iowa to? How about the second place in Louisiana? Did you read the newsletters, or the article? Because the article is a hit piece, that selectively takes passages out of context, and tries to project plenty of disinformation on the subject. Yes, I have read the newsletters. There is some reprehensible stuff, but a lot that is just hard right conservatism. I've already responded to the newsletters numerous times. Not going to do it all over again weeks later. So basically, you believe that the government should run a "stream lined" monopoly. Whatever Earl. We used to call that communism.
1. How did you get the newsletters? They are very obscure via the article. 2. The FTA program is 180 degrees opposite of communism. It says give us your best proposal and then make it better and more worthwhile to merit govt expenditure. It is the closest thing to market/merit based govt. expenditures. The way the Bush administration works is closer to govt communism as it was practiced by Russia. On health Bush decides to put health money into medicines for the elderly and money for aids but doesn't want to put money or more money into increased insurance coverage for kids. Nothing gets decided on merits. Everything gets decided on bs political slogans. There is no bang for the buck.
TNR posted them a day or so after the article, and then several more days after that. Although people in the RP, libertarian, and old-right conservative community have known about the content for some time. Right, but the issue doesn't address central economic planning, it only attempts to put lipstick (in my opinion) on that pig. I agree, and that is what we can continue to look forward to from these statist oriented candidates, pre-picked for us from a limited pool. It's not that your ideas don't have merit, but like the obsession with earmarks by some so-called cosmo-libertarians or fiscons, is that it's merely meant to take away focus from any meaningful, lasting and fundamental change. Also, you have to be careful criticizing GWB around here, or you get accused of BDS. Some sort of irony, that if he continued a Clinton policy, it's not his fault, or if he continued a bad Reagan policy (of many) then you're not a real conservative. Instead of working together for common solutions, we're being forced into groups to fight over sub issues, while the soundtrack remains the same. That's why I have been trying to post some issues based threads, so that we can get away from the left-right paradigm, and look for common ground and understanding of the differing opinions.