SB

What are people seeing in Obama and Hillary?

Edwards is clearly the best candidate!!!

Mike Huckabee!

Without Ron Paul I don’t know if the electorate would know what to look for.

They’ll eventually figure it out. Their problems with Ron Paul appear to mainly stem from the people he chooses to publicly affiliate with or allow to headline his campaign. There’s a market for the ideas so the right candidate will eventually come along. And hopefully he’ll have fewer weaknesses as a campaigner.

By this definition alone you have probably knocked out about 95% of the electorate. Maybe this is why Libertarianism remains so obscure.

Nope, I know a lot of moderate voters, very few of whom advocate discriminatory policies. I’ve known quite a few libertarians (myself included) who won’t be voting for Ron Paul. My problem is with the candidate and the people he has allowed to hijack his message. Not libertarianism in general (or even Ron Paul personally) because I actually believe in individual freedom and I like a lot of Paul’s idea…I just believe he’s the wrong person to implement them.

but it seems you consider me crazy since I will likely continue to vote for Ron Paul and I don’t think I am populist or racist.

We have our disagreements but you seem fairly rational so I’m willing to give your sanity the benefit of the doubt. If I thought you were a loon believe me the mockery wouldn’t be subtle. :) But you express your positions coherently and argue for your positions as rationally as most, even if I don’t agree with them all or your candidate, so you’re okay by me.

Every single one of the candidates has, I am sure, shady people that they are associated with.

Probably, but Paul courts it. And as the newsletters clearly indicate he’s not always aware of it when they hijack his name to push their own agendas. So I’m not voting for him unless he makes substantial changes…starting with his position on immigration.

Every single one of the candidates has, I am sure, shady people that they are associated with. Some are probably racist and some are flat out crooks. I am sure that some people that each President puts into a cabinet position will not always be of the utmost character. You can look at every past President and find some pretty sleazy people and/or people that do not deserve to be in their cabinets or associated with the Presidency. So your choice really boils down to who you would rather have making those choices. Your choices are only basically the rep. and dem. candidates for President. All other third party candidates are to obscure to even consider as 99% of the population do not even know who they are. Voting for them doesn’t even register as a protest vote. Maybe it is McCain who will put in war-mongering, racist at least against Muslim people in the cabinet. Maybe it is Hillary who if the cabinet members are like her are people that will do anything to get what they want and I mean anything. Maybe it would be Huckabee who may put pastors into each cabinet position. Or maybe it would be Ron Paul, who just like the other candidates may not have been the best judge of character, but would likely put people in cabinet positions that are much more friendly to liberty than any of the other candidates though they likely wouldn’t be perfect. My choice would be Ron Paul.

I will have to disagee with you about a Persident Paul getting zero percent accomplished. Actually I think his veto pen could accomplish a lot. If nothing else it would spur education to the elctorate about why he is vetoing these things. That would be good for liberty. Next as President he has a lot of power when it comes to foreign policy. There could be huge gains made here. Next while Bush has pushed on us many bad laws that will allow the President to track and control US citizens it is likely that Paul would not use the laws while he is in office as he believes most are unconstituitional. That would be good for liberty. He would also be able to have a huge pulpit to educate the electorate about our Constitution and about limited gov’t.

While I agree that this whole newsletter thing is certainly not a positive thing for the freedom movement. We will just have to agree to disagree on how that should affect each of our votes for President. At this point I am still voting for Ron Paul. I hope you can find someone else this cycle that can make as big of an impact as Paul has to our freedom movement. If you do I would like to hear about this person as it needs to be soon since are choices for President will likely be narrowed down to two people within a month. The more votes he gets now IMO wil help our freedom movement in the future. If the votes start drying up I believe it could have lasting consequences to the freedom movement.

“(since most of the Paulestinians aren’t libertarians, they’re populists, racists, or crazy people)”

By this definition alone you have probably knocked out about 95% of the electorate. Maybe this is why Libertarianism remains so obscure. I consider myself a Libertarian, but it seems you consider me crazy since I will likely continue to vote for Ron Paul and I don’t think I am populist or racist. If that is the case by your definition I can’t be a Libertarian. To have any effect on how this country is run we need at least 20-25% of the electorate and by trying to run off all but 5% or less since they aren’t perfect enough we will remain on the outside looking in and our country will continue down the wrong path.

“I’d posit that he hasn’t done much of anything except demonstrate effective ways to raise campaign funds. He hasn’t built support networks THAT TRANSLATE INTO VOTES, he hasn’t demonstrated effective campaigning techniques for future libertarian candidates, and his personal baggage turned off mainstream voters and associated us with the lunatic fringe.”

