RON PAUL On Fire! Online & On the Streets!
A good friend sent this article from a Florida newspaper - and the RON PAUL mania continues ONLINE and pounding the street too! SPAM my ASS.
An ENJOYABLE read
News: The Next President
Ron Paul: On Fire Online
The Texas congressman preaches simply the Constitution
BY WAYNE GARCIA
Published 08.01.07
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With the Jan. 29 Florida primary approaching, we continue our series on all the major candidates for the presidency, with an emphasis on the issues they are discussing and their supporters on the Suncoast. This week, Republican candidate Ron Paul:
If the 2008 presidential primaries were held solely on the Internet, it's likely that a famously libertarian, 71-year-old ob-gyn and congressman from Texas who most of America has never heard of would win the Republican nomination.
It's not surprising that so many in the nondigital world have never heard of Dr. Ron Paul, despite the fact that he is a huge hit online. Scientific polls across the nation -- when and if they even include his name in the crowded GOP field -- usually give him a score somewhere around ... nothing.
See that actual article for the included cartoons! Pretty Cute.
But in online surveys and in dozens of meet-up groups across Florida, Paul is practically worshipped as the last, best hope to get our nation back on the track envisioned by the United States' founders. He even has more campaign cash in the bank than the better-known John McCain, whose campaign is collapsing because of his support for the Iraq War.
Paul beat Rudy Giuliani, the G.O.P. frontrunner in most polls, by a 2-1 margin in an MSNBC Internet survey taken after the first Republican presidential debate in May. He had higher positives and lower negatives than any candidate after the debate, while just 9 percent of the voters were positive about him before, according to the unscientific MSNBC poll in which more than 96,000 votes were cast. An ABC online survey afterward was even more impressive for Paul: He received 25,700 winning votes. Second place went to "Doesn't matter because I'm not voting to put any Republican in the White House." It received 1,987 votes.
So if Paul is so clearly winning debates and support, why does nobody in the mainstream press give him a chance in hell to win, and why don't scientific polls reflect his popularity? That's what his supporters want to know, even if most pollsters and political scientists would scoff at such questions.
The answer is a complex blend of the unscientific nature of such Internet surveys, the limitations of traditional polling that looks only at frequent voters and Paul's support base that includes many disaffected (even downright angry) people who rarely, if ever, have gone to the polls on Election Day. Having the most MySpace friends of all the candidates (as Paul does) may be impressive to MySpacers, but it generally doesn't earn a lot of cred among the national press and punditry.
That doesn't bother Paul's troops.
"I am just a regular dude who owns a furniture store and watched a few videos and saw, wow, somebody who really believes in the Constitution," said Paul Bourgeouis, who is organizer of the Clearwater Ron Paul meet-up group.
Bourgeouis sells Paul bumper stickers and other campaign T-shirts out of his Black Swan Furniture in Palm Harbor, shoots and posts videos touting Paul's candidacy on YouTube and helps organize regular sign-waving events in front of the Costco on U.S. 19 that draw at least 40-50 Paul devotees.
It is with this kind of volunteer labor that Paul's campaign saw 1,000 of its yard signs spring up on street corners all over Pinellas County literally overnight, just in time for the Fourth of July. There's a Tampa Bay chapter, a St. Pete chapter, a Venice chapter. His Bradenton meet-up group drew about a dozen supporters for sign-waving in front of Mel's Diner at Cortez and U.S. 41 last week. His 75-strong Sarasota meet-up waves signs at the Walgreen's parking lot at Bee Ridge Road and Beneva.
All this happens will little apparent direction or financial support from Paul's national campaign. It is viral marketing come home to roost in politics.
"My sense is this is a very spontaneous sort of reaction to Ron Paul," said Owen Whitman, a Tampa consultant who is known for championing libertarian views and who is supporting Paul. "It seems to me there is a groundswell of support among people of all persuasions, not just libertarians. It's not an organized sort of thing. Ron is the first to say that.
"The freedom and liberty message is very powerful for the young people, especially those who haven't voted," Whitman said.
Paul has no apparent paid campaign staff in Florida, and an e-mail to his national headquarters to inquire about the campaign's strategy went unanswered. A Washington Post analysis of candidate appearances shows that Paul has visited early primary states Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa but has not come to Florida.
That hasn't stopped Paul from bringing Florida to the campaign. Two weeks ago, Bourgeouis and a few others from Tampa Bay flew on a private jet to a Paul speech and rally in South Carolina. He said it was inspiring.
What draws such fanatical devotion is Paul's total hew to a strict reading of the Constitution: He's anti-Medicare, anti-war on drugs, anti-neocons, anti-foreign intervention, anti-abortion, anti-big government, anti-Iraq War and anti-gun control. If it's not on the parchment, it's not the job of the federal government. His stance in Congress has earned him the nickname "Dr. No."
It is fitting then that one of the illustrations of Paul on various pro-Paul websites is one of his face digitally placed onto a painting of one of the founding fathers, complete with powdered wig.
"Our nation is teetering on the edge of dictatorship, as we find ourselves under the very same brand of, if not worse, tyrannical rule that the founding fathers and American colonies freed themselves from with the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776," said supporter Elaine Nichols in an e-mail to Creative Loafing.
Paul would apply the Jefferson-Madison model to return to a stricter reading of the Constitution and run America as the democracy that it was envisioned to be instead of what he views as a bloated federal republic.
The Internal Revenue Service? Paul would abolish it in his first week in office, he has said in debates and interviews. It's illegal anyway, his supporters insist, as it is not provided for in the Constitution. Week Two of the Paul Administration would see the unraveling of the (similarly unconstitutional, he claims) Federal Reserve Banking system.
His platform is a blend of Barry Goldwater conservatism, radical libertarianism, classic liberalism and pro-Constitutionalism that attracts the type of folks who believe America is headed toward tyranny and fascism.
Michael Wagner, a native New Yorker now living in St. Petersburg, is one of them.
"About two years ago I decided that I had enough of trying to convince people that we needed to change direction. I dropped out," Wagner wrote in an e-mail. "I sold my house, retired from my job, moved on board my homemade boat and sailed off. I intended to cruise the world and leave the U.S. behind."
But when he arrived in St. Petersburg earlier this year, he heard that Paul had declared his candidacy. A veteran of Paul's 1988 Libertarian Party campaign (Paul finished third behind Bush 1 and Michael Dukakis with less than 1 percent of the vote), Wagner docked his boat, registered as a Republican and joined the meet-up.
"I put my plans for cruising the world on hold," he wrote, "in hopes of helping to restore sanity to our nation's government."
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