Opinion: Freedom for the incompetent!
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Since Amina has nicely laid out the candidates’ financial pole positions, and since the paultards have come out in force to upbraid me for an ancient Ron Paul-related post (this is the thanks the L.A. Times gets for providing him a forum to deliver the night’s best line at the GOP’s Golden State debate?), it’s a good time to talk about the campaign cock-up of the fourth-place Republican contender. To wit: Is the Paul campaign guilty of gross fiscal mismanagement? And even if you believe the dollar is worthless without a gold standard, is it really that easy to turn so many millions into so little achievement?
At Reason, Dave Weigel does a little digging into Paul’s delegate count, and finds some reason for hope. Paul’s campaign makes even more impressive delegate claims, though the staff seems to count delegates on the same obscure sliding scale it uses to make dollars vanish. Paul’s fundraising was in its way even more miraculous than Mike Huckabee’s polling surge. And there was something heartening, as the Paul surge grew, in the candidate’s refusal to frame his campaign as some kind of consciousness-raising effort. Even if you never believed he was really running for president, it was good to know that he believed it.
Did his campaign? The newsletter brouhaha certainly suggests Paul applies a laissez-faire philosophy to all sorts of management areas, but did his campaign really need this many screwups, ballot emergencies, voting snafus and of course conspiracy-minded excuses for its own incompetence?
I expect no quarter from the Paulites, but I say all this with sadness. It’s been clear for at least six months that Dr. No’s campaign was shaping up to be more than just a novelty. Ron Paul tapped in to a wide array of interests, and his appeal went well beyond the simple ‘opposition to the war’ explanation arrogant journalists favored. But let’s just say he could have tapped in a lot deeper and with more lasting results. It’s not like we don’t need the help right about now. The country is seeing the beginnings of a real leftwing backlash and the Republicans are about to nominate a ‘national greatness’ conservative who is in every respect the anti-Goldwater. (Good luck getting any libertarian leverage from those Paul delegates at the convention.) Couldn’t Ron Paul have just spent 12 months focusing on the task at hand?
Update: Welcome, Pauline Order of Ron!
Half the time I feel like you don’t even know I exist, Ron Paul fans, so yes, welcome! Please stay and chat, and I’ll get your comments through the pipelines as quickly as possible. Sorry for taking the night off, folks, and really, whatever you want to call yourselves -- they wouldn’t be so crude at the L.A. Times but I do have friends who use the word ‘paultards,’ and only with love -- it’s up to you to name yourselves. As long as I caught your eye.
Everybody else, please don’t skimp on the comments. Plenty of brilliant stuff, interesting conversations forming, and rave reviews such as these:
‘factually inaccurate and sophomorically naive’ ‘I think you wrote this just to get people to see your article.’ ‘What exactly were you trying to say...’ ‘Hey Timmy your article was lame, like high school lame...’ ‘Another attempt by the MSM to discredit an honest and forthright individual...’ ‘I stopped reading the article after the first sentence, when you referred to...’ ‘I don’t know what you expect Ron Paul to do, take the order, cook the meal, wash...’ ‘I’m not being sarcastic. I swear on my neighbor’s cat I’m not.’ ‘Wanting to stop the murder in Iraq is not incompetence, it is morally justified...’