Ron Paul makes his move

Rep. Ron Paul, the oldest person remaining in the presidential race and the only one who's also simultaneously running for Congress (you know, on the off chance he doesn't reach the White House), came in second in the Montana Republican caucuses, right behind former Gov. Mitt Romney.

The 72-year-old onetime ob-gyn, who was the most successful fundraiser among all Republicans last quarter, got 25% of the GOP vote in Big Sky Country to Romney's 38%. Paul also beat Sen. John McCain, who got only 22%, and Mike Huckabee, who trailed with 15%.

In North Dakota, Paul, with 21%, fell behind McCain, at 23%, and Romney, at 36%.

Elsewhere, Paul, a strict constitutionalist who opposes the Iraq war and in 1988 ran for....

president on the Libertarian ticket, slipped back to his familiar single-digit showings, despite the determined, earnest efforts of thousands of outspoken Ron Paul Revolutionaries, including an endorsement from THE Jane Roe, an eight-state ad campaign, not one but two appearances on Jay Leno's show and stunts such as hiring a plane to circle downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday dragging a giant Ron Paul banner.

With incomplete results, Paul looked to finish in the Golden State with about 4% of the GOP vote, way behind Huckabee at 12%, Romney at 25% and McCain at 44%. Alaska, where Paul had thought he might do well, also turned out to be disappointing, as Romney easily won.

In West Virginia, Paul's forces did gain three of the state's 18 GOP convention delegates in a deal to throw in with the winning Huckabee supporters and deny Romney his expected win there.

In Maine, where the arcane uncommitted caucus system defies explanation, Paul forces finished third in voting recently but believe they will end up ahead of McCain in terms of state convention delegates and second only to Romney. Paul also finished second to Romney in the Nevada caucuses and ahead of the now departed Rudy Giuliani in Iowa.

In other Super Tuesday states, some with incomplete results, Paul's showing was not so super. He finished last virtually everywhere -- with 8% in Colorado; 6% in New York and Tennessee; 5% in New Jersey, Arkansas and Illinois; 4% in Missouri and Arizona; and 3% in Oklahoma, Alabama, Massachusetts and Utah, though he beat Huckabee there.

Many in Paul's dedicated legions of supporters profess incomprehension over how he does not attract wider support among voters. The only explanation they can imagine is that he would do much better in elections if it wasn't for a mainstream media bias that forces supporters to conspire on the Internet, has barred him from a major New Hampshire debate and often eliminates him from regular candidate listings.

For instance, The Times' recent tepid Editorial Board endorsement of John McCain in the California Republican primary discussed every remaining GOP candidate except Paul, who's outlasted more famous competitors like Giuliani and Fred Thompson and is the only GOP candidate to increase his fundraising  every quarter last year.

Many will now fill the comments section beneath this item with complaints about the mainstream media's bias and little recognition that the words themselves in this item contradict that claim in this forum. And, of course, they are welcome, as always.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Comments

[Nicolas Martin]

Mainly journalism is a conspiracy of dunces. This entire campaign one might have lucked onto a handful of MSM columns with a spritz of insight about an issue, and none of those came from the keyboards of Frederick and Malcolm. Mencken smirks at the circus and its media clowns.

[patty]

"Many in Paul's dedicated legions of supporters profess incomprehension over how he does not attract wider support among voters."

THAT IS EXACTLY RIGHT. How could people NOT vote for Ron Paul????

One message that ought to be heard loud and clear: people should STOP the "don't waste your vote on longshot candidates" argument and learn to vote their conscience.

I'm so sick of all the fearmongering, disgusted with all the pressure coming even from my friends and family to vote "strategically" for second-rate candidates like McCain or Romney (twisted logic being that only THEY can defeat Our Ultimate Enemy, Hillary). I wish there were some kind of indoctrination about the duty of voting one's conscience going on in public schools and a real movement in the country to make that message a popular belief. Until that belief takes root, and until we return to paper ballots counted publicly, we are essentially screwed. Remember what Ghandi said: "BE the change you wish to see in the world." That means vote as you would want the whole country to vote.

Andrew, I salute you. You are faithful to us "revolutionaries" even in our dark times.

[Derek Traise]

What a disengenuous submission. Taunting a candidate after the primaries might make your boss happy, but it doesn't quite count as positive media attention.

[Ron]

The Ron Paul Revolution is DEAD.

