Ron Paul Giving New England Another Try

The AP asks whether Ron Paul, increasingly left out of the big narratives of the GOP race, could actually pull a win in this weekend's Maine caucuses.

It doesn't hurt that Paul's visit this week made him the only presidential candidate from either party to visit Maine before the caucuses.

"I think that (because) he's paid attention to Maine, he'll be rewarded," said R. Kenneth Lindell, Paul's campaign coordinator in Maine… [he] wouldn't give specifics on the number of Paul volunteers but said it is in the hundreds, not a small figure considering Maine's relatively small population and meager share of the national delegate pool.

It's shaping up a lot like Nevada: Mitt Romney's the only other Republican giving the race any attention, grasping for a positive headline among the drumbeat of McCain endorsements and wet kisses from newspaper edit boards. And, like in Nevada, some of the Paul organizers will be battle-hardened veterans of Iowa and New Hampshire. The level of love for McCain is closer to New Hampshire than to Nevada—McCain won 44 percent in the March 2000 Maine primary. But early reports from the Ron Paul Forums, from Paul supporters who've been hitting the caucus sites, suggest that Paul is headed for second place behind Romney. (Romney would much, much prefer McCain hit second place: For the narrative he wants, beating Paul is like running up the score in World of Warcraft.)

One thing helping Paul this weekend and after: He definitively won the fourth quarter of fundraising and is almost certainly raising more money now than any Republican save McCain.

UPDATE: Right after I posted, the Paul campaign announced its newest policy advisors: Doug Bandow, Charles Peña, and Philip Giraldi. I guess they'll be writing the same stuff, but in a more official capacity.