This Ron's no Reagan

[botounami]

But will anything be done?

 

[LSUiLike]

I also think this was an excellent article. Paul could do a much better job combating the fringe and kook arguments. He needs to take the fight more to the other guys; many lack core conservative values and many have no real understanding of the situation. Paul is so kowledgable, but I think he could really do a better job of making arguments that more regular Americans can understand and agree with. Paul would most likely be a great president, but if he can't make the common folks see that, then we'll never have the opportunity to see what Paul can do in office.

 

[Mopsus]

"Running for President is more of a marketing endeavor than an education of the American populace in history and civics."

Hmm. This is like saying the cure for credit card debt is more credit.

This is a SYSTEMIC problem and can't be cured with a single dose of medicine.

I'm with you Brutus. But, one must get the patient in the hospital before dispensing the medicine. Sadly we have to PR the public before we educate them.

 

[itshappening]

the campaign people are incompetent, some of that article was pretty scathing

he should have hired people with experience running national campaigns

 

[Thumper]

Ronald Reagan was an actor with incredible name recognition. That made it easier for him to get elected.

...

I like Reagan but he was not in the same league as Ron Paul in terms of intellect or integrity.

I don't think anyone would disagree with you, but Reagan was smart enough to put together a campaign team that put him in office for two terms.

We all talk abou the message and the revolution and keeping it going no matter what happens but it will be alot easier to do that if our candidate wins the election. Then we can make some real changes...

 

[Badger Paul]

"Ron Paul made the mistake so many politicians make: He didn't take my advice."
Gee Phil if you're so brillant what the hell are you doing working as columnist?

Name me a handful professional GOP politicos who would drop everything to work for Ron Paul, especially now.

 

[polexi]

He should really get some top guys to work for his campaign. He should know by now we'll cover the costs.

 

[ShowMeLiberty]

The article raised some really good points.

Ideally, Dr. Paul could keep the current staff and they can keep doing what they've been doing and we can keep getting 5th place results in the primaries.

Realistically, Dr. Paul does need a professional campaign staff. Fast!

We're trying to win the votes of people who have been conditioned to short attention spans and sound bites. That's just the reality. Changing that is part of the goal, but the bigger goal is winning the election. And that means dealing with reality.

 

[Doriath]

I thought Mulshine was right when he wrote that the campaign needed to up its level of professionalism in the wake of the Philly rally, and he is still right now.

However, I find the Reagan comparison a stretch. Yes, Ron I has better staff, but as has been pointed out he was much more widely known, and had been a popular governor of California. Paul, by contrast, started out as an obscure congresscritter from Texas.

 

[Gadsdenfly]

The campaign could definitely benefit from hiring more Pros. One example I thought during last nights debate was the reference to Austrian economic theory. I agree with his statement wholeheartedly but I'm sorry Ron the typical voter just had no idea what you were talking about. It is possible to speak about the inflationary bubble cycles in terms that really seel the point to joe six pack and this is what pros and good PR people can help the campaign do.

 

[aksmith]

Great article on the incompetence of the campaign.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2008/01/this_rons_no_reagan.html

This Ron's no Reagan
Posted by Paul Mulshine January 09, 2008 8:50PM
Ron Paul is fond of calling himself the heir to the political tradition of Ronald Reagan.

So let us compare their records. In 1976, Reagan had so much success in primary elections that he nearly unseated a Republican president. In 1980, Reagan easily won the GOP nomination and then had little trouble unseating a Democratic president.

The Ron Paul campaign, meanwhile, just recorded a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire in one of the most lackluster fields in GOP history.

What accounts for the difference?


It certainly isn' money. Paul's leading the field in fund-raising. And he doesn't lack for supporters. He's leading the field there as well.

So just how did the candidate of liberty manage to get a mere 8 percent of the vote in the "Live Free or Die" state?

Ron Paul made the mistake so many politicians make: He didn't take my advice.

Back in November, when I first encountered his campaign staff, I wrote a column warning the candidate that he needed to get rid of the bozos running his campaign and hire some professionals. I came to that conclusion after I showed up for a press conference prior to Paul's appearance in Philadelphia.

I was shocked to find there were only two other journalists in the room. His staff had scheduled a press conference but neglected to tell the press. Worse, when the three of us tried to interview the candidate, Snyder rudely cut us off. He told us it was more important for the candidate to shmooze with donors than to keep his commitment to the press.

I have never seen such an amateurish move in my 30 years in journalism. As I noted in a column at the time, canceling a press conference is the sort of dirty trick that campaign professionals pull on the competing candidates. I've never seen a campaign manager pull such a trick on himself. And I never will again, I imagine.

As I also noted at the time, Paul had a chance to build some momentum in early November. But he needed some professionals running his campaign. Reagan certainly had them. His advisers were the very best money could buy. As for Paul, after his supporters generated $20 million in contributions, he had the money to buy the best as well.

