John McCain survived the New Hampshire primary thanks to receiving the support of the bulk of Republicans opposed to the Iraq war. McCain also did much better with the antiwar voters than other GOP candidates in the crucial Florida primary.
Ron Paul, who announced he was dropping out of the race last night, never made his opposition to the Iraq War the key theme of his own campaign. (He did superbly when asked about this issue in debates or interviews, but most voters never saw the debates or interviews).
After McCain had emerged as a near-frontrunner before the Florida primary, a single 30-second ad highlighting his warmongering could have had a huge impact. Even if the Paul campaign only paid to have it broadcst a single time, it would likely have gotten picked up and frequently rebroadcast as a new story (the same tactic other candidates used).
Stressing an antiwar message probably would not have allowed Ron Paul to capture the GOP presidential nomination. But educating voters about McCain’s record could have made all the difference.
Losing the antiwar vote to McCain is like losing the chastity vote to Bill Clinton.
It is perplexing that a candidate who voted so courageously against the war in Congress would siderail this issue in his presidential campaign – and thereby possibly miss a chance to block the biggest GOP Senate warmonger from the nomination.
Pretty laughable to attacks on the way Ron Paul ran his campaign .. the guys criticizing here are clearly losers when it comes to getting anything done as I’ve never heard of any of them. If its just a message delivery problem lets see them take it up. Ron Paul has done more for freedome then all the bozos criticizing Ron Paul here combined
I think that all this hand wringing and wails of betrayal by the Ron Paul campaign are absurd. The sense in some of these postings is that a magic sound bite potion exists which, if properly administered by a Ron Paul bearing the correct party label, will cause comatose voters, poisoned by generations of statist indoctrination, to eagerly embrace Jeffersonian principles. Such faith is the stuff of a Monty Python skit.
Whatever his personal flaws and campaign tactical mistakes, Ron Paul faced a challenge that would daunt Hercules. He performed better in a backwater like Missouri than in purportedly the most libertarian state, New Hampshire. Is that his fault or that of addled voters? I recall CNN posting exit polls for one of the states which broke down voting patterns along every imaginable demographic. I was stunned that Paul polled in the single digits among voters worried about taxes and inflation! Is it his fault that voters don’t bother to inform themselves on candidates’ stand on the issues? Or is it perhaps that these voters were worried that taxes and inflation are too low?
Yes, there is a MSM bias and news blackout. But Ron Paul did appear in nationally televised debates and even in one on one nationally televised talk shows. There was ample opportunity even for voters without access to the internet to become aware of him and his message.
Folks, the electorate is brain dead. They can’t think. They are yanked around by their emotions – fear, guilt, envy. Liberty is dying because people simply see it as of little value. No matter how Ron Paul’s message is packaged and massaged, no matter what his party label, America is not ready for a libertarian society. Period. The Ron Paul phenomenon serves only one purpose and that is to flush out a future liberty cadre.
Yeah, sound bites like:
Unelect First!
Impeach Cheney now!
That’s what fifty-five to sixty-five percent of the electorate wants to hear, and they are right, but it looks like they are never going to hear it from Paul.
The Ron Paul “Liberty cadres”, hehe–when is the tote bag coming out?
You are are welcome to your superhero. I have no interest in a political Billy Graham & Son.
Without impeachment you can all take up your “Liberty” with the next King.
The fact that a good proportion of Paul’s supporters cannot grasp that seemingly simple structural proposition, nor seemingly Paul himself, shows they too are not ready for the “Liberty” they so widely advertise.
And again, what is Paul’s position on faith-based initiatives?
No one seems to want to respond to such a simple question.
Eugene:
I agree that Ron Paul should have publicly called for the impeachment of Cheney and Bush. It was vital to his stand as a strict constitutionalist. However, Kucinich has come out in favor of impeachment, yet what good did it do him? Why did only 1% instead of 65% of the electorate flock to him if impeachment is such an important issue to voters? Even if Ron Paul embraced impeachment, he would still simply be rearranging the deck chairs.
