My wife and I maxed out in 2008 and besides that I gave up a shit ton of hours and hours of time promoting Ron Paul, creating signs, going to RP meetups weekly, standing outside the debate in Ft. Lauderdale all day and night handing out flyers and talking to people. Besides maxing out, also donating to the blimp, the fly overs (I think we in Miami paid for the first airplane one nationally), and a dozen other fund raising projects many from this forum. Man we shelled out thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. We were all trying, and experimenting and wanted to do whatever we could.
At the end of the day, I felt it was me supporting liberty and freedom and doing the most I could do to educate and further enhance the message of freedom. I'm not going to hold Ron Paul responsible for the rest of his life for my everything I sacrificed. I absolutely remember the taste of defeat and it was bitter and awful, but still felt the cause moved forward because we got a couple liberty candidates nationally and locally in office and we got the audit the fed bill moving.
It did wake up some politicians seeing what the RP run did, and it did push forward something as mundane sounding as Audit the Fed. I think it gave Rand Some instant credibility whereas Ron was an alone odd congressmen for 3 decades except for the the very tail end of his career.
I can completely relate to being pissed and feeling terrible, because it doesn't take long for me to recall the feeling sitting in the Miami RP office and feeling about as low as it gets. We spent a year of our lives to get RP's name out there and we had nothing to show for it when the FL primary came around. But like I said the movement continued in other ways.
I don't think we've seen the last of Rand. I think he saw the Trump mania, saw the ISIS fear mongering, needed to regroup and keep his spot in Kentucky, and we will be seeing a lot more of Rand in the future. I think he's going to make a name for himself in the Senate, speak more and get heard and raise his profile as a seasoned well known senator before he tries again.
In the shortterm is definitely hurts but I think long run he will have a good strategy.