Instead he stuck to a core of true-believer libertarian activists. And the problem with true-believer libertarians is that they turn libertarianism into an ideology. You know that old joke about the professor who asks, "Sure it works in practice. But will it work in theory?" That's the typical libertarian.

A classic example is toll roads. They are fine in theory but awful in practice, as we in New Jersey know all too well. Yet libertarians support them because they like the theory, even though in practice toll roads cost more than 10 times as much as free roads.

The typical American voter, meanwhile, doesn't care about the ideology of libertarianism. He cares about what works. Reagan understood that. Though he had essentially the same philosophy as Ron Paul, he crushed his opponents by portraying them as liberals totally out of contact with reality.

Paul has managed to accomplish the exact opposite. Instead of characterizing his opponents as liberals, he has let them characterize him as a liberal. This has been disastrous. Exit polls in New Hampshire showed that voters who characterized themselves as conservative were the least likely to vote for Paul. He did best among voters who saw themselves as liberals.

If his campaign was being run properly, the exact opposite would be true. Take the Iraq War. In that debate Saturday night, Paul came off like a blame-America-first liberal instead of an America-first conservative. After making the conservative point that we can't afford the war he went on to once again get into a pointless debate about the reasons Al Qaeda attacked us, saying that 9/11 occurred "because we invade their countries and occupy their countries, we have bases in their country -- and we haven't done it just since 9/11, but we have done that a long time. I mean, it was the Air Force base in Saudi Arabia before 9/11 that was given as the excuse."

This is a wonderful statement of libertarian theory. Americans, however, care about reality. Paul would have been better off talking about the many practical errors the neoconservatives made in Iraq, mistakes a hardheaded conservative never would have made, such as inadvertently turning over control of that country to Islamic fundamentalists.

After Paul made his comment, Mitt Romney attacked him, saying, "Well, unfortunately, Ron, you need a thorough understanding of what radical jihad is, what the movement is, what its intent is, where it flows from. And the fact is that it's trying to bring down not just us, but it's trying to bring down all moderate Islamic governments, Western governments around the world, as we just saw in Pakistan.

Paul might have responded, "If you know so much about radical jihad can you explain to me why Iraq is now being run by an Iranian-based extremist party that truck-bombed our Kuwait embassy not so long ago? And can you explain why women in Iraq now have to wear the veil when they weren't required to do so before the invasion?"

Of course, to make that sort of point he'd have to have people working for him who actually understood the issue and could brief him on it before the debate. Instead he has people working for him who just throw him out there to engage in stream-of-consciousness rants about his core beliefs.

This is mere self-indulgence. A candidate may believe in hundreds of things, but he only has time to communicate a handful of things. And it's often the little things, not the big things, that resonate with the public. I've had people tell me they would vote for Paul simply because he would end the federal ban on unpasteurized milk. Nothing illustrates the overreach of the federal government more than the story of that Amish farmer who was arrested for selling fresh milk. I have no idea if that story's true, but it would win votes even if it weren't.

Every candidate has a political philosophy that he loves to discuss in great length. But a candidate only has minutes, if not seconds, the communicate that part of his platform that will connect with the public. Reagan was a master at this. Paul is inept.

Paul has been cast by the media as a fringe candidate, but then so was Reagan when he began. However Reagan quickly overpowered his critics both in the media and in the Republican Party by going over their heads to the voters. Paul's campaign, meanwhile, has failed to get his message out. His staff then whines about bad press coverage. You don't hear Mike Huckabee whining about his press coverage. Maybe that's because his campaign is being run by professionals.

Actually, Snyder et al. are lucky they're not getting press coverage. If any reporter ever bothered to examine the campaign, he would no doubt hear as I did from dozens of disgruntled Paul supporters all over America. For a sample, read this open letter to the campaign staff from a supporter: http://ronpaul.meetup.com/boards/view/viewthread?thread=4013172

As for Paul himself, he should either get serious or get out of the race. The point of mounting a political campaign is to win. No one had to tell Ronald Reagan that. But someone should tell Ron

The campaign is what it is. The candidate is loyal to the people he hired. And he almost uniformly refuses to take prep. He is who he is. That's part of why we all support him. He is not trying to be fashionable. He is being himself. Yes, we all wish that he would buff up the presentation a bit and we all wish his campaign staff had more media savvy, but we still have the best candidate and that should count for something. And the assumption that Ronald Reagan ever had a philosophy like Ron Paul is erroneous. He was a big government Republican who talked a little like a libertarian. Romanticizing Reagan is counterproductive. He's like a blank slate that all Republicans (even those like Rudy and Mitt who hated him while he was president) can write on for their own purposes. His was a failed presidency in almost all ways. What he did have was professionals running the campaign who understood the scale of a presidential election.