Congress votes to impeach. Why aren’t they moved to do so by the 65% of Americans who you claim are demanding it?
The point that I made in my posting above is that Americans simply see no value in liberty so long as they have jobs and are gorging themselves on cheap junk food while staring at their big screen TVs. Discussion of the threat to liberty by unconstitutional behavior will only elicit slack-jawed, vacant stares from your average voter. “Huh? What about peaches. Maybe I’ll grab one during intermission.”
Ron Paul has clearly made a bigger impact on the national political scene in one year than has the Libertarian Party in its 36 years of existence. You belittle the notion of a cadre of liberty-minded activists that the Ron Paul campaign may have generated who certainly can mature intellectually in the years ahead. Have you a better suggestion how to turn things around?
By the way, I recall hearing Paul mention in an interview that he is opposed to faith based initiatives because they will bring churches under government influence.
There might not be a “years ahead” as was the case with 1930’s Germany.
And as far as your final sentence. I do believe it would be the other way around.
I don’t disagree with the gist of what you are saying, but with emendations.
Kucinich made the motion for the impeachment of Cheney, and Paul did not support him initially, which truly surprised me.
Paul did, however, support sending it to Judiciary.
I urged Kucinich’s people to make impeachment an even more central part of his campaigning, as Gravel has done.
Paul had an early advantage over Kucinich in the media. I cannot prove but strongly suspect that his exclusion from some of the debates hinged on his strongly anti-corporate message, including his proposal to get rid of private insurance in government health programs.
Because I criticize Paul, does not mean I have not criticized Democrats. Far from it–the fact that Pelosi took impeachment off the table is a grave dereliction of her constitutional responsibilities, and also stupid politically.
Conyers has been equally remiss, though his phone has been ringing off the hook on the issue. Whatever one thinks of Wexler, he is making a strong effort to advance impeachment.
I consider impeachment much more important than the presidential election.
What you say about Congress, left and right, is correct, but not doing anything about it even as sitting Congressman, like Paul, is very hard to grasp.
Ron Paul did make an impact, but that impact is now constricted within the context of the Republican Party, where it will go nowhere.
Any interest I had in Republicans ceased with the invasion of Iraq, which I consider the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history–so great in fact that it endangers American survival.
I opposed this very publicly even before the invasion, and I am not patting myself on the back when I say that I predicted in outline what has happened long before it did, including even the Turkish-Kurdish friction as a late and capping event.
Even before the war started I was astounded by the complete ignorance of the very people, military and political, who were behind it, even though some had already been in the area during the First Gulf War.
How could they know anything about Hussein’s regime, without even knowing who or what the Ba’ath was, or what distinguishes Sunni and Shia, or that Christian Assyrians were pro-Ba’ath if not necessarily pro-Hussein, or that Iraq was still nation of tribes in some important respects?
Tribes–has it really taken half a decade for the US military to realize there is a Mesopotamian and Arab tribal and clan structure?
Ignorance is ignorance and often can be cured. Some ignorance, however, is so abysmal it cannot stand for anything save as a sign of irremediable stupidity. And such stupidity is invincible.
Prediction was nothing psychic on my part but close familiarity with the area over three thousand years, including in graduate school a minor in Arabic History under Ernest Dawn, one of the most competent American Arabists you likely have never heard of.
Though I was not an Arabist myself, I at one point almost took a position at UCLA beacause another great Arabist, perhaps the greatest in recent times, G. E. von Grunebaum was there, and at that time I was interested in the handing down of classical Greek traditions in Medieval Islam, a theme Dawn had also emphasized.
At any rate, I paid a very high price for opposing the war in Iraq, including personal (which I have no intention of talking about here) and only a small part of it was being attacked as an “anti-Semite” by supposed conservative Republicans, many of whom were Neo-cons but not all by far.
