“An Exceedingly Unlikely Proposition”: Can The Romney Campaign Co-Opt The Ron Paul Movement?
When Ron Paul released a statement earlier this week informing supporters that “moving forward … we will no longer spend resources campaigning in primary states that have not yet voted,” it was easy to imagine Mitt Romney’s campaign staff quietly rejoicing. The Congressman’s staff was quick to clarify that he was not officially suspending his efforts for the nomination, but it was hard to see this as anything other than the end of the Paul campaign—and, in turn, the beginning of Romney’s cooptation of it.
As Barack Obama’s campaign proved in 2008 after its bruising primary fight against Hillary Clinton, a party that’s been unified in time for the national convention is its own reward. But bringing Paul’s supporters into the fold would also seem to have a special attraction for the Romney campaign: The Massachusetts governor earned plenty of votes in the primary, but he never quite inspired the enthusiasm of the Paul movement, which has regularly attracted thousands of committed supporters to rallies. It’s only reasonable for Romney to hope he can transfer some of that fervor—especially from young people, a demographic President Obama himself seems to be targeting—to his own campaign.
Having spoken with a wide swathe of young Paul voters, however, I’ve learned that’s an exceedingly unlikely proposition. Paul may have been running for the Republican nomination, but what he produced was a movement whose identity revolves around his own personality and his professed libertarian ideology. It’s a movement with hardly any affinity for the GOP—and for a man like Romney least of all.
It’s telling that Paul supporters almost uniformly refer to Paul’s bid for the presidency as a “movement” or “revolution,” rather than a “campaign.” To ask about their allegiance to the party is, for many of them, to make a category mistake. “It’s not a matter of partisan politics,” says Casey Given, an organizer for the University of California Berkeley chapter of the Youth for Ron Paul group. “It’s more about the ideas than the party.” Indeed, a common refrain among Ron Paul supporters is that the Republican Party needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Generally, Paul’s supporters speak of his campaign as something more akin to a political science or philosophy seminar, than a campaign for public office. Paul’s message has always encouraged his supporters to believe there’s much more at stake than temporary occupancy of the Oval Office. “It’s not designed to win votes, it’s designed to illuminate the right path forward for both the U.S. and its role in the world and how we manage the economy,” says Jacob Arluck, an organizer for Cornell University’s Youth for Ron Paul chapter.
In the words of Cliff Maloney, the former Pennsylvania Campus Coordinator for the Paul campaign, who has since been hired by Paul’s congressional office, “They don’t want anybody that’s going to give them rhetoric, they want someone that will give them the truth.” And, having been given access to the “truth,” Paul’s supporters are refusing to abandon their candidate. “They will stick with him until he says he drops out of the race or when he wins the race,” Maloney says. “[Ron Paul supporters] would do anything for Dr. Paul’s message.”
But even if they’re reconciled to the fact that Paul won’t win this year, many young voters don’t think of their support for Paul as a lost cause. The college-aged students who comprise the Paul campaign’s base was attracted to him in part because they hoped even if he didn’t win him the election, his organization could at least shape the political discourse for years down the line. “Being the party of old white rich men will not be a winning strategy in the future,” says Given. But that’s a strategy that depends on their staying firm to their principles and not transferring their allegiance to another candidate this year. “After 2012 is over, the Republican Party is going to have no choice but to realize that the future of the party is in more of a classically conservative libertarian direction,” says Pinter. “That’s where the youth is voting.”
Unsurprisingly, then, when I asked Paul supporters whether they would be voting for Romney this year, every single one of them said definitely not, and they insisted other Paul supporters they know wouldn’t either. “I think it would be very difficult for Ron Paul supporters to sleep at night and support someone that represents a lot of the principles that they disagree with,” said Tyler Koteskey, who called Romney a “liberal in conservative sheepskin.” Indeed, for some, the very suggestion that they might vote for Romney was an insult. “Personally, I would not vote for Romney,” said Mike Pinter of UC Davis. “I have conservative principles that can, under no circumstances, rationalize a vote for Romney.”
Needless to say, Barack Obama faced nothing like these challenges when he wooed disaffected Hillary supporters in 2008. Paul’s fans, it seems, will insist on continuing to divide the GOP, unless, and until, they can take it over entirely.