Nobody expected this campaign to get so big so fast. It has not been nimble. That needs to change and change five minutes ago. But us bitching about it won't make it happen.

 

[kaberUSA]

bump.

Quote from "Message From Ron: Onward!"


this is a great article, and i think its exactly what dr. paul needs to read.

I agree.
I mean we've raised 20 million dollars, we could hire the best people who have all the connections with the MSM.
twenty million dollars is a lot. You could hire a lot of princeton/harvard/yale folks who have a lot of connections into the MSM. I mean wake up campaign. It's about money, so hire people who can get you the coverage we need

 

[sunghoko]

A fair criticism of the Paul campaign with solid examples. snyder and benton may have to step back and we need a proven campaign strategist.

 

[spudea]

Ronald Reagan didn't have to fight the NEOCON establishment. Really this post is unwarrented. We raised the 20 million TOO LATE to have much of any significant impact on IA and NH. The war chest is being spent. Have you seen the mass mailings going out to the entire country blasting all the other candidates and comparing them to RP? National TV ads will be airing before Feb 5th.

 

[CRAT0S]

...............................

 

[Sesshomaru]

I completely agree with this article. HIRE SOME BADASS PEOPLE PLEASE! Let the trusted ones around you work under some pros to make things happen. If he jumps on this ASAP, he can still generate even more momentum.

 

[rexsolomon]

I beg to disagree with a lot of people who suggest that the status quo with regard to how the campaign is being run is 'just fine'.

ITS NOT. Dr. Paul had the best chance amongst the Republican candidates to come out 2nd or even 1st in NH.

Not admitting your mistakes - means you have no intention or will to IMPROVE.

So we have an official blogger for on the Ron Paul website. THAT'S THE BEST THEY CAN DO?

Pardon me for saying this, but I think the 'everything is fine at RP HQ' cheerleaders here may actually be defensive because they may actually be aliases inside the RP HQ.

Anyone here know how to get in touch with Rand Paul?

 

[Xenophage]

This is simply a promotion of anti-intellectualism. Ron Paul does a great job of separating the practical side of libertarianism from the ideological side, but you cannot always do so or you'll get bogged down in details and your overall message will be lost.

The writer is probably correct that Paul's campaign management is amateurish compared to the other candidates. Attacking them for their political philosophy, however, clearly demonstrates that the author doesn't understand libertarianism at all.

Libertarians that support toll roads do so not because they "work better" but because they are against any form of involuntary taxation based on moral grounds. User fees are fine, though. The big argument for the superiority of these roads however exists only under the assumption that the roads are privately owned, and open to competition. There are potential problems with such a road system, according to some libertarians however, who support the road system as something that it is necessary for the government to be involved in, but even so they believe in user fees like a gas tax as morally superior to any form of involuntary tax to pay for the roads.

 

[Babylon]

Anyone here know how to get in touch with Rand Paul?

What's the point?

It's over.

This primary season will be done in three weeks.

Have you looked at a calendar lately?

There will be no changes. Do you think any sane 'professional' would want to align himself with Paul at this point?

"Gee! Sure, Dr. Paul! I'll be happy to sign on for two weeks of work so that my track-record can be destroyed! Where do I sign up?"

There is a reason Libertarian/Randian/LewRockwell types never make any headway in our society or political system.

They're know-it-alls.

They are above everyone else, and don't take advice.

Since they are SOOOOO smart, any failures are always the fault of others -- not themselves.

 

[breakranks]

While Paul Mulshine makes valid points about some of the inadequacies of this campaign, his primary focus is on the campaign's inability to deliver messages and events to the MSM in a fashion that the MSM has become accustomed to. Mr. Mulshine's critique is focused on style over substance.

While I am also displeased with the campaign's performance, I find it hardly a reasonable for Dr. Paul to drop-out of the race due to these inadequacies. Dr. Paul is raising serious issues that are not being addressed by any other candidate. Americans benefit by being educated on these issues and being able to discuss them amongst themselves, with or without MSM input.

Personally, as one may find obvious by my attendance on this forum, I value the substance of Dr. Paul's message, his integrity, and his choice of topics over the style of his talk, the types of clothes he wears, and the competency of his campaign staff.

Ultimately, I view this piece as an attack on Dr. Paul, especially given the link to a single poster's open letter to the campaign. This piece was intended to hurt the candidate and discredit the campaign. Unfortunately for Mr. Mulshine, Americans are gaining distrust for MSM sources and turning to trusted word-of-mouth sources.

I don't have a problem getting access to any of Ron's speeches or events, as they are almost all available through YouTube, Justin.TV, RPForums and a myriad of online sources. Perhaps placing such a low priority on MSM journalists, who can't seem to find out about events as easily as I can, is not such a bad strategy after all.