I joined RPF in late 2007 affter spending most of that year promoting Paul's candidacy offline or through the meetup system. In January 2007 I and other early Paul supporters anticipated many of the problems the candidate was going to face, that the insularity of the campaign would not address, and felt the internet was an insufficient base to bring Paul's momentum to critical mass for winning the key early primaries. The proposals developed to address this included ensuring Paul raised tens of millions nationwide, that he fund scientific polls that included his name (to counter his exclusion from most major media sponsored polls), promoting his name to actual likely GOP primary voters, etc.
We formed a loose, preliminary independent network to help solve the problems and to encourage the campaign to adopt. Alas, do to some inefficiencies in that coalition (and some needless internal turf fighting within the Paul movement) the effort to head off the problems were stalled. Until the money bomb concept came along, and proved the movement could circumvent the soft blackout of the congressman and raise him serious money, Paul's candidacy was frankly circling the drain by early fall 2007. In hindsight, while we were all hopeful for the best, in truth we were too far behind the curve by that point to get Paul to real frontrunner status to overcome what would become a hard MSM blackout of the candidate by January 2008.
A 'tortoise beats the hare' strategy, where a steady Paul would prevail due to the frontrunners canceling each other out, was the only chance he had left (and showed some partial realization in early primaries). But too many things had to keep falling in place for that to prevail, so true to lackey form the media soon wrapped McCain with the status of winner (to create that reality), and Paul was done. It didn't help that the campaign appeared half hearted about really trying to win from the start, or that Paul seemed to cave on issues of concern to many in the liberty movement (like 9-11/false flags, or continuing to run as an independent), which disheartened his own troops.
About the main thing left to do ever since was to talk about what could have been on these boards, with the hope that a future Paul or Paulite liberty presidential campaign listens and learns from the 2007-08 example. Hopefully the archive of ideas and resources built on RPF will serve that prepartory function. The next great liberty candidacy will still have to build its coalition mostly offline, while raising serious early money and regular-voter visibility, which the Paul campaign did not. Repeating the 2007 mistakes by concentrating on online gabbing, cable TV interviews or debates, or outreaching to the general population instead of to likely primary voters, will doom the next candidacy as much as it did Paul.
The political season was sweet and fragrant with ardor. We mounted a vibrant challenge and survived to dust ourselves off. We will have our day.
