Digg - GOP Fight in Nevada

[pauletteNV]

http://digg.com/political_opinion/GOP_Fight_in_NEVADA_McCain_In_TROUBLE

Some really interesting comments on this one...worth a few minutes read, a dig, and a comment, too

[Lucille]

A really great article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121944799376665201.html?mod=googlenews_wsj). One of the most flattering articles I've read in the WSJ on RP, actually.

I mean, Haynes didn't make the RP or the NV RPRs sound like insurgent kooks in the wrong at all! I hope he doesn't get fired.


GOP Fight in Nevada Could Cause McCain Trouble
Delegation Split
May Prompt Votes For Libertarians

[...]

Running a strident libertarian campaign in the primaries, Texas Rep. Ron Paul tapped a seam of Republican frustration across the country, railing against the Bush administration's impact on civil liberties, foreign policy and the growing federal government. Mr. Paul's message resonated particularly in Nevada, a state where frontier spirit and personal freedom runs deep, and he captured second place in the January state caucuses, ahead of Sen. McCain.

Mr. Paul has suspended his campaign, but his libertarian loyalists have not. Their lingering discontentment and underlying philosophical differences may prove fertile territory for the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee, Bob Barr, and dangerous ground for Sen. McCain if even a portion of the Republican base is too disgruntled to vote. Nevada is shaping up as a key battleground in the presidential race...

[...]

In April, riding high on a second-place showing in the Silver State, the grass-roots Paul supporters were well represented and well organized at the Republican state convention. Winning a key rule change, the Paul delegation began electing a majority slate for its candidate, when party officials dropped the gavel, turned out the lights and adjourned the convention indefinitely.

[...]

In the city of Pahrump, 60 nearly barren miles west of Las Vegas, in a windowless tavern called Irene's Casino, a group of friends gathered to pass around a bottle of Ron Paul Revolution Cola and discuss how the Republican Party had wronged them.

This is a place where people move to be left alone, where mobile homes are sold as Freedom Homes and where Mr. Paul won the local Republican caucus, as his campaign signs along the highway still attest. He owed his victory to spontaneous gatherings like this one, where supporters fed up with the size of government, the Iraq war and the incursions on their civil liberties organized their own grassroots campaign.

"Out here folks draw water from their own well," said compatriot Kenny Bent, a former rancher, miner and lumberjack with long gray hair and mustache past his lower lip. "They have their own sewage system. They don't need the government and they don't want its intrusion."

Across the state, lifelong Republicans like Mr. Bent who now identify more closely with Mr. Paul's cause than with the party establishment say they won't vote for Sen. McCain.

The McCain campaign maintains that Nevada is a natural fit for the candidate. "He's a Western senator. He understands the issues, from water to public lands, that affect Westerners," said spokesman Rick Gorka. "And he's independent. He's a maverick. That has tremendous appeal in Nevada."

But the hard-line libertarian voters see Sen. McCain as the embodiment of a Republican Party they no longer trust to protect their freedoms. Citing the campaign finance rules and ban on college sports betting that he championed, many conservatives are rejecting the presumptive Republican nominee along with the party establishment.