frasu
01-10-2008, 02:47 AM
A good analysis of the NH primary in Reason
Paul simply underperformed. The problems were threefold: a late start in actual campaigning, a strange ad campaign, and a waste of energy among novice volunteers who should have been getting out the vote.
The late start was the most obvious (and reassuring) reason for the disappointing finish. It had been widely known, for months, that New Hampshire could become Paul country. But not until December did Paul volunteers really start to flood the state and do the dullest grunt work of politics: phonebanking, door-to-door canvassing. Some of the work had been done earlier, but there wasn't the kind of critical mass that can rack up votes until the arrival of Vijay Boyapati's Operation Live Free or Die, a third-party effort to bring in Paul volunteers and put them up in houses so they could learn the art of the campaign. Most came too late to prune down the voter lists the campaign had and create a truly effective, Bush 2004-style turnout list that could have maxed out the totals on election day. There is no such thing as a perfect list – indeed, the Obama campaign probably turned out female voters who'd been committed on Monday and Judas'd him on Tuesday. But I found plenty of grumbling about how tepidly the Paul forces were organized before the grassroots arrived.
I found even more grumbling about the ad campaign. Paul spent more than $1.5 million on TV and radio ads in this state, and from the get-go, Paul supporters responded to them with an ire unseen in any other campaign. Obviously, the Pauloverse has always been more communicative than the base of any other campaign: There are no RudyGiulianiForums, there are no multi-thousand-post YouTube threads for Fred Thompson's country-fried web videos. Get that many online fans and you'll get some nasty feedback.
In this case, though, the feedback was right. Paul's numbers spiked after he ran a simple ad slamming the government for invading Americans' privacy, but then the campaign moved on to media that stressed his army record, his pro-life views, and especially his yen for closing the border. The ads got slicker and slicker, and the numbers didn't move. The slickest ad, a Tancredoean cry against birthright citizenship and visas for terrorists, was a total flop. The 50 percent of Republicans who told exit pollsters they want to deport illegal aliens voted for Romney, McCain, Huckabee, and Rudy, in that order. A volunteer who went by the name of Ball griped that the ads made Paul look like a generic Republican, not a solution-spouting maverick libertarian. The evidence supports him.
The third factor – the work of the volunteer rEVOLutionaries – is the hardest to gauge. Paul volunteers and signs were eye-poppingly visible across the state, and the week of the primary they turned downtown Manchester into their own bottle city of Kandor. Painted Ron Paul vans drove up and down the Elm Street drag as Tom Sheehan, the Ron Paul Patriot, donned revolutionary war clothes and a backpack that supported as many as four giant-sized Paul signs. Paul people crashed other candidates' publicity stunts and waved signs on corners. When Fox News expelled Paul from the final pre-primary debate, 36 hours before the polls opened, more than 200 Paul fans flooded the city to protest and march and disrupt Fox's programming. Could they have spent that time scrounging up enough votes to beat Giuliani and win some headlines?
Maybe that's not a fair question. The Paul people figured out a while ago that their candidate is hated by most of the GOP and ridiculed by the media. Some of the loudest cheers in Paul's concession speech came not when he hit his applause lines but when CNN cut live to the room, and the crowd's eyes could turn to a big screen of their own celebration. There, for about a minute, Anderson Cooper had to watch as a 10-term congressman discussed the folly of paper money.
the entire article here : http://reason.com/news/show/124295.html
Paul simply underperformed. The problems were threefold: a late start in actual campaigning, a strange ad campaign, and a waste of energy among novice volunteers who should have been getting out the vote.
The late start was the most obvious (and reassuring) reason for the disappointing finish. It had been widely known, for months, that New Hampshire could become Paul country. But not until December did Paul volunteers really start to flood the state and do the dullest grunt work of politics: phonebanking, door-to-door canvassing. Some of the work had been done earlier, but there wasn't the kind of critical mass that can rack up votes until the arrival of Vijay Boyapati's Operation Live Free or Die, a third-party effort to bring in Paul volunteers and put them up in houses so they could learn the art of the campaign. Most came too late to prune down the voter lists the campaign had and create a truly effective, Bush 2004-style turnout list that could have maxed out the totals on election day. There is no such thing as a perfect list – indeed, the Obama campaign probably turned out female voters who'd been committed on Monday and Judas'd him on Tuesday. But I found plenty of grumbling about how tepidly the Paul forces were organized before the grassroots arrived.
I found even more grumbling about the ad campaign. Paul spent more than $1.5 million on TV and radio ads in this state, and from the get-go, Paul supporters responded to them with an ire unseen in any other campaign. Obviously, the Pauloverse has always been more communicative than the base of any other campaign: There are no RudyGiulianiForums, there are no multi-thousand-post YouTube threads for Fred Thompson's country-fried web videos. Get that many online fans and you'll get some nasty feedback.
In this case, though, the feedback was right. Paul's numbers spiked after he ran a simple ad slamming the government for invading Americans' privacy, but then the campaign moved on to media that stressed his army record, his pro-life views, and especially his yen for closing the border. The ads got slicker and slicker, and the numbers didn't move. The slickest ad, a Tancredoean cry against birthright citizenship and visas for terrorists, was a total flop. The 50 percent of Republicans who told exit pollsters they want to deport illegal aliens voted for Romney, McCain, Huckabee, and Rudy, in that order. A volunteer who went by the name of Ball griped that the ads made Paul look like a generic Republican, not a solution-spouting maverick libertarian. The evidence supports him.
The third factor – the work of the volunteer rEVOLutionaries – is the hardest to gauge. Paul volunteers and signs were eye-poppingly visible across the state, and the week of the primary they turned downtown Manchester into their own bottle city of Kandor. Painted Ron Paul vans drove up and down the Elm Street drag as Tom Sheehan, the Ron Paul Patriot, donned revolutionary war clothes and a backpack that supported as many as four giant-sized Paul signs. Paul people crashed other candidates' publicity stunts and waved signs on corners. When Fox News expelled Paul from the final pre-primary debate, 36 hours before the polls opened, more than 200 Paul fans flooded the city to protest and march and disrupt Fox's programming. Could they have spent that time scrounging up enough votes to beat Giuliani and win some headlines?
Maybe that's not a fair question. The Paul people figured out a while ago that their candidate is hated by most of the GOP and ridiculed by the media. Some of the loudest cheers in Paul's concession speech came not when he hit his applause lines but when CNN cut live to the room, and the crowd's eyes could turn to a big screen of their own celebration. There, for about a minute, Anderson Cooper had to watch as a 10-term congressman discussed the folly of paper money.
the entire article here : http://reason.com/news/show/124295.html