Fair enough. I have been thinking it is time to distance myself from this campaign anyway. While I was part of the earliest Paul draft movement back in 06, I am not pleased with the direction this campaign and the grassroots has taken, particularly over the last month or so. Essentially, the worst elements of the grassroots have taken over, and it is sad to see this.
My personal feeling is that a lot of this is going to do more harm than good in our ability to return the GOP to its core principles.
Best of luck to you all.
And before the PA primary too. Anyway, when you got here you just didn't realize that RPSAA or Ron Paul Supporters Are Annoying (or Assholes). Nothing has really changed in the last month.
What we're seeing here, it appears, is the Romney people handing scraps to the Santorum and Gingrich people, and the Romney argument is "Ron Paul delegates will embarrass Washington State." We're trying to appeal to people by using different arguments.
Their arguments wouldn't work, of course, if we didn't act like assholes all the time.
But we do. That's our thing. But that's been our thing all along. What's the point of NOBP? It just pisses people off. I haven't heard any reason why we ever have to say that. What is exactly the purpose of that? I have heard many people use a version of "all the others suck, NOBP". Fine. But what purpose does that serve? It just makes people think that we're assholes, and can't be relied upon to act not like assholes on TV. Do we we still have a MARCH on the RNC in Tampa planned? That's open hostility. Everyone but Paul supporters hate Paul supporters more than Paul himself, because we very often act inappropriately.
That's their argument, and it has nothing to do with Paul, and everything to do with our behavior.
This isn't new though, this has been going on the whole time. If there was a change, it was in 2007.
In early 2007, April, May, Ron Paul's 2% had no college students, no anti war faction, but goldbugs and conspiracy theorists, people who remembered Goldwater and Robert Taft. But then came an argument with Giuliani, and a discussion of blowback, and that drove away Republicans and brought in young anti war people. And that helped, but it really seemed to put a ceiling on Ron Paul within the Republican Party. And everything we see now is a result of that. Ron Paul perhaps could've staked out a "realist" Reaganite foreign policy, but, from the summer of 07 on, his foreign policy became completely unacceptable to many, many Republicans. Long time RP supporters on Free Republic said "too rich for my blood" and stopped supporting. This all happened in the summer of 07. And it really hasn't changed much. We still have the same problems with registered Republicans, and old people.
Our new supporters seem to hate Republicans at least as much as Democrats, and Republicans say "right back at you". The core Ron Paul supporter can't communicate with a typical Freeper, we're isolated, and we don't seem to care about this at all. I'm not making the argument that this chain of events was bad, had Ron Paul not made a splash in May 07, bringing in Anti War Protesters, it could be argued he might've stayed in the Tancredo / Hunter range, without passionate supporters. We do have a Senator Rand Paul, after all. And things are getting better. But we have really pissed off many many Republicans.
Not sure how I missed it. I'll leave it up in case someone else did too.