[JD]

"For instance, The Times' recent tepid Editorial Board endorsement of John McCain in the California Republican primary discussed every remaining GOP candidate except Paul...Many will now fill the comments section beneath this item with complaints about the mainstream media's bias and little recognition that the words themselves in this item contradict that claim in this forum."

I appreciate your mentions of Dr. Paul, but a mention on a blog doesn't carry the same weight with the non-netters that a mention in the newspaper or newscast does. It's a stone cold fact that the larger media conspired to keep Dr. Paul out of the running.

For months, we heard about the 'electability' of Giuliani, Thompson, etc. The media treated those eventual also-rans as if they were serious candidates while telling all of us that Dr. Paul was unelectable. Once Dr. Paul outlasted Giuliani and Thompson, there were no more mentions of Dr. Paul. Many people thought he'd dropped out of the race as many people still don't pay attention to politics unless it's fed to them by the larger media.

In other words, the media showed that it was 100% incorrect in determining who the American people would favor and the cure for the wrong was to push, with all of its might, a walking advertisement for narcissism like John McCain.

It's cured me of taking anything that the media says seriously anymore. Down's Syndrome women as suicide bombers in the Mideast? Ain't buying it. The market dropped because of XYZ? No go. The surge is working? Yuh, right. 30% approval for George Bush? Try 15-20% and quit fudging.

With the exception of a few outlets such as this blog, the way the larger media has treated Dr. Paul and his supporters has earned it the eternal scorn of millions.

[basiltaco]

Without letting mainstream media completely off the hook, I can only conclude from the Super Tuesday results that Ron Paul's percentages reflect the percentage of people in this country who actually pay close attention to what politicians say--and have realized the nothingness of it. I predict that, with the way this country is going, in 10 years, even the mainstream media will have a difficult time denying that Ron Paul's message was ahead of its time.

[outsider]

Ron Paul is not ignored by the MSM, they just have no reference point to include him. The last thing MSM want is a candidate or president who sticks to their message, or no hidden skeletons in the closet. The MSM is wise in the one sense. They have learned not to ask Ron Paul any questions. The resulting answer generally flattens them.(Congress Paul, please keep your your answers vague and obscure) So, Ron Paul is left out. Better that we hear about what might happen, and have endless debate.

Watch, (if you can) the reports put out, how the the MSM broadcasts.....everything is immediate, now, now, now.

God forbid they have to wait for something to happen.

When they wait......they start rummaging.

The best example of this is the movie "The Right Stuff", everytime the media is portrayed, you hear in the background the munching sound of locusts.

MSM desperately want a RACE, to continue to report and pontificate on, things to poll, and unfortunately, if everyone heard RP's message, there would not be one. And with nothing to report, even the most insignificant tidbit, (oh look, Hillary is wearing a pantsuit!), it is in the mind of MSM, death.

Good Luck America!

[Tony Bothwell]

There's a joke amongst Ron Paul supporters that goes something like "Dr. Ron Paul cured my apathy", but what makes that funny, is that it is true. Without chasing conspiracy theories about miscounts, you cannot argue that the mainstream media almost completely ignored Ron Paul in spite of his record earnings and large support base. Which is disheartening as clear media bias has taken the place of strict reporting. "Anchors" like Bill O'Rielly shout his guests right off the air... fair and balanced?

I do appreciate your fair commentary though, as much as I wanted Ron Paul to do better, clearly not enough Americans believe in the constitution these days.

And now, unfortunately as in past elections, we're given the illusion of choice as we are offered 2 candidates from the same party.

[Judith Sharpe]

How could Ron Paul win when most people have not even heard of him and/or know so little about him that they discount him? The media bias is real, every supporter knows that. We have eyes to see and ears to hear.

[Jason]

To be honest, it has a lot to do with the campaign itself which seemed more than happy to sit on its hands and wait for the convention than to actually go out and campaign.

No one mentions that Paul has had fewer campaign events than almost any other candidate. He had fewer total events this month than Hilldog had in Cali alone.

You can't win like that, even with millions and hundreds of thousands of supporters.

I have been following this thing since the exploratory committee was formed, and I have no idea what in the heck the national campaign has been doing since the money started coming in.

Now we can work towards getting Paul some allies in congress using our network. PaulCongress.com

[Robert]

I want everyone to be made very fully aware, that the media blackout wasn't as orchestrated as it seems. take for example this.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/republican_presidential_nomination-192.html

no this is just a link but if you dig you will understand that just by leaving him out of all of these polls, (and yes he was just left out in most of them) or only listed once.
The exposure thing is big, and the media isn't doing their job. this is problematic and frustrating.