Well at least he has demonstrated how to raise funds and he has demonstrated how to get ten times as many votes as any prior LP candidate. Every other prior candiate that has run hasn’t done that. They haven’t demonstrated effective campaigning techniques that turned into votes, they haven’t built a support network, and they also have plenty of baggage that has turned them off to the mainstream voter and associated us with the lunatic fringe.

Your exactly right that it took a while for the electorate to learn that electing LBJ and Nixon where the wrong direction. They finally after seeing some of the problems associated with LBJ’s great society and Nixon’s statism that they should instead elect someone more in Goldwater’s image as he had been right about most things, so they chose Ronald Reagan. Possibly we will find out in the future (maybe it will take ten to twenty years) that Ron Paul was right about most things and that we should elect someone that closer resembles him (less the racist associations). Without Ron Paul I don’t know if the electorate would know what to look for.

Ron is not running for the Libertarian nomination. He is running for the Republican nomination for President. Don’t try and say he has to be 100% libertarian even though he is not running for that parties nomination.

He has to be libertarian enough for me to vote for him, and he’s not. He might have been when he had a chance to win because I’m in agreement with him on many issues, but now that he’s essentially a protest vote I have zero interest in voting for a candidate who wants to restrict immigration and who apparently surrounds himself with advisors who are either a) incompetent or b) possibly racist or crazy.

But you are telling me that Goldwater did not have anything to do with Reagan getting elected. Without Goldwater, Reagan never would have had a chance to move up the ranks in the party to ever have a chance to be elected.

I’m telling you that the Republican reaction to Goldwater’s loss was to elect a statist politician, Richard Nixon…twice. Then they backed Ford (who was a decent president, but also wasn’t a Goldwater-ite). Then they lost to Carter. Only after Carter completely screwed the pooch was Reagan electable (and after he toned down his rhetoric). As for the Goldwater-Paul comparison, Ron Paul is no Barry Goldwater. Goldwater won his party’s nomination, Paul was never in serious contention because he did a horrible job of running a national campaign, so while you claim that Ron Paul’s candidacy has set the table for a resurgence in pro-freedom agendas I’d posit that he hasn’t done much of anything except demonstrate effective ways to raise campaign funds. He hasn’t built support networks THAT TRANSLATE INTO VOTES, he hasn’t demonstrated effective campaigning techniques for future libertarian candidates, and his personal baggage turned off mainstream voters and associated us with the lunatic fringe.

Heck the LP party and other anarchists have been pushing their Libertopia for over forty years and they have gotten absolutely no where. In fact they may have pushed the freedom movement back by many years since most Americans consider them Kooks.

None of the LP members I’ve met have been anarchists. Most of them were just very nice people who liked discussing issues but had no clue of how to accomplish anything outside of their heads. Kind of like Ron Paul. As for portraying libertarians as kooks, I’d say the Paulestinians have done an excellent job of that without much help from the libertarians (since most of the Paulestinians aren’t libertarians, they’re populists, racists, or crazy people). Of course it helped having a candidate who can’t manage an effective staff that could highlight the rational people who vote for him.

I will grant that Paul is not perfect, but if he has to be for you to vote for him your will be down to a party of one. That is one thing that Reps and Dems do far better than the rest of us. They look at where they agree with the candidate. We seem to look only at what we disagree with. It doesn’t matter if we agree on 95% of what the candidate says, it is the 5% that matters to us, and by god if the candidate doesn’t change his stance on that 5% we will not vote for him.

Actually, they often vote on what they think the candidate can get accomplished. Those who vote for their preferred candidate on 5% of the issues believe he’ll probably be able to get that 5% passed through. I agree with Ron Paul on about 80-90% of his issues. I believe he’ll be able to accomplish 0% of it, outside of merely signing vetos…and even then I don’t trust him to not fill his staff with idiots, racists, and loons because he can’t read people or judge character very well (and they can do a lot of damage on their own if they don’t share his libertarian agenda…because he’s already indicated he’s a hands-off manager). So you tell me what’s worse, a candidate who I agree with 5% of the time who can accomplish 5% of the goals I want or a politician I agree with 90% of the time who can’t accomplish any of them and who seems likely to appoint a Cabinet that may work against those goals.

This is a big reason why we are diminished to obscurity when it comes to politcal campaigns.

We are diminished to obscurity because we support candidates who think that repeated appearances on Alex Jones’ radio show aren’t going to hurt his political campaign with mainstream voters and who don’t seem to have a clue about hiring competent staff. If you find a likeable candidate who looks like he has an ability to get at least some of his platform passed and who doesn’t openly truck with crazy people then our beliefs have a lot of appeal to mainstream voters.

