Last week, I went to a district party leadership meeting.<\/p>\n
Most of the leadership in my district is guys who’ve been in the GOP for a while – I remember some of them from the 2000 election. There was one young woman who is a pretty enthusiastic Ronulan. And that kicked off an interesting discussion.<\/p>\n
She was a little put off by some of the rhetoric aimed at the Paul crowd by the mainstream GOP. We, in turn, are a little put off not so much by Paul’s rhetoric itself – several of us in the party’s leadership have fundamentally small-l libertarian sympathies; I, indeed, was a big-L Libertarian for a few years, ten years ago. So, outside of foreign policy – an areas where Libertarians and Ron Paul are dogmatically naive – it’s not like Ron Paul and his followers are preaching to a completely hostile choir – at least at a policy level.<\/p>\n
But all questions have two levels; Policy (“What we want!”) and Implementation (“How we’re gonna get it”).<\/p>\n
Around the time of the precinct caucuses and the first round of district meetings last February some of us activists started getting emails from other activists; the Paul crowd was going to try to game the rules to try to bum-rush the conventions; to try to snag a disproportionate number of district, state and national delegates, to make Paul, if not a contender for nomination this fall, at least a broker of some legitimate delegate power when the horse-trading before and during the convention takes place.<\/p>\n
And they were\u00a0 pissed<\/em>!<\/p>\n It reminded me of some of the irate long-time GOP activists in the Sixth District two years ago, who argled and bargled over Michele Bachmann’s “tactics” for getting the nomination to run against Patty Wetterling.\u00a0 She got her people to go to the caucuses and conventions, and to vote for her.<\/em><\/p>\n Which, really, was what Paul’s MN campaign did.\u00a0 And did with amazing success.<\/p>\n Chief, over at the Dogs and True North<\/a>, has the big takeaway<\/a>.<\/p>\n