Politics

Reason Writers Around Town: Brian Doherty in Canada's National Post on the Ron Paul Revolution

|

Canada's National Post today excerpts chapter one of my recent book Ron Paul's Revolution today.

It's an interesting time to call back to the beginnings of the modern Ron Paul movement in 2007, as this excerpt does, as the hopes of his fans for direct and clear national influence on the Republican Party this go-round are coming a-cropper, even though Paul more than doubled his raw vote totals and percentages from the 2008 run to the 2012 run. Paul's political director Jesse Benton tells the Tampa Tribune that Paul will not seek to be nominated from the floor at the Republican National Convention this month, and Paul's campaign manager John Tate emails a press release (which I could not find online this morning, but which is quoted at length in this blog entry by Paul campaign advisor Doug Wead) in which he laments that:

The Committee on Contests recently issued a ruling on the establishment's challenge to Ron Paul's delegates and alternates who were duly elected in Maine, and on our challenges to the outright cheating that occurred in Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Oregon (alternates only).

Despite Ron Paul's supporters being so clearly in the right in these four states, the establishment is so far refusing to rule fairly and seat our duly elected delegates and/or alternates.

The Party establishment will fight the Paul people, just like it fought the Goldwater kids in 1960. But being young, energetic, and correct about the future of the country can beat being old, sclerotic, and dedicated to a doomed and destructive status quo.