Ron is not running for the Libertarian nomination. He is running for the Republican nomination for President. Don’t try and say he has to be 100% libertarian even though he is not running for that parties nomination.

Heck it may take 16 years or even longer for the freedom movement to really have a say in the political spectrum. But you are telling me that Goldwater did not have anything to do with Reagan getting elected. Without Goldwater, Reagan never would have had a chance to move up the ranks in the party to ever have a chance to be elected.

Heck the LP party and other anarchists have been pushing their Libertopia for over forty years and they have gotten absolutely no where. In fact they may have pushed the freedom movement back by many years since most Americans consider them Kooks.

I will grant that Paul is not perfect, but if he has to be for you to vote for him your will be down to a party of one. That is one thing that Reps and Dems do far better than the rest of us. They look at where they agree with the candidate. We seem to look only at what we disagree with. It doesn’t matter if we agree on 95% of what the candidate says, it is the 5% that matters to us, and by god if the candidate doesn’t change his stance on that 5% we will not vote for him. Heck Dems and REps will vote for a candidate if they just agree with him on 5% of the issues. This is a big reason why we are diminished to obscurity when it comes to politcal campaigns. But maybe that is exactly what many of the activists in the LP movement want. They like being able to rant about everything without actually anything happening. That certainly seems the case here.

To me is doesn’t make a lot of sense for people to say that they are not voting for Dr. Paul now because of the newsletters or by who he would appoint to the cabinet once he became President.

It does make sense, we’re walking away from offering the candidate support not because he can’t win but because we consider him unqualified for the office of President because of his questionable judgment on personnel.

He has virtually no chance of winning so who he would appoint to a cabinet post is meaningless. This is more about building momemtum for a freedom movement that will elect people in the future.

When your poster children for your movement are people who wouldn’t make good officials for the offices they’re running for you’re not helping the movement, you’re hurting it by making your movement look incompetent.

By voting for Paul you are not really voting for the man but voting for his message of freedom and if enough people vote now to help jumpstart this movement then in a few years we may actually be talking about someone who has a chance to win and will help push us back to what the founders believed in.

By voting for Paul, you’re voting for the man and the public’s perception of your movement will be tied to their perception of who your movement votes for…that’s how elections work. As for his message of freedom it was discredited by the newsletter scandal (a controversy that would and should be a deathblow for any candidate) and his poor handling of the aftermath. As for how libertarian he is he took great pains to distance himself from libertarianism to sell himself as “Republican” during the election and only started selling the libertarian angle once he started getting tarred as a racist. His immigration policy is wholly incompatible with libertarianism, he’s offered no specifics on how he intends to get any of this stuff passed if he were to win, and by supporting him it makes us look like fools for supporting a guy who doesn’t strongly support our ideals or have any clue of how to implement it. As someone else here pointed out, now that he’s effectively eliminated if he wants the protest vote he needs to clean up the ideological weak spots on his platform and show us something worth voting for if he wants libertarian support…and that means ditching his anti-immigration platform (which is at best protectionist and at worst outright racist) and openly disassociating himself from the more extreme elements of his following.

The people that are jumping off the bandwagon and are plain attacking him are doing more to hurt the movement of freedom than they realize.

I consider his immigration platform to be statutory racial discrimination rationalized by a claim we need to preserve the welfare state. Paul has used one anti-freedom policy to justify another so I don’t consider his platform nearly pro-freedom enough for a protest vote. He doesn’t have to drum the racists out of his group or demonize them (which is another form of discrimination) but I’m damn sure not voting for him as long as he supports laws that treat foreigners as less than equally deserving of the same rights as Americans in order to preserve a welfare state he should be vehemently trying to abolish.

Dr. Paul is certainly not the perfect candidate, but if we have not laid the groundwork through Paul’s candidacy and votes, when the more electable closer to perfect candidate comes along this candidate would likely not have a chance to win either.

Considering that most of Paul’s success has been grassroots efforts that occured in spite of Paul’s staff rather than because of it I’d argue he hasn’t actually built much of anything for anyone else to use. He’s produced very little for the assets he’s been given and a lot of what he did produce was amateurish and counterproductive and it didn’t translate into votes. No libertarian candidate is going to particularly want to trumpet the Paulestinian fan base as a core constituency either, because those guys did as much as anyone to sink Paul’s candidacy. Frankly, a libertarian candidate can do a better job of pushing a more consistently pro-freedom message attractive to moderate voters than Ron Paul has given and the “truthers” and the racists will still vote for him even if the candidate doesn’t pander to them or seek their council…because frankly the libertarians are pretty much the only group with mainstream acceptance that don’t want the racists and the “truthers” hunted down and strung up from trees because we think they have a right to believe what they want as long as they don’t try to force it on others.