By: Eric Wen, The New Republic, May 19, 2012
Yep, “Call Him Cynical”: Rand Paul Rebuked For Gay Marriage Remark
Sen. Rand Paul, who said he wasn’t sure President Obama‘s views on marriage “could get any gayer,” was rebuked by an influential evangelical leader Sunday.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, appearing onCBS’ “Face the Nation,” strongly disagreed with the Kentucky Republican’s choice of words.
“I don’t think this is something we should joke about,” Perkins said. “We are talking about individuals who feel very strongly one way or the other, and I think we should be civil, respectful, allowing all sides to have the debate…. I think this is not something to laugh about. It’s not something to poke fun at other people about. This is a very serious issue.”
Perkins’ words were echoed by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on NBC’s“Meet the Press” Sunday.
“People in this country, no matter straight or gay, deserve dignity and respect. However, that doesn’t mean it carries on to marriage,” Priebus said. “I think that most Americans agree that in this country, the legal and historic and the religious union marriage has to have the definition of one man and one woman.”
Paul made his remarks during a meeting of the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Iowa on Friday.
“The president recently weighed in on marriage and you know he said his views were evolving on marriage. Call me cynical, but I wasn’t sure his views on marriage could get any gayer,” he said, drawing laughter from the audience.
Same-sex marriage surged to the forefront of political debate after Obama declared his support last week.
In an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts — hastily arranged to quiet the fallout from Vice PresidentJoe Biden’s comments days earlier that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage — Obama said: “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” He also said it was “the golden rule, you know? Treat others the way you’d want to be treated.”
In response, likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney reiterated his belief that “marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.”
And Rand Paul’s father, GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, said the government should not make rules on marriage.
The libertarian view, he told Fox News, is, “Stay out of people’s lives. I would like the state to stay out of marriage…. Let two people define marriage.”
By: Morgan Little, The Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2012
“Poking The Elephant In The Eye”: Ron Paul Backers Make GOP’s Lives More Complicated
If 90% of life is just showing up, Ron Paul supporters have discovered the secret of success at state Republican Party gatherings.
Last week, the Republican National Committee issued a stern warning to the state party in Nevada: if you allow Paul backers to take many slots for the national convention, the party might just refuse to seat the state’s entire delegation as punishment.
How’d that work out? Based on previous vote totals, Nevada Republicans were supposed to give Mitt Romney 20 of the state’s 28 delegates. That’s not what happened.
Despite former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses, Texas Rep. Ron Paul has won a majority of the state’s delegates to the party’s national convention later this year in Tampa, Florida.
Thanks to organized Paul supporters, who have been working to increase their candidate’s support at state conventions around the country, 22 of the 25 Nevada delegates up for grabs will be Paul supporters. (Another three are automatic delegates.) […]
“The Paul folks couldn’t get their people turned out for the caucus,” said veteran Nevada political columnist Jon Ralston. “But they outmaneuvered the Nevada Romney people ever since and dominated the county conventions and this is the inevitable result. The question remains: To what end?”
The answer to that question is far from clear. Paul supporters hoping for a brokered convention are fooling themselves, but their success at state party conventions will likely give the strange Texas congressman a stronger voice at the Tampa gathering.
Indeed, Nevada isn’t the only one. Paul backers “commandeered the Maine Republican Party convention” over the weekend, too, winning all 15 of the at-large delegates.
Adding insult to injury, in Massachusetts, less than half of Romney’s 27 chosen delegates won. One of the losers was Kerry Healey, Romney’s former lieutenant governor, who was thought to be a lock for the national convention.
When it came to day-to-day campaign logistics, Team Romney was infinitely better organized than Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, but when it comes to getting supporters to show up at state conventions, even in Massachusetts, Romney’s campaign looks awfully weak compared to Ron Paul.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 7, 2012
“No Nutritional Value”: A Farewell To Newt
It’s not easy letting him go. Not easy at all. Sort of like swearing off bedtime Ben & Jerry’s: there’s valor and the promise of self-improvement in the sacrifice, but also the sad awareness that the world just got a little less naughty. A little less fun.
No matter. It’s time to cut Newt out of our diets.
He has no nutritional value, certainly not at this point, as he peddles his ludicrous guarantee of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, a promise that would be made only by someone with his own bottomless strategic reserve of crude. Doubly oily entendre intended.
