Like Setting Out Bait
Looks like Ron Paul will finish fifth at about 10%, with McCain and Thompson ahead of him in the 13-14% range. If the results hold up, there are four clear tiers from: The Huckster; Mittens; the Geezer Twins; The Original Specie. Way way down below that fourth step is the small man in search of a balcony, who would surely settle for even a footstool tonight. And culling his base of support to a hardened core of whoever is trapped in a minivan with him, Duncan Hunter. So, let’s spin the Paul results, shall we?
Option One: The man raised a ridiculous amount of money last year and owns the internet; he inspired an army of volunteers in a caucus system where being able to concentrate bodies is almost uniquely useful and he still couldn’t beat ten lousy percent. Hell, Fred Thompson barely showed up and he beat Paul.
Option Two: Iowa – least libertarian state in the union? On the issues where Paul is nationalist/conservative rather than libertarian – abortion; immigration – Iowans had more conventional candidates to pick from and did. On the issues where Paul is libertarian rather than conservative – Iraq; surveillance power; various economic issues – Iowa is infertile ground. Even getting 10% is an achievement.
Option Three: Those cheating bastards! Iowa’s Republican caucus procedures take place behind enough veils that the Powers That Be were able to Ron Paul of votes he should have gotten!
Option Four: It’s the media’s fault! For any number of reasons.
I’ll take about 60% One and 40% Two.
Comment by Mona —
January 3, 2008 @ 10:22 pm
But how did Gus Hall place?
Comment by Jim Henley —
January 3, 2008 @ 10:24 pm
Verrrrrry carefully!
Ba-dom-bomp!
Comment by wellbasically —
January 3, 2008 @ 10:30 pm
(From 4) The Iowa caucus is not a secret ballot. So if it’s important to you to have some standing in the Republican party, you won’t vote for Ron Paul.
(From 1) I would look at overall vote totals including the Dems. You want to know where the independents went, if they all went to Obama, those were Paul’s voters. I would put this down to Paul’s Republico-centric advertising on abortion and immigration. Usually a candidate who comes through with a surprise in Iowa or New Hampshire fizzles out later in S Carolina where the primary is limited to party members only.
(From 2) Iowa is a commodity state which is doing well in the current inflationary environment. So farm prices are up and economic worries are down there.
(From 3) It’s possible that Romney sent some of his votes on the second ballot towards Fred Thompson in order to keep him alive in the race, to take votes from McCain and Huckabee later.
Sorry those were out of order. But it was a tall order for Paul to beat expectations and he hasn’t done much special to make it happen. He’s not a great candidate unfortunately. Since the war slowed down, and US casualties will not reach 4000 for a month or two. Gold was a great issue for Paul but he’s really addled about it.
Comment by Glaivester —
January 3, 2008 @ 10:35 pm
I don’t think the GOP has a second ballot.
Comment by Leonard —
January 3, 2008 @ 10:38 pm
Second that point on the occupation. Since the success of ethnic cleansing in reducing violence, Americans are turning away from the “war” as an issue as fast as they can. We hate depressing crap like that. This was the main issue driving Paul’s candidacy.
With the war less salient, people felt free to rally to Huckabee.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 3, 2008 @ 10:47 pm
But what does Huckabee offer to somebody who might otherwise support Paul?
I’m depressed. I thought for sure that he’d beat McCain (who has no steam left) and Thompson (who barely showed up). This is sad.
Comment by Mona —
January 3, 2008 @ 10:50 pm
Huckabee is win-win for me. If the GOP nominates him, Obama (or whomever the Dem candidate is), will beat his @ss. But should that not happen, Huck has some conscience and is not quite the warmongering neocon the other front-runners are.
And he isn’t Rudy Giuliani. I’m in “Anybody but Rudy” mode. Rudy is fucking smart, and a total Machievellian, authoritarian monster. His intellect + his goals make him the worst possible
choicedictator.Huck is better, but also too socially conservative for most Americans. Don’t think he has a chance in the general election.
If only Russ Feingold were the Dem nominee…but I’d settle for Obama.
