I spent most of Saturday at the Fourth CD GOP convention.<\/p>\n
The Ron Paul crowd swept into almost all of the leadership and delegate positions in the Fourth CD on Saturday; only Mike Boguszewski remains from the old executive committee.<\/p>\n
The Paul crowd replaced everyone else, myself included, with their slate of candidates – for whom they voted with almost vapor-lock-tight discipline (and no, no sour grapes; I am not “District Secretary” material, and wanted to move over to Vice Chair for Media and Commiunications; I finished closer to the money than anyone who wasn’t on the “slate”, which I took as a mild compliment).<\/p>\n
Now, I’ve met a lot of the district’s Ron Paul supporters. \u00a0They are, in a lot of ways, the type of people everyone’s been trying to attract to 4th CD GOP politics for years; young, idealistic, motivated. \u00a0 Unlike 2008, most of delegates that had been forwarded from the House\/Senate district conventions showed up for their third straight session of sitting in their delegate chairs until their butts went numb.<\/p>\n
And that’s all to the good.<\/p>\n
Less good? \u00a0Some of their leadership was motivated by fairly palpable anger over the “way they were treated in 2008”, when quite a few GOP activists gamed the system to keep the first<\/em>\u00a0wave of Paul supporters out of power. \u00a0To their political credit, they spent their four years organizing, and did a good job of it.<\/p>\n Less to their credit? \u00a0While anger is a good motivator, “anger at the inner workings of a political party” has, I’m going to guess, a short shelf life. \u00a0 And at least in the Fourth CD, the anger was manifested by ballot. \u00a0The twitter stream during the convention indicated that at other districts, Paul supporters booed Dan Severson and Pete Hegseth, whose main transgression was “not being Kurt Bills”, the Paul crowd’s candidate for Senate, or refusing to stand to support John Kline at the 2nd District convention when he was re-endorsed.<\/p>\n Still, it made for an interesting day. \u00a0Rumors on the floor had it that there’d been negotiations going on to keep Jim Carson – who did an excellent job leading what was bound to be a long rebuilding effort, after having led Roger Chamberlain’s upset victory for the Senate two years ago – in place as district chair. \u00a0For one reason or another – rumors on the floor varied, but most of them seemed to come back to “we’re still pissed off about 2008” – the negotiations broke down and the Paul crowd voted their straight slate and replaced Carson with former one-term Roseville mayor John Kyslyczyn<\/a>.<\/p>\n So now, with the exception of Boguszewski, we have an entirely new Fourth CD; in much of the district, the leadership is new from the “BPOU” (MNGOP talk for the lowest level of the organization, which might be a House district, a Senate district or a County) level on up.<\/p>\n So what do we have, other than the hardest-to-spell leadership team in all of Minnesota politics (Kyslyczyn \/ Boguszweski)? \u00a0It’d tempting to say “a big slate of leaders who’ve never won a political race outside the party”, but then outside of Kyslyczyn’s term as mayor and Carson’s management of Chamberlain, the old and new teams are both tied at zero, so we can call that a wash so far.<\/p>\n My big concern, now as then? \u00a0While the crowd of Paul supporters at the convention Saturday carefully replaced their “Ron Paul” posters and stickers with “Kurt Bills” goodies, and voted to endorse Tony Hernandez by a 190-5-5 margin (after running a skillful campaign to win support from most of the establishment and <\/em>Paul crowds), I have yet to hear a lot of support for, or even especially much awareness of, races farther down ticket or, more importantly, for candidates who get endorsed even if they’re not <\/em>on the Paul slate.<\/p>\n Now, I know that there are a lot of good, committed people among the Paul crowd who are committed to using their positions in the GOP to work for the party<\/em>, not just a candidate or two.<\/p>\n But I get a different impression from some of their leadership. \u00a0Ronald Reagan once said that if someone agrees with you 70% of the time, it doesn’t make them 30% your enemy.<\/p>\n