There were calls for him to desist two weeks ago, after he lost Alabama, which abuts his home state of Georgia. But they fell on a deaf Newt.
There were fresh appeals last week, when he failed to wring even one measly delegate from Illinois on Tuesday and then Louisiana on Saturday. But Newt doesn’t need anything as prosaic as delegates, so long as there’s still pocket lint from Sheldon Adelson and the warmth of Callista’s frozen smile.
If he refuses to quit, we in the news media must quit him. Starve him of his very sustenance: attention. Exert a kind of willpower that we’ve lacked in this primary, which we turned into too much of a circus by encouraging too many clowns.
We’ve begun. As the weekend came to a close, The Times’s Trip Gabriel reported that Gingrich’s “full-time traveling press corps is down to a handful of embedded television reporters.” The Associated Press, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and even Politico had packed up their bags. I envision Newt as a larger, grayer, windier version of the little boy at the end of “Shane,” watching the last of these stubborn scribes recede into the horizon, begging them for one last sweet tweet, promising a tasty sound bite about Trayvon Martin or Robert De Niro or … “The Hunger Games!” There must be some harbinger of cultural decline to rail about there! Do “Hunger Games” contestants use food stamps? Those are always good for a diatribe or three.
I implore Fox News to pull up its drawbridge, CNN to bolt its doors. If a Newt falls in the forest and not a single news anchor listens, can he really hang around?
He says he’s propelled by a desire to promote “big ideas,” but his candidacy has devolved into ever smaller talk and ever more desperate sideshows that drag an already undistinguished debate ever lower. Late last week he actually resurrected the Obama-as-Muslim bile, saying the president’s policies raise legitimate suspicion in voters’ minds.
In truth Newt 2012 has never been a lofty enterprise. Although he loves to tout his intellectualism, he got what brief traction he did for visceral and theatrical reasons, with fits of rage and flights of fancy.
He took off when he lashed out at “the elites,” pretending not to be one of them. He soared when he savaged the news media. He rocketed to a colony on the moon.
And he illustrated a dynamic that will survive this campaign season and that we should all think about: how much the profusion of cable channels, Web outlets, other news platforms and commentary of all kinds (including this column) rewards flamboyance, histrionics and a crowded field. A brash candidate is never more than a bellow away from three minutes of air time or two paragraphs somewhere. The beast is ravenous, and I don’t mean Newt.
Yes, the serial surges of the Republican contest since August had grounding in a fickle electorate and changeable polls. But we eagerly abetted them. En route to our beige destiny of Mitt, we craved color. And showcased it.
Newt is one of the few surviving peacocks, especially if you discount Ron Paul, who’s less peacock than emaciated ostrich — never airborne, head in the sand — and so consistently discounted that no one even bothers to implore him to fold his tent. No one can remember that he pitched one.
It’s time to forget Newt as well. His delegate count is closer to Paul’s than to Rick Santorum’s. His strategy — a generous noun — hinges on a replay of the 1920 Republican convention, which picked Warren G. Harding on the 10th ballot.
The 10th ballot? That’d really send the Republican nominee into the general election with a head of steam. I can see the bumper stickers now. Newt: Battle ready. Ballot hardened.
Great politicians are memorialized with holidays, monuments, libraries. For Newt I think an ice cream flavor is in order, something in the clogged vein of Chubby Hubby or Chunky Monkey, although not so physique-focused. Nutty Professor is too obvious a suggestion, though it opens the door to pralines, aptly Southern.
Maybe Peaches ’n’ Scream? That would honor the state he comes from while acknowledging the state he’s been in — unsubtle, overwrought. Not qualifying for the Virginia primary was a blow akin to Pearl Harbor. The Palestinians are “an invented” people.
Newt is empty calories. A pointless pint of them.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 26, 2012
“Drop Dead”: Republican Presidential Candidates To Rape Victims
I wrote Monday night about the emerging conservative war on women’s sexuality, and it looks like I was on to something. At Wednesday’s GOP debate in Arizona the Republican candidates for president competed to be the most vociferous in their opposition to reproductive health and freedom.