And yes–I belittle Paul’s “Libertarian cadres”. Why? Because what is the point if their own leader cannot stand up for impeachment and strike, not only while the iron is hot, but when not striking and very loudly, risks constitutional disaster and economic catastrophe?
Incidentally, anyone here, who in a past used the slogan “S&W R.I.P.” was using a slogan I first coined in a fight over the Second Amendment, which I consider as significant as the First, in fact as all of the Bill of Rights.
And indeed it was exactly the Second Amendment that got me to support, very strongly Peter Fitzgerald, and also began my first interest in Paul.
For all that, Durbin and Obama deserve kudos for being right about Iraq from the beginning, and for courageously opposing it in days when it was not an easy thing to do publicly.
Right now, Paul by comparison, looks very compromised, and also a danger in my opinion to the very Libertarian ideas and Constitutionalism he once championed.
This watered down Libertarianism, and Dr. Slop “education” in Kindergarten economics while the Constitution goes down the drain, and not standing up, as Kucinich has done, are inexcusable as far as I am concerned.
And I must say I have come through this last year with an enormous respect for Kucinich as analaytic mind, and also for some of his supporters, who have fought the good fight even at great odds, including calling for a recount in new Hampshire on general principle.
The Paulists by comparison are looking more and more to me like door to door salesmen selling icons and snake oil.
Also, thank you for answering the question about faith-based initiatives.
corr:”analytic mind”. Pardon this and any other typos I have not caught.
With the way things were handled Ron Paul is lucky he got a handful of delegates. Of course he was going against the tide of the Media and entrenched Political Elites.
But, there should have been better campaigning in the right demographic areas to gain support and to increase the pressure on those Elites and Media to allow a bigger share of the Election pie.
Unfortunately this did not happen and the likelihood that a Warmonger not a Puppet will be the chief of the White House grows(if it is not a certainty already). This really terrifies me, because these people will go to great lengths to create conflict to fill their Military Industrial Complex “lobbying” coffers. They won’t care how many millions will die. They will have a PR campaign on the sidelines showing how much they care about poor destitute Africans who are poor and destitute because Corporations like Exxon Mobil rob their countries blind.
Eugene:
Just a thought on impeachment. When one steps back from the intense partisan emotion surrounding this issue, impeachment is simply someone getting fired. This happens in the private sector all the time, and often for the most frivolous of reasons. And the public has no problem with it (unless, of course it happens to them). Yet when it comes to a politician, especially the President, being fired, some people go all wobbly and are willing to overlook egregious constitutional and war crimes when they wouldn’t tolerate a mail room boy stealing a roll of postage stamps.
One wonders, of course, why aren’t the Democrats taking advantage of the more than ample evidence to impeach Bush and Cheney and thus tar the Republicans. Is it because they fear the public will become comfortable with impeachment and demand it more often and of Democrats as well? Or is there something darker going on here. Could it be that with the ongoing electronic surveillance frenzy, Congress has been blackmailed into silence? Witness how the moralizing hypocrite, Governor Spitzer of New York, has just been snared by FBI wiretaps. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that most members of Congress, being corruptible political animals, have something to hide.
Uh, what? You seem to have your facts out of whack.
First off, Ron Paul didn’t drop out. wtf. idiot.
Second, his anti-war stance was well known! All the time in the news or on the debates it was mentioned, “Ron Paul, the only anti-war Republican candidate…”
Who the hell let you write such bullshit on their blog?
The article you linked to said that the Republican anti-war voters may have thought that McCain was anti-war, if it is true that they were that stupid/ignorant, possibly lied to… then the reason for McCain’s win isn’t that Ron Paul didn’t use his anti-war stance enough.
I remember also that many people who voted for Romney claimed in the exit polls that they agreed with him on illegal immigration and thought he would be the best candidate to reduce it…. They just so happened to be ignorant to the fact that Romney had illegals working on his own lawn.