Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul emerged from the Iowa state convention with a clear majority of the delegates being sent by the state to the GOP national convention in Tampa in August. Paul won 21 of the 25 contestable delegates, and will have 23 of the 28 total delegates Iowa will send to Tampa.
The Iowa victory marks the third and final time Iowa has had a “winner” of it's first-in-the-nation caucus. Mitt Romney had narrowly “won” the January caucus in a first, unofficial count. But that victory was reversed on a recount later that month that gave Rick Santorum the victory by a razor-thin margin of 34 votes. Paul had placed a close third in the caucus vote tallies, but the delegates to the national convention are selected by a state convention and are not bound to the results of the caucus poll. Paul forces continued to organize in the county and state caucuses that followed, and pulled off an overwhelming victory with the June 15-16 state caucus.
“This ends a process that began with the Iowa Cavalcade last summer,” Paul campaign aide Doug Wead boasted on his blog, “when Ron Paul came within a few votes of winning the Straw Vote, and handily defeated Romney, Santorum, Perry, Gingrich and Pawlenty. Dr. Paul’s strong showing was virtually ignored by the main stream media whose executives apparently felt threatened by his call for transparency in the actions of the Federal Reserve, a prime support system for their corporate advertisers and, in some cases, their own parent holding companies.”
Mainstream media websites have continued to project Ron Paul as winning only one delegate in Iowa, and it has become the source of amusement to Paul forces. Wead sarcastically called it a “marvelous fiction” that the New York Times and the Associated Press are still claiming in on-line charts that Ron Paul had won only a single delegate to the national convention from Iowa. The New York Times is also claiming that Paul won no delegates from Louisiana, though Paul won a majority of delegates from the Pelican state.
