The New Yorker: PARTY CRASHER (a write up of the Ron Paul campaign)

[sailingaway]

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2012/02/27/p465/120227_r21865_p465.jpg

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/27/120227fa_fact_sanneh?currentPage=all

there is stuff in here I disagree with wholeheartedly, like the idea Ron 'had to know' about all the provisions of the newsletters just because the writer was a ghost writer who pretended to be him. But they are writing as fair a piece as they can, given their biases, I think.

[tennman]

A long, but mostly good read.

Good points in that right now Paul needs to thump more of the Republican issues like taxes, ending Obamacare, ending the IRS, etc. It doesn't mean he has to give up the other issues, but he needs to talk about the issues that can fall upon friendly ears to gain support.

[WD-NY]

A long, but mostly good read.

Good points in that right now Paul needs to thump more of the Republican issues like taxes, ending Obamacare, ending the IRS, etc. It doesn't mean he has to give up the other issues, but he needs to talk about the issues that can fall upon friendly ears to gain support.

yep, now that Santorum has decided to bet the house on Social Issues (short term minor win, long term EPIC FAIL because the press is going to bury him with it), Ron should be doubling down on economics in his stump speeches.

[KingNothing]

yep, now that Santorum has decided to bet the house on Social Issues (short term minor win, long term EPIC FAIL because the press is going to bury him with it), Ron should be doubling down on economics in his stump speeches.

Every time Santorum opens his mouth now the only thought that comes to mind is "oh my God, this guy is trying to lose every single independent voter."

It'll be interesting to see where he's positioned in two weeks.

[KingNothing]

I think that was a very fair article.

It was by no means a puff-piece, but it wasn't a hit either. If every substantial periodical dedicated so many words to us to that end, I imagine we'd be in an even better position than we currently are, so I'll take it.

[Aratus]

interesting read

[goldwater's ghost]

interesting article. well researched though the same tendency to view us as those weird paulites seeps through

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/27/120227fa_fact_sanneh?currentPage=all

Paul lost his first congressional race, in 1974. Two years later, he won a special election (the earlier winner had accepted a job in the Ford Administration), only to be voted out a few months later, and then, in 1978, voted in again. He was a supporter of states’ rights, drawing on a Southern political legacy that predated the Civil War; his vision of liberty often entailed granting power and discretion to state governments, to help them stand firm against federal tyranny. Paul got used to casting symbolic votes: against spending initiatives with bipartisan support, say, or in favor of his own quixotic resolutions to rein in or defund this or that agency. You get the sense, from Paul’s invariably genial analysis, that his political career has been a series of disappointments, most of which seem predictable in retrospect. “I must confess,” he once said, “I was a supporter of Ronald Reagan, because I believed, through the seventies and during the election of 1980, that he did have an intent to cut back, and that he was seriously concerned about deficits.” Paul left Congress after losing a 1984 Senate race, and he left the Republican Party so he could run for President, in the 1988 election, as the Libertarian Party candidate. But some card-carrying Libertarians viewed him, not implausibly, as a conservative—a pro-life Texan, out of step with the Party’s commitment to personal liberation. (The Party platform called for “full rights” for lesbians and gay men, legalization of drugs, and an end to the drinking age.) Paul eventually won the nomination, having fended off a challenge from the American Indian activist Russell Means, but he won fewer than half a million votes that fall, and soon returned, grudgingly, to the Republican Party.

In 1992, as Paul was preparing to launch his second Presidential campaign, he got a call from Pat Buchanan, who had decided to challenge George H. W. Bush. At Buchanan’s request, Paul agreed not to run and promised—along with Rothbard, the Austrian from the Bronx—to support the insurgent Buchanan campaign. Buchanan emphasized the language of “cultural war,” not liberty, and he thought Americans should be protected from economic harm and from “the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture.” (The most poignant word in this formulation is “our.”) But Buchanan and Paul agreed, for instance, that the North American Free Trade Agreement was a mistake: Buchanan thought it would erase American jobs; Paul was more concerned that the treaty created new transnational regulatory agencies. Paul also shared Buchanan’s disdain for Party élites, and his twinned hostility to welfare and warfare, including the first Gulf War—and, a decade later, the second one.

