I guess Mike Huckabee was well known nationally before this process began. It seems like Governor Huckabee had a good strategy getting attention for himself by focusing on the Iowa vote and winning Iowa. You can get higher poll numbers if you win one of the early states and prove yourself like Huckabee did.
While I agree that Paul should have focused more on Iowa, Huckabee had it far easier considering his built-in constituency (evangelicals). Even before he rose to the top of the polls, the media started going crazy talking about him "surging" into respectable double digits. When fence-sitters and people who weren't thrilled about backing Romney saw that this guy had a chance (and even existed), they piled on board. Paul rarely broke double digits, and even when he did they typically didn't show those poll results, and they often omitted his name even when he had strong single digits and was doing as well as one or two other "frontrunners."
As I said before, Giuliani still had decent numbers in Florida and nationally. Paul did not. Everybody knows Paul isn't going to win a thing. A majority of his own party doesn't like him. Paul got as much coverage before a vote was cast as other people with similar poll numbers, and he actually probably got more. I remember seeing Paul on all 3 Sunday Morning talk shows and basically every other political show on tv.
Giuliani had those numbers because he was nationally known (Florida is just a microcosm of the nation) and the media had been hyping him for over a year.
Paul's own party didn't even know who the hell he was until the coverage started, and while I'm sure Paul turned some off because he's not a neocon the media repeatedly describing him as an "isolationist" and a capital-L Libertarian didn't help his case at all.
And the media coverage we're talking about is not Sunday morning talk shows, it's the 24-hour "who's up? who's down? who said what?" coverage from the talking heads obsessed with celebrities and horse races.
You guys are the ones who need to take your blinders off. You're too biased for Ron Paul and don't understand why the media doesn't cover someone who has no chance of winning and hasn't won anything yet.
I'm not asking for round-the-clock Paul coverage, I'm asking for them to stop reporting that there are only three candidates left, stop leading reports on Paul with "he can't win," etc. Paul probably gets less than 1% of candidate coverage, despite his poll numbers being closer to 6% and even his odds to win the nomination being above 1%.
And what exactly do you propose to do about the media? Bitching about it on an internet forum is sure doing a lot of good. I'm guessing you don't want the government telling these stations who to cover, so what do you do?
Exercise our free speech, explain to people who should know better (like you) exactly what we're talking about, and propose getting rid of the special rights that enable corporate media to have the power it does, for starters.
