First, I believe we actually won 2008, but the GOP bent the rules to defeat us. I was about 40 votes away from being a delegate. At the last second they extended a deadline, the day after we filed an entire slate of delegates with a check signed by the Ron Paul campaign. So I contest the implicit assumption that we actually lost in 2008, but managed to win this time..
Second, I do not believe we won Louisiana because establishment types had titles within the campaign. From my own observations in doing what volunteering I did (including running for alt delegate), it was the grassroots activists (the same kind that we had in 2008) that carried us. What is different this time was that in 2008, nobody knew who in the hell Ron Paul was. I wore cafe press T-shirts with the text "Who is Ron Paul?" printed on it. I bought a sheet of plywood, painted "Google Ron Paul" on it, and put it up in front of a friend's business along the I-10 service road. So much of that type of activism took place. We planted seeds in 2008, and to suggest that we won because we had politicians embedded is to discount all the work and effort put in over all these years. We were bound to have higher numbers than last time because people have had 4 more years to learn who Ron Paul was.
In summary, please do not credit those people for our victory. It was a grassroots victory for a movement whose time has come, plain and simple.
