I’m glad Bob Barr’s campaign set things straight. I figured a racist would try to pull something like this on him.

I was born wearing a Tigers hat.

I’m not a Kansas native, so I’m an adopted fan :)

There’s no 25-man roster in politics and there’s no GM that decides who makes it.

The 25-man roster in politics is the budget and the GM is the campaign manager and the candidate is the owner. They decide who’s underperforming and who gets cut. Well, good ones do :)

That means you don’t necessarily have to work your way up the food chain, proving yourself to someone.

They do it all the time. Many people who develop expertise in campaigns do so by starting out as unpaid/underpaid volunteers. That’s the farm system. In smart organizations, they’re evaluated and promoted based more or less on merit. Same as in baseball. Sometimes they’re promoted or retained for reasons other than merit. Same as in baseball.

Politics, OTOH, is constantly shifting.

Dude, you need to read some Bill James, or at the very least read “Moneyball” (by Michael Lewis). Baseball, like politics, is constantly changing in what makes a successful team. In “Moneyball”, Lewis points out how teams with fewer resources compete by determining and exploiting undervalued commodities that their opponents miss…which is never a constant as the opponents eventually adapt. That’s very similar to politics. And the era in which the game is played factors in as well. Pitching meant more for baseball teams in the ’60s like being anti-war means more for candidates in the post-Iraq era. An approach that wins for you one year won’t necessarily win for you in another.

Considering how badly the paid campaign staff performed, I think “something for nothing” is a fair assessment.

C’mon now, you’re stretching big time. There’s a significant difference between paying someone who works hard and paying someone who doesn’t, even if the net result is basically the same for both. The former is bad management/execution and the latter is deliberate sabotage of the organization’s goals.

I’ll lock horns on baseball/politics analogies all day…I’m a long-time Royals fan

Ditto. I was born wearing a Tigers hat.

It’s important identify the areas where the analogy breaks down, though.

- There’s no 25-man roster in politics and there’s no GM that decides who makes it.

That means you don’t necessarily have to work your way up the food chain, proving yourself to someone. If you suddenly figure out how to command your plus-fastball and your plus-slider, you can sign up for the big leagues tomorrow.

- The political landscape is more fluid.

Setting aside the occasional steroid era, the winning formula is basically the same: power arms, above average defense, and a well-balanced lineup that has a little bit of pop in the middle.

Politics, OTOH, is constantly shifting. As Brad pointed out a few days ago, voters are constantly swaying back and forth, looking for that magical politician that can actually follow through on his promises. I think we can all agree that the political landscape of 2007-08 was far more favorable to Paul’s platform than 1984. The advent of the internet gave him another competitive edge.

Anyways, I should get back to work.

Considering how badly the paid campaign staff performed, I think “something for nothing” is a fair assessment. Especially since Paul has been around long enough to know that successful campaigning depends on good staff. If he hasn’t figured that out after this many years working in politics then the man is a fool.

Good analogy, btw, but you really can’t hold ‘88 against them.

I don’t…that’s why I compared it to a Rule 5 draft pick. Most Rule 5s fail in the majors too because they’re rushed, so they don’t have a real shot to succeed even if they’ve got the talent. As for raking A ball, plenty of guys do that too who aren’t major league prospects (particularly if they’re older players)…he definitely failed at Double-A, though, and never got in a game at Triple-A so there was no indication he was ready for the big leagues.

I’ll lock horns on baseball/politics analogies all day…I’m a long-time Royals fan and I’ve seen every way that a baseball team can both succeed and fail in regards to management strategy :)

You misinterpreted. I never called his hiring of family members or friends malicious. I was just pointing out that to Ron Paul running a serious campaign always came in second to having “his” people (family and close friends) in charge of it, even if they weren’t qualified.

1) “On the dole” clearly implies “something for nothing” and in this context it would require obvious malice towards the donors to give money away like that.
2) He was always adamant to his supporters that he was in it to win it. If he stuck with “his” people knowing that they were hurting his chances to win, that would again require obvious malice towards the donors.

I think it is far more likely he is simply a poor judge of talent and/or he underestimated the value of having good talent on the staff.

Good analogy, btw, but you really can’t hold ’88 against them. You greatest staff of all-time couldn’t have won that one, just as Barr doesn’t stand a chance. And he didn’t just “produce” at A ball, he absolutely raked. In one election, he won a primary against an opponent who had the overt backing of the state’s governor; that simply doesn’t happen.

You misinterpreted. I never called his hiring of family members or friends malicious. I was just pointing out that to Ron Paul running a serious campaign always came in second to having “his” people (family and close friends) in charge of it, even if they weren’t qualified. That’s the biggest reason I lost so much respect for him. In his own way, Paul’s not so different from Bush when it comes to running a staff…and I’ve frankly had enough of that kind of “leadership”.