The alliance didn’t last. By the time Buchanan ran again, in 1996, he had made himself unpalatable to libertarians by speaking out more plainly against free trade—he wanted the government to implement tariffs and other programs to help American workers. But Buchanan and Paul remained friends, and Paul, who returned to Congress in 1997, often appealed to the same sense of dispossession that inspired Buchanan’s followers. Polls confirm that Paul does best among young people, but his rallies are also full of earnest older voters, alarmed at the changes in the country they thought they knew and angry at the powerful bureaucrats who rig the system. By inviting these alienated patriots to become part of his “remnant,” and by educating them about the machinations of the Federal Reserve, Paul casts himself as the leader of a righteous cabal—a conspiracy of the conspired-against.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/27/120227fa_fact_sanneh#ixzz1mztDlJ6p

[goldwater's ghost]

lol. thx mods. didt see it. sorry about that

[kathy88]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/27/120227fa_fact_sanneh?currentPage=all



AWESOME.

[Roxi]

Beautiful. It's too bad not very many people will take the time to read it in entirety. Thanks for posting.

[BrittanySligar]

Best RP article ever. Period.

[PolicyReader]

A long, but mostly good read.

Good points in that right now Paul needs to thump more of the Republican issues like taxes, ending Obamacare, ending the IRS, etc. It doesn't mean he has to give up the other issues, but he needs to talk about the issues that can fall upon friendly ears to gain support.

Yeah getting through the nomination was always going to be the harder part, if Paul wins over the GOP he's in good shape for the general and a focus on his economics is a good route to do that (now if only the PCC had more consolidated versions of that plan for people to start off with. I love that they have actually posted the details but an easy introduction it is not :p )

[Just Flossin']

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/27/120227fa_fact_sanneh?currentPage=all

[stu2002]

http://www.newyorker.com/images/2012/02/27/p465/120227_r21865_p465.jpg

The Political Scene
Party Crasher
Ron Paul’s unique brand of libertarianism.
by Kelefa Sanneh

On December 16, 2007, on the two-hundred-and-thirty-fourth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Ron Paul, congressman and Presidential candidate, presided over a nationwide fund-raiser. This was a new tea party, with a new slogan: “Liberty is brewing.” In Boston, hundreds of Paul’s supporters marched to Faneuil Hall. Paul himself appeared in Freeport, Texas, where organizers had prepared barrels for him to dump into the Brazos River. One barrel read “United Nations”; another read “I.R.S.” The campaign raised more than six million dollars in one day, which was a record, and the event prefigured the protests that became common as the Tea Party movement coalesced, in 2009. The movement, with its focus on economic liberty and small government, sometimes seemed like a continuation of Paul’s campaign for the Republican nomination, during which he won a great deal of attention and a modest number of votes. It’s not much of a stretch to call him the “Godfather of the Tea Party,” as his campaign literature does, quoting Fox News. Ron Paul was ahead of his time.

Paul is running for President again this year, in a field that many Republicans find disappointing. And yet, while Paul is doing better, state by state, than he did in 2008, he has conspicuously failed to establish himself as this year’s Tea Party candidate. Polls have shown that voters who support the Tea Party are actually less likely to support Paul—some have gone for Newt Gingrich, whose denunciations of Obama are pithier, or for Rick Santorum, who is more forthright in his defense of “traditional American values.” In South Carolina, where Paul received thirteen per cent of the vote, behind Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Santorum, he did his best among voters opposed to the Tea Party. The Ron Paul movement has grown, but the events of recent years—the rise of the Tea Party, the fights over corporate bailouts, the messy passage of Obama’s health-care reform bill—have done surprisingly little to raise Paul’s standing among Republicans. Last summer, Jon Stewart mocked cable news channels for “pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist,” and asked, “How did libertarian Ron Paul become the thirteenth floor in a hotel?” The answer is embedded in the question. People don’t think of Paul as a top-tier Republican candidate partly because they think of him as a libertarian: anti-tax and anti-bailout, but also antiwar, anti-empire, and, sometimes, anti-Republican.

“I think parties are pretty irrelevant,” Paul says, and he doesn’t go out of his way to convince Republicans that he is one of them.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/27/120227fa_fact_sanneh#ixzz1nWRulGSI

[affa]

One thing I think we/RP need to address:

This article states:
"Most pressing of all, he called for the eradication of the Federal Reserve, the rejection of paper money, and a return to the gold standard—in his view, most economic threats can be traced, often directly, to the government’s insistence on devaluing the currency by creating more of it."

People don't understand this. They think it means we're all carrying around bags of gold, and it sounds ridiculous to them. It really needs to be explained that you can still use 'paper money', it just needs to be backed by gold. You can still use credit cards, even.
It's not a rejection of 'paper' money, so much as a rejection of 'fiat' money. People need to understand this, because otherwise it sounds crazy to the average person.

[Warmon]

Good read. I enjoyed it.