Below The Beltway

At least one Ron Paul supporter is willing to take a sober, unbiased look at why their candidate lost and comes up with a list of several factors:

No name recognition: The main reason there was a lot of “buzz” about some can[d]idates is that they were well known. Huckabee and Romney were governors, Guilliani was all over the news in 9/11 and since then, the mayor of one of the most influential cities in the world. Fred Thompson was an actor. John McCain had already run for president and had his name floated around. Against this, you have Ron Paul. He doesn’t have the suavely presidential look of Romney, and he doesn’t have the stupidly macho-hero image of McCain, and he doesn’t have the charismatic “good ol boy” power of Huckabee. He is straightforward and clear and honest … but not that exciting to most people. And he’s not “big”. When most people think of him, unfortunately, they link him not to Republicans, but Libertarians.

When the buzz about Paul running for President started back at the beginning of 2007, I said pretty much the same thing:

When most people don’t know who you are or what you believe, you need to spend a lot of money teaching them about those things. Without the money to do so, you have to rely on free media coverage to do it. When I read mainstream press articles about Paul that describe his campaign as “quixotic” and describe him as “iconoclastic” I don’t take that as a good sign. To me, it’s a warning that they may treat him more as the Dennis Kucinich of the GOP than as a serious candidate.

Even if that doesn’t happen, though, there is a danger when you rely on free media to define your campaign. Just ask Howard “The Scream” Dean.

I repeat this not to point out that I was right — although, apparently, I was — but to point out that this is something that was, or at least should have been apparent from the beginning and yet the campaign never really did anything to address it.

Which leads us to another factor:

No organization: the campaign he ran was a completely disorganized mess, a shambolic fuck-up of such monumental proportions I’m frankly astounded you Libertarians haven’t lynched his campaign staff for treason. I’ve seen better efforts by my city councilmen. The only real traction ever made in the campaign was by the grass-roots element. Fundraising? Grassroots. Internet viral message? Grassroots. Precinct level organization? Grassroots. Certainly, the grassroots deserves a commendation for one of the best efforts in history … but the grassroots cannot get your canidate ACCESS. That’s the campaign’s job, and they failed, leading to…

Not only that, but by allowing itself to be defined almost exclusively by the grassroots supporters, and not taking any real steps to exercise control over them, the campaign created the impression that the grassroots was the campaign, even when they did something that was detrimental — such as heckling Rudy Giuliani in Michigan and Atlanta, chasing Sean Hannity through the streets of Manchester, New Hampshire, or engaging in fundraising plans (i.e., the blimp or the idea to get some boxer to have Ron Paul’s name tattooed on his back) that were both silly and created the impression that the campaign was a joke.

Which leads to another problem created by the lack of control:

Lack of Control of the Message: People were hearing all kinds of crap that was attributed to Ron Paul. That he was racist. That he was going to ban abortion. That he has no problems with abortion. He would abolish the military. He would withdraw us from the UN and all trade agreements. That he didn’t trust any medicine except alternative medicine. That he planned to let the poor starve. And on, and on, and on. And no one in his campaign, and he himself, fought this. His site is full of doubletalk — his page on Racism is so vague and missing the point that most people saw it as code for “We won’t stop racism, it’s not our job, so if you’re racist go right ahead”.

By not exercising any control over grassroots supporters, the campaign allowed anyone to latch on and pursue their own agenda whether we’re talking about 9/11 truthers or outright racists.

And then there was:

The attitude: I’ve mentioned this before. But when you’ve got no name recognition, people don’t understand your position, you can’t get on TV , your campaign is paralyzed, and people link you to “fringe groups” , the last thing that’s going to help is hearing some nut screaming at the top of his lungs that Ron Paul is the greatest man since Jesus. It makes your canidate look like Lyndon LaRouche. People go with what they see, and for every time I had a calm, logical discussion with a RP supporter, I had five times I had to listen to a disjointed diatribe about liberty that told me nothing about how RP would deal with my problems, or the problems I thought that this country needed to address, and everything about things I didn’t care about. Perhaps that’s me…the votes suggest otherwise.

Even before the voting had taken place, the possibility of having rational discussions with some elements of Paul’s online base was, quite honestly, impossible. Just take a look at the disaster that was several of the comment threads in these posts at The Liberty Papers, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Any criticism of Paul was treated as heresy and any suggestion that one of his ideas might not be 100% right led to one being called everything from stupid to a member of Tri-Lateral Commission. I for one didn’t mind the personal attacks — they really didn’t mean anything to me — but it was distressing that so few people were willing to engage in debate rather than spewing invective, and it didn’t impress me at all.

You’re not going to convince people of anything if you’re not willing to debate in a civilized manner and accept people who disagree with you aren’t necessarily evil.

Which leads, in the end, to an inability to admit that it’s over:

Pie-in-the-sky thinking: After the first few contests when he got beaten badly, someone — either the grassroots or the campaign — should have done some rethinking and new strategizing. Instead, the grassroots complained it was due to the MSM bias and the stupidity of voters, and the campaign did nothing. And so it happened again, and again, and then Super Tuesday came along and that was a trainwreck, and Super Tuesday II killed the popular vote aspect of winning. The answer? “Well, we can still win on delegates”.

Which then led, of course, to the inane suggestion that Paul’s supporters could somehow thwart the will of millions of people who voted in Republican primaries, steal the nomination from McCain on delegates, and actually get away with it.

Finally, the author makes three suggestions for how what to do next time:

1. A platform that doesn’t scare the shit out of people: If you’re really determined to roll back the changes in government, you are going up against literally everyone else. So sweeping changes are probably going to turn people away. Remember — just becuase everything is wrong and horrid to you doesn’t mean everyone else sees it that way. Most people see government as needing to be adjusted slightly , with “better people” in power — not “renovated”. If you move your platform slowly over time so people can see the results, then you can prove you were right. (Or, if your platform actually makes things worse, well, you have time to correct. That gold standard thing is not going to go well at first).
2. A can[d]idate that people besides Libertarians can get excited about: I certainly don’t mean to insult anybody, but only a small fraction of the population gives a shit about Ron Paul. You need someone younger, a charismatic speaker, someone handsome, married to a goodlooking woman, someone very Christian, a veteran, and who has a track record slightly less extreme than Dr. Paul. He has to be able to compromise. If you insist on playing it with guys like Ron Paul, the slick criminals like McCain and the messianic pretenders like Obama will beat you and keep beating you.
3. A campaign that can at least find it’s own ass if it put it’s hands in it’s back pockets: C’mon, folks. I wouldn’t trust those people to lead starving wolves to fresh meat, much less leading the electorate to unite behind a can[d]idate. If the people you’ve got running this mess are the best you can do, HIRE someone. Pay that evil demon that’s running Obama’s campaign, or hell, hire an ad agency. Anything. The grassroots element is already working perfectly, but you need a national level to coordinate it, to be the contact point for media inquries, and to leverage the money into something useful.

I don’t know how long it will take to pull all three of those things together, but if anyone does manage to do it we might finally have a candidate who believes in individual liberty, can communicate it articulately, and can run a campaign that has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

Until then, I’m voting for Bob Barr this year.

H/T: Jim Henley & James Joyner