No one cares about getting the honest answers out of politicians?

[Kelly O]

Media bias against Ron Paul is not a fantasy - it is real. From the very beginning, the media has been saying that Ron Paul has no chance to win. All the other candidates have been snickering and laughing at him since day 1.

The major media outlets consistently ignore Paul. For example, 1010wins, a major radio in New York never mentions Ron Paul in its election coverage.

Also, during the debates, Ron Paul always is allotted the least amount of speaking time and he is continuously cut off by the debate moderators. This has been the case from the first debate in 2007.

Most people I have talked to STILL don't know who he is! Or, if they do know him, they have no idea what he stands for.

I don't know if the Ron Paul campaign could have done things differently to attract voters' attention. I suppose there is always room for improvement.

But, the simple fact remains: the mainstream media and the Republican party have never taken Paul seriously.

I do hope Ron Paul starts a 3rd-party run. If anything, he will steal votes from the Republicans and tip the election to the Democrats. This will teach them a lesson for their hypocisy: wasteful spending, unecessary wars and the gradual theft of our civil liberties. And, let's face it, between the Democrats and the Republicans, there really isn't much difference.

[cees]

No media bias..... after the election. THanks for the Happy ending piece.

[sean truitt]

it's up to his supporters now. he has said he will run as long as we support his campaign. whatever happens at the convention, the ron paul revolution will continue, probably in the form of people being motivated and inspired to seek public office in his model. andrew, thank you for mentioning the media bias. maybe you can take some of the revolution into your world. do you think the media should be allowed to manipulate the country the way it does?

[DX10]

My bride and I have given the $4600 to this campaign and more to ads in Utah and the Blimp. We have talked to folks until we are blue in the face. We tried our best to get the campaign to simply concentrate on slogans rather than trying to educate the masses. And, I don't regret any of it. We can sleep peacefully knowing we gave it our best shot.

The post mortem will discover many causes. Just recently I spoke for the second time with a person here in our town to see if he had studied Dr. Paul's positions as I had asked. He said, "I thought he had dropped out!" So, the MSM had done their job. The campaign was not without fault and there are surely other things to blame.

I employ people and so I know they come out of our educational (?) institutions rarely prepared. Even the engineers can't answer the simplest questions. But judging from the results of this election to this point I must confess that I had no idea that the ignorance and stupidity of the population ran so wide and deep.

E Pluribus Unum hardly fits this country anymore. Divide and conquer seems more appropriate.

I have to tell you boys and girls it is tempting to just say every man for himself, plant your victory garden, and pray that the depression comes quickly. I don't think there is anything less that will wake this sleeping giant up.

I will donate to Dr. Paul's congressional campaign as I have done for years here from New Mexico. But, unless there is a strategy that will permit us to vote in the general election for Dr. Paul, then me, my bride, our four children, and ten grandchildren will be sitting this one out.

[Jason Krider]

I won't complain, Mr. Malcolm. You've been the only consistent writer to cover RP in a major paper. You may continue to get hell from others, but I'm grateful for your voice.

[Berol Schaeffer]

As disappointed as I am in the lack of broad-based response to Paul's message, I have to say that the main stream media represents the main stream. (Duh.) And unfortunately, the main stream populace does not want to think through the issues. So I cannot fault the MSM entirely. Because most people are sheep, I suppose that if the MSM had proclaimed Paul as the darling all along, he would have received significant support -- but that would have been just as wrong as the exclusion of Paul's message that mostly took place. At the end of the day, if you presented all the candidates' positions in an objective and balanced way (a myth in itself), most people would still rather fear and rely on the government to run their lives than to take responsibility for themselves.

[Jeanette Doney]

The Ron Paul rEVOLution is the most fantastic political experience far surpassing my wildest dreams of what grassroots could be. I am one of the LUCKY Americans to have found Ron Paul and the rEVOLution.

[Ron]

You really think that the words themselves in your ONE little column contradict the claim of media bias? Mr. Malcolm, you may not have such a bias and I wouldn't claim you do, but go to news.google.com and do a search for Ron Paul then compare it to Rudy Giuliani. 30,000 results versus 49,000. Then compare the news outlets that the names are appearing in. The results do not represent articles that are about each person, but merely that reference each person. You will notice when searching for "Ron Paul the actual news outlets that mention him are overwhelmingly not mainstream. When Fox news does not mention him, it's with a headline that he's eliminated.