To some degree it may be similar to the groundwork that Goldwater laid that got Reagan elected a few years later.

Reagan got elected 16 years after Goldwater ran (4 presidential elections later). Jimmy Carter had more to do with Reagan’s election than anything. The reaction to Goldwater from the Republicans was Dick Nixon.

What he did along with what LBJ did made the electorate ready for Reagan.

After Nixon, Ford and Carter all got their shots. But mainly because of Carter’s incompetence and the recession that came at the end of his term.

Paul may be laying the groundwork along with a likely terrible next Presidnet in regards to freedom and we may have a situation where the electorate will be ready for a libertarian type candidate in the not so distant future.

If anyone else tries to win a presidential election Ron Paul-style by cobbling together a coalition with racists and conspiracy theorists playing visible roles it’s going to be a hell of a lot longer than 16 years before the next liberty-friendly candidate sits in the White House. That will pretty much discredit the movement for our lifetimes.

The people that are jumping off the bandwagon and are plain attacking him are doing more to hurt the movement of freedom than they realize. Dr. Paul is certainly not the perfect candidate, but if we have not laid the groundwork through Paul’s candidacy and votes, when the more electable closer to perfect candidate comes along this candidate would likely not have a chance to win either. With this groundwork laid he may actually have a chance. To some degree it may be similar to the groundwork that Goldwater laid that got Reagan elected a few years later. Goldwater wasn’t the perfect candidate from a libertarians perpective but he was the closest we had up until Ron Paul. What he did along with what LBJ did made the electorate ready for Reagan. Paul may be laying the groundwork along with a likely terrible next Presidnet in regards to freedom and we may have a situation where the electorate will be ready for a libertarian type candidate in the not so distant future.

Dissing Dr. Paul over the newsletter smear is just as bad as it shows fickleness in picking a candidate.

No candidate is 100% perfect, so why should we act as if they must be for us to support him? This is especially true with libertarians, so take the hint, and lighten up some.

As to why he didn’t do so well in Iowa: remember that this was a pro-war hyper-religious state, custom-made for Huckabee. Dr. Paul doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve and is anti-war. Do the math.

As to why he didn’t do so well in New Hampshire: Too many independents jumped over to Obama when it became apparetn that a Hillary fix was in. Unfortunate, but true. It seems that a lot of the independent suppor up there was mroe of an anti-Hillary sentiment than a pro-Paul one.

As for the campaign, the lack of openness by the NHQ is disturbing. The TV and radio ads need help, and the paid print media advertising is non-existent. Dr. Paul needs a speech coach to simply improve his vocal tone and presentation skills–he needs to smile more and not be so serious all the time. He also needs to take his opponents directly to the woodshed, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. He needs to make them look stupid and call them out as stupid.

That being said, the strategy has been simple: use the run-up to the primaries to build the resources and marshal the forces. That’s been done. Then use the first few primaries to gauge what’s on voters’ minds compared to the campaign platform. That’s a work in progress and will continue with MI, NV, SC, and FL. The next step then is to tailor the message and then UNLOAD for Super Tuesday. That’s coming. Meanwhile the other guys have been focusing on either a win-it-all-by-momentum-now focus (Romney, McCain, Hucakbee) or a use-one-big-state-for-momentum focus (Giuliani) or have no focus at all (Thompson, Hunter). IOW, build up, fine-tune, then attack. We saw the first signs of that with the more assertive Dr. Paul at the last debate, and it was good to see.

All I can say is be patient. Expect another 8% in Michigan today, whether that’s actual votes or votes alloted to him by fraud and Sal Anuzi.

BTW, In Dr. Paul’s congressional district race there is no D, no L, and the only comeptition is a vastly underfunded R for the primary. So even if Dr. Paul does not get the nomination he’ll most likely still be around in Congress as a senior member in the House after the skunking to come.

We will not buy into the scare tactics that the present Administration, and the media is feeding the American public with terrorist propaganda. The time has come for people to think, and those that do, will know the truth. I love my Country, and I will not stand by and let our corrupt government, big corporations or the media tear it completely down. We need to start somewhere, and it will be by informing our citizens of the truth, and the crisis our nation faces. Ron Paul has my support and vote. As George Bush stated in May 2003, “Mission Accomplished”, or was that another lie?