Acceptance
by
Published on 02-14-2015 08:00 AM
Accept that Rand Paul is still the underdog and has to put up a big fight. You can't control that. It's "unfair", but it is what it is.
Accept that the media will try to destroy him and his followers and the flood of hitpieces. Even if they annoy you, you can't control them. Accept them as the reality that they are and ignore them. They sidetrack you otherwise.
Accept Rand's flaws and try to work around them in your efforts to campaign. You can't control his flaws.
Don't accept yourself slacking in your efforts to campaign and donate. You can control that.
Don't accept yourself being a poorly received representative of Rand Paul and the liberty movement (by spamming polls/posts/news outlets or picking fights with people, online or otherwise). You can control that and you're giving the media more fuel to use against him. Yep, we're somewhat more obsessive than other followers, and for good reason. But try to consider how that makes you look and in effect, Rand look.
Let's avoid a repeat of 2008 and 2012. We got too hotheaded about things we had no control over and put our heads in the sand when faced with the adversity, which made us massively overstimate our chances and kept us from making informed choices (like our dogmatic faith in the campaign that they would have an answer for the newsletters). 2016 isn't in Rand's favor, but we're in a much, much better and actual realistic position to win. Use that to kick ass.
I'm not saying give up. To the contrary. We just need to be grounded and I don't think we were in 2012. Some people mistake my posts for negativity, it's not. I don't do much with subjective value judgments anyway. I just think we need to be as rational as we possibly can be. And we need to be mindful over the actual reality of Rand's campaign to be the best campaigners we can be. With that comes accepting that the cards aren't stacked in our favor, but we can still play them as well as we possibly can and then some.
Happy campaigning!