Ron Paul Wins Another County
On Wyoming's high, brown, coal plains, brush fire hot spread hour by hour,
And an old cracked bell tolled warning: Flee ye dogs who lust for power!
Four years ago, I was privileged to write
an article for Lew Rockwell about losing. We lost a contest for Ron Paul. We lost the fight for a national delegate. We lost a battle for freedom against the entrenched forces of evil and stupidity. By a vote of 37-44, my county failed to send to the national convention a soft-spoken doctor with honor, high integrity, and a dedication to human liberty, instead sending a professional lobbyist.
No one likes to lose. Unfortunately, to be a warrior in the cause of freedom means to constantly lose. An unceasing string of losses generally awaits anyone wanting to pursue liberty in the political arena. Even apparent victories will often turn into losses, as once the "forces of freedom" storm into power, they quickly become as corrupt as those they displaced. One gets used to this. One reads Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell and other stalwart libertarian optimists and tries to keep things in the correct long-term perspective.
Nevertheless, one does not like to lose. One does not like to see our bright-faced bands of upstart freedom-fighters constantly crushed and humiliated by the inexorable numbers of putrid, slimy power-worshipers, proudly waving their vomitous flags. Ever-triumphant. Ever-unstoppable.
No, one burns deeply in righteous hatred of this evil, this madness; ever-longing, ever-seething to stomp these vermin and grind them forever into dust. And from time to time a man, if he is to call himself a man, must stand up for himself and attempt to do just that.
It is thus with exceeding pleasure and great gratification that I bring LRC readers, and thus the world, the following report:
This time, we won.
Oh, what sweet beautiful words. Yes, we blasted evil to pieces. We tore stupidity to shreds. Victory, for once, was ours! Ron Paul won my county, Campbell County, Wyoming.
Now it occurs to me that it would be most useful to the reader to know
how we won. Here is how.
It is mostly a story of procrastination and inaction. Let us skip that part. Yes, a couple of us kept our Ron Paul signs up for the past four years (mine kept on getting stolen for a while, until I literally screwed one onto the front side of my house). Yes, we Ron Paul supporters had a few meetings in the interregnum period, including one I find hilarious to look back on, wherein the momentous topic of what we should name our group was discussed and debated for what seemed like forever. I ran for state house in 2010, and another Ron Paul supporter ran for city council. We both lost, of course.
So the freedom flame was kept alive, but for the most part, nothing happened. Life went on, and politics was not the focus of it.
Then about a week before the precinct caucuses, I rolled back into town, realized it was now or never, and sprang into action.
I attempted to contact everyone on my list of supporters from last time.
I visited the people on the FEC report -- those who had given more than $200 to Ron Paul.
After much struggle and many phone calls, I finally convinced the "official" campaign to give us their list of under-$200 donors. I then called, e-mailed, and personally visited the homes of as many of those people as practical.
I brainstormed anyone and everyone that I might be able to get to the caucus: friends, acquaintances, people at businesses I patronize, people I know from church, co-workers, former co-workers, etc. I invited them out to the caucus. I asked all the Ron Paul supporters I was contacting to please likewise get not only themselves but as many people out to the caucus as possible.
We are all aware of how well Ron Paul does among young people. With that in mind, I gave a presentation to a class at the local community college announcing the caucus was coming up that weekend and explaining how to participate.
High school seniors here are required to take a course in government, a requirement tailor-made for my get-out-the-youth plot, because virtually all the seniors are eligible to participate and vote at the caucuses since they would be 18 years old by November. So, I also gave my presentation to every single government class at the local high school, nine presentations in all, getting the word out to half the senior class, amounting to a few hundred individuals. In this case my procrastination worked out ideally. Because of it, I was telling them on Thursday and Friday to come out on
that Saturday -- the day after tomorrow or tomorrow, the same way they'd be informed of a party coming up that weekend. Any longer interval would have been too long and the event entirely forgotten by the time the day for it arrived. In these presentations, I had to be very non-partisan and non-biased. I was not promoting Ron Paul, I was promoting the idea that they come to the caucus and have a chance, for the first time in their life, to have some small amount of input into the system that presumes to boss them around and rule over them (as I told them, the young are a perpetually-renewing underclass). Nevertheless, at least one young man apparently saw right through me, and from the back of the class he caught my attention and held up a page in his notebook he'd sketched in large letters "RON PAUL!". I just smiled and gave him a little nod. The libertarian revolution does indeed continue to spread and the future is getting brighter.