Immediately after he placed second in Nevada, you could do the same thing in google news and not only would you not find mention of him in any mainstream media, you'd also notice that the mainstream's coverage, which up till then had mentioned the first and second place people at least, largely came to only mention who won.

Spending some time with news.google.com and going through the history of the articles to see whose saying his name and who isn't, will demonstrate a strong mainstream media blackout of his name to any objective observer. I've been observing this since the first time FOX denied him entry into the debate, from that time forward, it seems to have become an unspoken rule that you don't talk about Ron Paul in the mainstream media.

I'm not going to be one who claims this is the sole reason why Paul isn't winning, I think it's obvious that people in this country are scared of living free lives and they love the false security of big government programs being done in the name of protecting them, a false security that Ron Paul simply does not offer. Even so, to say that the very real and obvious media blackout is not impacting his numbers is closing ones eyes to the obvious.

[John Lim]

I don't think people are interested in the truth. Certainly, the media has a responsibility, but citizens in a society have a responsibility to research their candidates. Each voter has a self interest in promoting his interest through the candidate he choses. This selfish pursuit is suppose to yield a candidate that is good for the masses. Given that politicians simply blow with the and give thirty second sound bites for complex issues, they only reveal that they do not have a depth of understanding to truly combat tough issues. The public similarly is not interested.
I hope I am wrong but I don't see a bright future for this country. The fundamentals are no so suppressed that they may as not well be there.
Let's see what happens in the coming year.

[John Lim]

I don't think people are interested in the truth. Certainly, the media has a responsibility, but citizens in a society have a responsibility to research their candidates. Each voter has a self interest in promoting his interest through the candidate he choses. This selfish pursuit is suppose to yield a candidate that is good for the masses. Given that politicians simply blow with the and give thirty second sound bites for complex issues, they only reveal that they do not have a depth of understanding to truly combat tough issues. The public similarly is not interested.
I hope I am wrong but I don't see a bright future for this country. The fundamentals are no so suppressed that they may as not well be there.
Let's see what happens in the coming year.

[Serval Djingic]

There probably are many more explanations for these results.
- Many voters want genozide in iraq to continue
- Paying paper for oil is great for all of us
- We cant catch osama, but need to punish someone, so lets kill the persians next
- Many terrorist live in the US already, so patriot act is appropriate
- Terrorist hate us cause were free, so lets abolish personal freedoms.
- Rule of Law is irrelevant anyway, we go to war for the UN.
Ron Pauls message would work great with educated, selfrespecting and responsible people; It is not suited for the US, it would be more for switzerland or skandinavia.
Paultards ought to "just leave". The US that is.

[Alex]

It is truly incomprehensible that Americans choose to vote not in the favor of a candidate who believes in making decisions based completely on the constitution, the supposed oldest in the world. I find it remarkable that Americans are so proud of their liberty when you can't even watch the candidates debate at a so called "debate," or that main stream media fails at their job of true investigative non biased work instead filling their days analyzing the dumbest things without effort waiting for an end result that pleases them. Yup, it’s pretty sad to live in a country that has forgotten its roots in true liberty, and it will only continue to worsen without the concern of many Americans. I hope Ron Paul runs third party and takes the vote away from the so called republicans, because the ideas of Mitt Romney and More Wars McCain aren’t even close to being conservative, they don’t deserve to be elected running on a lie.

[Arno]

a quote from the Noland chart; "The main stream media only projects where they think the delegates will go. The GOP race is so wide open it is killing the media. They want to crown the candidate prince now. They are so proud that they resurrected John McCain from the dead that they are salivating to end the GOP Primary and get to the upcoming Hillary showdown. And then they are going to turn on McCain and chew him up for breakfast in a Hillary love fest.

But the reality today is that all four GOP contenders are still in the game. It is absurd for the main stream media to convince Americans that one candidate or the other is out based on one day's totals. "

I second that...

[Ed]

Quite simply, America hasn't reached the point where people are willing to expend the effort to understand the economy, foreign policy, and the constitution. We've drifted too far in the direction of socialism and government parenting.

Ron Paul won't win. Neither will the next strict constitutionalist. Nor the next. But perhaps, in time, we will come to embrace the document and concepts that laid the groundwork for our great nation.