Comment by Nell —
January 3, 2008 @ 10:56 pm
@Glaivester: For real? The Rs have a totally different process? Quite possible, I guess.
In 1984, the year I was living there and took part (in the Dem event), everyone at the R caucuses went to Reagan’s corner and that was that.
Comment by Nell —
January 3, 2008 @ 10:57 pm
And: wellbasically makes a lot of sense.
Comment by Leonard —
January 3, 2008 @ 11:02 pm
Thoreau, Huckabee doesn’t offer much to almost any possible Paul voters; few of the candidates do, but of them I’d guess the best situated as the “war’s-not-such-a-problem” alternative to Paul is Thompson. He seems the most conservative choice of what’s on offer to me, “conservative” in two senses: what he seems to be for policywise and just his general old-white-maleness. One wants an old man to run a stolid regime; one wants a younger man to run a war.
I think Huckabee benefited from the same root cause, but his support was people who were formerly vaguely supporting Rudy G. as the super-SOB necessary to flog the wogs until morale improves.
Comment by Larry in SC —
January 3, 2008 @ 11:16 pm
Are you kidding? 10% for Ron Paul is awesome! 8 months ago no one ever heard of Ron Paul. The media has certainly not gotten behind him. All the pundits have been laughing and counting him out. On the other hand, everyone knows Giuliani and the media played him up as the already crowned president. To come in at two and half times more votes than Guiliani is remarkable. The momentum is just building. NH will be even better.
Comment by solarjetman —
January 3, 2008 @ 11:19 pm
I wouldn’t read too much into Giuliani’s lack of performance in Iowa. He didn’t campaign there at all; he’s hoping to win the larger, later states.
I think the way to interpret Paul’s performance is relative to previous libertarian or libertarian-ish candidates.
To be honest, even though Paul says he doesn’t want to run as an independent/libertarian, I’ll be shocked if he doesn’t. That movement of his is still going to be around after a couple more primary losses, and they’ll have no trouble raising money for ballot access.
Comment by wellbasically —
January 4, 2008 @ 12:22 am
I think Paul’s last best issue is the connection between gold and oil. People in New Hampshire are suffering from high commodity prices. People in Iowa are loving it.
Comment by Joe Strummer —
January 4, 2008 @ 12:33 am
Yes Rudy did not campaign in Iowa. But he got 4%. That’s Mike Gravel territory, and Gravel has the excuse of being insane in ways that are recognizable to ordinary Americans. We were told by our libertarian betters – Clint Bolick who has advised Giuliani and Randy Barnett who has pleasures himself to dreams of Hizzoner – that whatever Rudy’s deviations from the principles of limited gov’t, it was all worth it for the sake of electability.
I have to ask at this point: Really?
Comment by Eric the .5b —
January 4, 2008 @ 1:08 am
I wish Paul would have beaten McCain (because that would just be good for America), but 10% and 4th is…well, OK, when’s the last time any libertarian has gotten 10% of any race outside Paul’s district?
Larry in SC has a reasonable reaction for a Paul supporter…
Comment by bachwards —
January 4, 2008 @ 3:16 am
My fear is that should Huck be the nominee and lose in the general, the GOP will be convinced that it was precisely because he had a conscience or wasn’t warmongering enough.
Comment by mds —
January 4, 2008 @ 8:38 am
Well, yes and no. Formally, it’s not got much of a genuine libertarian tradition. But it has plenty of that American tendency towards schizophrenia. Having been born and intermittently resided there, I encountered a substantial swathe of people asserting that government doesn’t work, that they wanted it off their backs, all while collecting farm subsidies and demanding upkeep on minor rural streets out of the public purse. Heck, my own father decries the failures of the government that rescued his father after the Depression, and that sends him a disability check every month. I could see some of these people thinking they support Dr. Paul’s agenda, even though they really don’t. But I could see more of them going to Huckabee for the ardent Jesusing, since the Iowa pseudolibertarian crowd are likelier to be primarily religious conservatives, as opposed to more genuine small government types in, say, Montana.