And a better analogy would be a staff that produced at A ball (HOR level), who couldn’t hit at AA (since they whiffed on his senatorial campaign), and who never played a day at AAA (since he didn’t run for governor), and who did terribly in the majors once as a Rule 5 draft pick (’88 presidential campaign), getting moved up to the majors again. That’s incompetent management as well as misplaced faith, no matter how you look at it.

putting his family members on the dole

He surrounded himself with family members and loyalists

Heh. I see what you did there.

Yeah, he rode his inner circle right off the cliff, but that’s a significantly different thing than your first statement. There’s no reason to think it was a malicious attempt to put people “on the dole.” It’s more likely that it was just misplaced faith in a team that excelled in AAA, but simply couldn’t hack it in the Majors.

It comes down to the old saying of “If you want a friend in politics, buy a dog.” Personally, I think that once a politician decides that the key to his success is to isolate himself and only work with people he’s got a pre-existing relationship with, he’s done as an effective politician. He’ll surround himself by people who think just like him, the opinions he hears are from people who are predisposed to agree with his, he runs out of ideas, and he finds it increasingly difficult to work with others to achieve anything of import. Basically, he becomes just another stagnant hack living on the dole and the best thing he can do is hang it up and try and find some new blood with good ideas to replace him.

I think Ron Paul hit this point quite awhile ago, but since he was pretty much the only game in town for libertarians he was able to stick around because he had a fairly diverse following. I’m not so sure, however, that the following outside of the Paulestinians is going to survive his failed presidential campaign, since it exposed his weaknesses (and some very unattractive baggage) quite clearly. I think his primary value to his ideology would be as a gadfly, not so much a leader.

I think he has a problem saying “no” to people whom he likes or who have helped him in the past. He has been in politics for thirty years, and for most of them, ever since he began publicly opposing Reagan, he has been isolated from the levers of power. He had very few friends and associates whom he could trust, and he has too much difficulty to throw them under the bus when the time calls for it.
In the end, he was unwilling to sacrifice his long-standing personal relationships for political gain. This may seem honorable, but it is no different than losing your business because you are unwilling to stop buying supplies from a factory with horrible quality but which is managed by your best friend leading to consumers soundly rejecting your shoddy goods.

I turned against Ron Paul not because I disagree with his policies. Rather, this campain brought me to suspect that he lacked the set of skills necessary to be an effective executive. Had he won the presidency, he would probably have lost every battle with Congress and would have been plagued by appointees who turned out to be very corrupt. I hated to come to this conclusion because I like the man very much. I think he is spot on on monetary policy and on foreign policy. I think I will be an old man before I see the U.S. recover from the monetary blackhole it is plunging into.

Family members received less than 1% of campaign expenditures and if you look at the breakdown, they all seem pretty reasonable. It would have been stupid of him not to tap family for small tasks.

Actually it’s a very fair and accurate assessment, especially if you look at the positions where he put those relatives, particularly in regards to his press team (which isn’t a “small” job on a campaign by any stretch of the imagination). He surrounded himself with family members and loyalists, most of them inexperienced amateurs, they did a shitty job for him, and once he had the money to hire better staff he didn’t. That’s where he behaved stupidly, assuming he was serious about running a presidential campaign to begin with.

At least I’m not stupid enough to be blindly devoted to a politician more interested in putting his family members on the dole than running a serious campaign.

C’mon now. Family members received less than 1% of campaign expenditures and if you look at the breakdown, they all seem pretty reasonable. It would have been stupid of him not to tap family for small tasks. He made a lot of mistakes, but this wasn’t one of them.

And Doug, he did renounce Stormfront on numerous occasions. We even cited them numerous times for you. I guess if you tell yourself something enough times, you start to believe it.

The only thing he didn’t do was return the money. You can argue that it’s a bad PR move, but it actually makes sense in a way. Giving the money back to the organization would have tantamount to donating to the organization.

I’m with UC, though. You’ve said some things over the past year that have angered a lot of people and you stir it up every time you mention RP. We’ll all be better off if you just let it rest.

you’re neck deep in it. look at your own history of Paul-related comments, asshole.

At least I’m not stupid enough to be blindly devoted to a politician more interested in putting his family members on the dole than running a serious campaign.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/05/27/ST2008052701255.html

But hey, feel free to go on thinking Ron Paul’s your messiah. Maybe one of these days that’ll translate into something more impressive than a second place finish in Nevada and winning the MySpace Republican “primary”.

http://adage.com/campaigntrail/post?article_id=122855

You keep saying I’m lying but you never back it up.

Don’t attack my integrity unless you’re prepared to support the argument.

You’re probably right, but the point of the post was more Bob Barr than Ron Paul and to point out something I was saying back in August when this all happened — that being a libertarian doesn’t mean you have to accept the support of every wacko that can write a check.