CNN’s John King read a viewer-submitted question about whether the candidates support birth control and why or why not. The audience immediately booed, because they hate when their candidates are forced to expose their extremism on social issues. In recent weeks all the Republican candidates have all volunteered their opposition to making contraception available, specifically with regard to the Obama administration’s requirement that employer provided health insurance cover it. But somehow asking about that is considered unfair. “You did not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide,” complained Gingrich. when in the Illinois State Senate. You’ll be shocked to know that Obama never actually voted for infanticide but rather for protecting doctors who complete abortions when the fetus shows “signs of life” from unfair prosecutions.
But we already knew Gingrich was prone to cheap demagoguery; Gingrich makes a hypocritical attack on “elites,” the media or the “elite media,” in every debate. What we don’t get to see as often is just how inhumane the Republican candidates all are on women’s health.
King noted that Gingrich and Rick Santorum have criticized Mitt Romney for having signed a law requiring hospitals, even Catholic ones, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims when he was governor of Massachusetts. If Romney were a decent person, this would be an easy question to answer. He would say, “Of course any institution in our society that purports to care for the sick must provide contraception to rape victims.” But Romney isn’t running for decent person, he’s running to be the Republican nominee for president.
And so Romney defensively insisted he would never have dared tell anyone to provide contraception to a rape victim. “There was no requirement in Massachusetts for the Catholic Church to provide morning-after pills to rape victims. That was entirely voluntary on their report. There was no such requirement.”
Think a little bit about what this means: a woman who is violently raped and has no control of which hospital she is taken to, or who lives near only a Catholic hospital, will be forced to carry her rapist’s fetus.
The even greater irony, of course, is that this woman who does not want to be forced to carry her rapists’ fetus will end up getting an actual abortion, not using the morning after pill, which Gingrich falsely characterized at the debate as a kind of abortion.
Santorum and Gingrich were not in the least bit embarrassed to have been referenced opposing contraception for rape victims. Indeed, they pressed the point. “The reports we got were quite clear that the public health department was prepared to give a waiver to Catholic hospitals about a morning-after abortion pill, and that the governor’s office issued explicit instructions saying that they believed it wasn’t possible under Massachusetts law to give them that waiver,” said Gingrich.
“If you voted for Planned Parenthood like the senator [Santorum] has, you voted for birth control pills,” noted Ron Paul. “And you literally, because funds are fungible, you literally vote for abortions because Planned Parenthood gets the money.”
That’s an easy argument for Paul to make because Paul opposes the federal government providing any health services. For a big government anti–sexual freedom conservative such as Santorum, though, it poses a conundrum. Santorum’s response was that he opposes federal spending on contraception (through a law called Title X), but knowing he couldn’t get rid of it settled for trying to balance it with abstinence education.
As Congressman Paul knows, I opposed Title X funding. I’ve always opposed Title X funding, but it’s included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things, including the funding for the National Institutes of Health, the funding for Health and Human Services and a whole bunch of other departments. It’s a multibillion-dollar bill.
What I did, because Title X was always pushed through, I did something that no one else did. Congressman Paul didn’t. I said, well, if you’re going to have Title X funding, then we’re going to create something called Title XX, which is going to provide funding for abstinence-based programs, so at least we’ll have an opportunity to provide programs that actually work in — in keeping children from being sexually active instead of facilitating children from being sexually active. And I pushed Title XX to — to accomplish that goal.
You’d think voting for contraception, which helps reduce the number of abortions, would be unobjectionable. But Republicans think it’s so immoral that Romney actually accused Santorum of being insufficiently anti–reproductive freedom:
Senator, I just saw a YouTube clip of you being interviewed where you said that you personally opposed contraceptives but that you — you said that you voted for Title X. But you used that as an argument, saying this is something I did proactively. You didn’t say this is something I was opposed to; it wasn’t something I would have done. You said this — you said this in a positive light, “I voted for Title X.”
God forbid. The intellectual honesty award goes, as always, to Paul. Being an ObGyn, Paul had to point out that Gingrich was lying when he referred to the morning after pill as an abortion. “Actually, the morning-after pill is nothing more than a birth control pill… you can’t separate the two. They’re all basically the same, hormonally,” said Paul.
So, naturally it follows that Republicans who don’t want hospitals to provide birth control don’t want them to offer the morning-after pill either. That should teach those slutty trollops not to get raped, right?
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, February 22, 2012
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