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View Full Version : Elias: Only Paul puts primary rules to good use




McLane2007
12-04-2007, 11:22 AM
http://www.redding.com/news/2007/dec/04/only-paul-puts-primary-rules-to-good-use/

McLane2007
12-04-2007, 12:07 PM
Thomas Elias
Tuesday, December 4, 2007

It was bound to happen: Some smart Republican campaign strategist was bound to see the opportunities buried in the rules the party adopted four years ago for its Feb. 5 presidential primary.

Those rules turn California from a bastion of plurality-winner-take-all politics to a place that will essentially run 53 separate primaries, with the leading GOP vote-getter in each congressional district taking three of the state's 173 Republican convention delegates. Another 11 delegates will go to the statewide leader and three more will be unpledged.

So far, the major Republican candidates have not bothered to change tactics to take advantage of the new rules. You won't see former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney campaigning in West Los Angeles or San Francisco.

They come to those precincts to raise money, but never to plump for votes.

And yet plenty of delegates are available. Securely Democratic districts like that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco have thousands of outnumbered Republican voters empowered under the new GOP rules to elect three delegates per district.

So while the top-tier Republican candidates focus on getting out votes statewide, using TV and other standard tactics, they're leaving an opening.

Enter Ron Paul, a formerly obscure Texas congressman who has surprised political analysts with both his performance in debates and his ability to draw support and money via the Internet.

Paul opposes continuation of the war in Iraq, but favors using force against the Taliban and terrorists in Afghanistan. He opposes the North American Free Trade Agreement and amnesty of any kind for illegal immigrants. He's even against continuing to give automatic citizenship to the children of the undocumented. He'd like to end the federal income tax and abolish most federal agencies. He opposes the Patriot Act and the federal war on drugs, and he's against abortion rights.

Not exactly the prototype candidate for the districts of Pelosi, Waxman, Miller and other liberal California Democrats in Congress. But he's threating to take convention delegates away from the top Republican candidates in some of those districts.

It's the economic way for a Republican to go. If Pelosi's district, containing 34,000 registered Republicans, gets the same number of delegates as the Orange County district of Dana Rohrabacher, host to more than six times as many GOP voters, why not go after what's available in Pelosi-land?

So Paul supporters with libertarian views like his are organizing in hopes of becoming a national Republican presence out of proportion to their actual numbers.

If it begins to look like they have a chance of cutting into the big guys' delegate haul from California, you might actually see major candidates forced to change tactics.

Rather than concentrating completely on the safe Republican areas of Orange County, San Diego County, the Inland Empire portions of San Bernardino and Riverside counties and the Central Valley, candidates like Giuliani and Thompson and McCain and Romney might have to attend to the long-neglected Republican minorities residing in mostly Democratic districts.

For it's only a matter of time now before the top-tier Republicans realize their party in this state has created entirely new rules. New rules invariably generate new tactics.

Meanwhile, Democrats have had similar rules for the past two California primary elections, but so far nobody has significantly organized among the usually ignored Democrats in places like Fresno, Redding and Newport Beach.

In fact, the two parties have essentially made California into 53 small states, but Paul is so far the only candidate to do anything about it.

Maybe he will have to make a strong showing Feb. 5 before others take heed and change their approach for the 2012 primary. But it's also possible major candidates will realize what they're passing up by sticking to the areas where their party is the majority.

If they do, there's even a chance the new rules will allow some actual New Hampshire-style personal contact between real people and candidates they usually see only on TV.

Paul is pushing the major candidates in that direction. If he does well, he'll have made a major contribution to democracy this year even if he never had a real chance at his party's nomination.

Thomas Elias is a political columnist whose commentary appears in newspapers throughout California. His e-mail address is tdelias@aol.com.

mosquitobite
12-04-2007, 12:09 PM
Damn media. They weren't supposed to report on that! :D

BlutStein
12-04-2007, 12:11 PM
shhhhh....the other candidates don't need to figure this out. They might want some delegates too. :)

McLane2007
12-04-2007, 12:47 PM
Do we really know if Californians for Ron Paul are taking advantage of this? Anyone here in a California meet-up that can confirm this?

schmeisser
12-04-2007, 12:51 PM
The writer gives the official campaign too much credit. This is spontaneous grassroots exploitation of the system - nobody can match that!

specsaregood
12-04-2007, 01:24 PM
The writer gives the official campaign too much credit. This is spontaneous grassroots exploitation of the system - nobody can match that!

There was something that Anita Andrews said in her meeting.

The other campaigns are not worried about Ron Paul winning, despite having more grassroots support. What will worry them is, if all the inexperienced Ron Paul supporters become knowledgeable, professional and learn how elections are won. It seems that is exactly what Ron Paul's grassroots supporters are quickly becoming. A lean, mean, organized, grassroots campaign team.

Sandra
12-04-2007, 01:56 PM
I think the single most issue that Ron Paul and Californians are eye to eye on would be ending the war. Abortion and immigration issues would be hairy. Push that end the Iraqi war thing!

literatim
12-04-2007, 02:00 PM
Awesome. :)

Benaiah
12-04-2007, 02:26 PM
The writer gives the official campaign too much credit. This is spontaneous grassroots exploitation of the system - nobody can match that!

They do that with EVERYTHING. They are incapable of realizing that we are a bunch of individual cells operating on our own, and free of the campaign. They believe that "some music promoter from Miami (Trevor)" is single handily responsible for Nov 5th and the Tea Party. This article is just another example of how they can't comprehend that the entire grass roots, free from centralized leadership, is responsible for EVERYTHING that is happening.

BeFranklin
12-04-2007, 02:41 PM
They do that with EVERYTHING. They are incapable of realizing that we are a bunch of individual cells operating on our own, and free of the campaign. They believe that "some music promoter from Miami (Trevor)" is single handily responsible for Nov 5th and the Tea Party. This article is just another example of how they can't comprehend that the entire grass roots, free from centralized leadership, is responsible for EVERYTHING that is happening.

They can't in other words, comprehend the individual. Who is us?

Original_Intent
12-04-2007, 02:48 PM
They just have to throw in the parting shot "even if he never had a real chance at winning his party's nomination"...