On Friday night another supporter and I called a last-minute meeting, to which almost 20 people showed up. We went over what to expect the next morning, talked about what had attracted each of us to Ron Paul, and had a great time.
We then had the caucus. We lost the straw poll to Santorum, 38 to 32, but every single one of those 32 was a solid, hard-core Ron Paul supporter, and we elected almost every one of those 32 to be a delegate for the county convention. We even elected a few supporters that couldn't make it or came late and missed the straw poll, so that in the end we had 36 delegates and 4 alternates.
In the intervening weeks, I continued trying to dig up more Ron Paul supporters and get them appointed as delegates. Then, a week before the convention we had another Ron Paul meeting and a young man presented an idea: he could make up a flyer and then we could go around and give them to all the delegates to the convention. Aha! How obvious! There's only a hundred of these people. Let's get out there and do some old-fashioned retail politics!
So I got the list of delegates from the county chairman and off I went. The young man who'd had the idea helped too. We didn't get around to all of them, not even close, but we talked to about 50 out of 161 delegates and alternates. I was able to convince many of them, even if not to support Ron Paul, to at least support
me. It's just a matter of going around and convincing them you're a half-way decent person. It's not that hard -- even politicians can do it, and most of them are in reality not even one-eighth-of-a-way decent people!
The day of the convention arrived. We had our Ron Paul table with our Ron Paul literature and our Ron Paul signs and our Ron Paul free donuts. A Gadsen flag hung nobly over it all. I went through my list, giving last-minute reminder calls to all the good guys. I mingled through the crowd, succeeding in meeting many of those whose homes I hadn't been able to get to.
Things went wrong. Another Ron Paul supporter, one who had not participated in any of the work listed above by the way, now insisted that he was going to run as Alternate National Delegate and refused to talk to me or anyone else about it. This was after he had explicitly assured me that he was fine and happy with me being the nominee. Also, some of our cadre of 36+4 didn't show up. Many of the people I'd visited and who would've supported me didn't show up. Many of those who did show up left before the election of the national delegate. I can hardly blame them, by the way. I had thought that we liberty folks were ridiculous debating the name of our organization, but we pale in comparison to these guys, who could debate -- at incredible length and totally unblushingly -- such topics as the grammaticality of adding the word "only" to a platform plank. Clearly we should leave utter banality and slack-jawed stupidity to the professionals: the Republican Party of the United States. No one can compete with them. Such burning issues as the redundancy of "only" we attacked from 10 AM to 3:30 PM. Finally it was time to put our two cents into the mysterious slot of our nation's Free and Glorious Election Process.
I stood there and observed as the votes were tallied. We're ahead...pulling away...uh oh, a whole block of establishment votes...they're catching up...oops, it looks like they counted one (establishment) ballot twice; I point it out, the elderly lady says I'm wrong...only a few hash marks apart...only a few ballots left, though...could it be?...yes....
We won!
Despite all that had gone wrong, by a spread of four votes we had won it (really five if I was right about the counting mistake. There was no second counting to make sure, and doubtless the evidence has now been destroyed). It took quite a bit of work. It took the lessons learned back in 2007-8 of how the system worked. It took intelligence. It took numbers. But most of all, it took initiative. Just as I explained in my article about losing four years ago: if
you do not do it, no one will do it. The "official" campaign will not do it. Do not impotently wait for their help. The other supporters will not do it. They are waiting for someone else to take charge. At some point, someone has to seize the reins and decide that things are going to happen, and that he is going to make them happen.
Go out and be that someone.
You are the campaign. You are Ron Paul. How do you think Ron Paul got to be Ron Paul? He
did something -- on his own initiative! No one told him to run for Congress (as far as I know). He just did it. Lo and behold, eventually something good came of it. You too can be a Ron Paul. Just seize a pencil, write a plan, and then take the action to make it happen. It doesn't have to be about electoral politics. Obviously!
But in! into the fray! Boldly dive!
And fight! Fight your own way! While you live!
Be a go-getter, a true freedom fighter. A legend. A hero. A
man.
Though tyranny's bitter, and nooses grow tighter, let's fight them as long as we can.
Join the fight for human liberty. Take your place beside Mises and Rothbard, Cobden and Bright, Henry and Paine, Locke and Rand. Let us all, when our lives are over, go to be part of that great and noble pantheon of those who stood firm and spat directly into the foul face of tyranny. Be one of those immortal Bold Ones.
The few.
The brave.
The Individualists.