Still, a good showing, especially when compared to Il Duce. Fox News really needs to reconsider, though it’s unlikely to. Also, it’s nice to see Clinton given a bit of a bloody nose.
Comment by Tom Scudder —
January 4, 2008 @ 9:40 am
I am for what I expect is the only time in my life eagerly looking forward to Billy Kristol’s next New York Times column.
Comment by Janie —
January 4, 2008 @ 11:48 am
mds:
That disability check your father gets is NOT an entitlement. He paid premiums for that, deducted out of his paycheck every 2 weeks for his entire working career! And, he’s getting paid back in much devalued dollars than the dollars that he paid into the system. Not to take his disability check would be like paying full-coverage car insurance and then not making a claim after you have a wreck.
Comment by Bill Woolsey —
January 4, 2008 @ 12:34 pm
I read that most Iowa Republicans oppose the War in Iraq. So, Paul should have done well in Iowa on that account.
Also, the primary in South Carolina is open. We don’t even have partisan registration. You just show up to the polls on primary day and vote in which ever primary you prefer. You can only vote in one. The presidential primaries are held on different dates this year, so if you vote in the Republican one, your name is marked on the voter list and you cannot vote in the Democrat primary. The primaries for all the other offices will be held in June on the same day, but you can only vote in one primary.
Comment by u2canbfmj —
January 4, 2008 @ 12:41 pm
spin it anyway. But I heard america being flushed down the crapper around 9:30 est. It doesn’t matter who wins, sans RP. The game played in DC will not change and will get even bigger.
Comment by freedom is popular —
January 4, 2008 @ 1:15 pm
ww.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/01/6735_mccain_in_nh_wo.html
Huckabee wants to increase military spending by 50% per year(more than 270 billion dollars extra per year plus he wants to rebuild infrastructure overseas with untold hundreds of billions of dollars of spending while we need more than two trillion dollars spent here in the USA just to rebuild our bridges, roads, and repair our waterlines some of which are still hollowed out logs and 5 million miles of lead pipes.
“Right now we spend about 3.9% of our GDP on defense, while we spent about 6% in 1986 under President Reagan. We need to return to that 6% level.”
“We have to stop using our active duty forces for nation building and rely on other government agencies for building schools, hospitals, roads, sewage treatment, water filtration, electricity, legal and banking systems. The State Department should be in charge and coordinate with the relevant departments of Energy, Housing, Education, Treasury, Justice, and Transportation. ”
http://www.cfr.org/publication/14335/
Comment by freedom is popular —
January 4, 2008 @ 1:17 pm
McCain doesn’t care if we stay in Iraq for a hundred years, a thousand years, or a million years. That is what he said and that is what he means.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/01/6735_mccain_in_nh_wo.html
Comment by Edward —
January 4, 2008 @ 2:21 pm
No R can beat a Democrat, save for Ron Paul and I’m not even sure that’s possible since most Americans love their warfare/welfare state. They decry the fact that K Street runs Washington, yet when a Statesman like Paul shows up that is shunned by lobbyists, they won’t elect him. They want “change,” but elect the same politicians over and over again.
Here’s a great artcile which details Obama’s wishy-washy stance on war and Iraq. A peacenik he is not.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/taylor-j3.html
Folks, the debt, calculated using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which includes funded and unfunded liabilities (such as Medicare and Social Security), is over 55 Trillion dollars. (Over $150,000 per American) This debt will never be repaid, it can only be monetized. The result of debt monetization is inflation. (IE the Federal Reserve prints the money to pay the debt. – an oversimplification)
Monetizing $55 trillion worth of debt will make the Weimar Republic look like a walk in the park. It is already starting to happen. The M3 figure, made a secret in Jan. 06, has been calculated at 15% according to the work at shadowstats.com (This website has some great information about Government Accounting).
We cannot continue the warfare/welfare state without massive inflation.
It’s no wonder the elite have contempt for us. We’re easily manipulated and frankly, we deserve what we get. Hell, most of you probably didn’t read more than 25 words of this diatribe.