The Paulite Mess

The big puzzle from Day One of the Republican National Convention was: why did Mitt Romney's convention pick a fight with the Ron Paul delegates?

Dana Millbank has some of the details. Basically, the convention took a candidate with a few hundred very aggrieved delegates, and gave them...pretty much nothing. Well, they get a video presentation and a Rand Paul speech today I guess, but what they didn't get was procedural fairness: not only were they not allowed to put Paul's name in nomination, but they also weren't given opportunities to formally dissent on new RNC rules or on the platform.

Some of that, to be sure, was understandable. Actual roll-call votes on the rules and the platform would have been extremely time consuming. But surely the convention could have found ways to accommodate the Paul delegates' desire to be heard. Would a formal nomination, for example, really have hurt anyone? As it was, the Paul delegates still voted for him; the convention simply refused to tally their votes.

The result was a few ruckuses on the convention floor during the rules and platform adoptions, which sparked some second-tier news stories -- and, during the actual nomination vote, much louder cheers for Paul's occasional votes than for Romney's, leading (for the tiny audience watching, but presumably also for the large contingent of working press on the scene) to the conclusion that the convention wasn't very enthusiastic about their nominee.

Now, it's possible that the GOP was stuck with this problem (especially the lack of enthusiasm for Romney) whatever they did. But I doubt it; it sure seems to me that they could have avoided the rules fiasco, at least, without either substantive concessions or blowing up the schedule.

Millbank interprets this as a case of Mitt Romney being a control freak. Could be; on the other hand, I'm always reluctant to invoke personality explanations, especially in cases where we don't know for a fact that the nominee himself had anything to do with it. My guess is that it was a more straightforward miscalculation; whoever was handling these choices figured that they had the votes, so why should they worry about accommodating what is, after all a pretty small minority at the convention (especially since it represents an even smaller minority within the electorate). They knew that they couldn't push Ron Paul himself so far that he would walk out, but that was about it; they didn't consider what the delegates might do.

I don't want to make more of this than it is; the GOP convention wasn't derailed significantly from its function of giving people who were inclined to vote Mitt some reasons for doing so. Still, it's an unforced error; a party doesn't want to get in the habit of making those.

Bad Call, Good Call

Calls I made, that is. In the keeping me honest category...

I haven't mentioned it since the primary, and I should: wow, I was dead wrong about Tommy Thompson. I figured he would fade right out of the picture -- really, I don't think I specified anything and I'm too lazy to look it up, but if I had I would have predicted he would finish third or fourth, far from winning. Obviously, I got that one totally wrong. 

On the other hand, I'm pretty pleased with my advise back during the primaries and caucuses that the Ron Paul "delegate strategy" was basically an overhyped nothing. Today's reports have the Paul people and the Romney folks reaching deals, and Paul certainly appears to have received things he was looking for. And yet it's hard in my view to argue that he would have received much more or much less had his delegate count been significantly different. His leverage has always been walking out entirely, and the threat of taking his voters elsewhere doesn't depend on how many actual delegates he has in the building.  

By the way, I should note that it is possible that his caucus-state organizing might make a difference in other ways if it produces more Paul influence within formal state organizations going forward. It's possible that happened; I don't know how many states link party governance and delegate selection procedures.

This is, by the way, exactly as it should be. My Thompson prediction was basically just a guess based on my reading of the GOP electorate in Wisconsin, the Republican Party, and the various candidates; in other words, basically stuff that I have no particular expertise about. I should, on the other hand, get things I say about nomination procedure right, so I'm glad I did. I hope I make it more or less clear which category I'm doing most of the time.

Anyway, enough about myself, but I did want to mention the Thompson thing. 

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Will Ron Paul's libertarian campaigns have any long-term effect on the Republican Party? If so, on what policy positions?

Delegates and the Ron Paul Strategy

You're going to hear a lot about Ron Paul's nifty plans to snag delegates by out-organizing the other campaigns. See for example this article about how Paul's people were trained to stick around after the straw poll vote portion of the caucuses in order to secure as many next-stage delegates as possible (in the Iowa multistage caucus process).

It's very unlikely to matter.

Here's the deal. Ron Paul is, of course, not going to be the Republican nominee; in fact, he's not going to come remotely close. His faction is going to struggle to stay over 15% of the vote in most states, and under Republican rules that's not going to translate into all that many delegates. Other than the very, very unlikely event that Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum battle to a delegate tie similar to last night's Iowa caucuses tie, it's not really going to matter very much to the nomination whether Paul gets 5%, or 10%, or even 20% of the delegates (and, really, gaming out all the obscure rules isn't going to get him a total delegate share larger than his overall vote share, so it's not going to be 20%).

Nor will it matter very much at the convention whether Paul leads an army of delegates or just a handful for reasons beyond the nomination. On the issues where Paul varies wildly from the rest of the GOP -- foreign policy, civil liberties, and a few others -- he's not going to win. For the rest, the real leverage that Paul has isn't the number of delegates who will listen to him; it's the vote in November. Whether Romney (or Santorum) will buy the threat that he jumps third party or just tells them to stay home isn't going to have anything at all to do with whether Paul has a couple hundred or a couple dozen delegates at the convention.

The truth is that even though delegate counts are what formally determine the nominee, very few nomination battles have come down to delegate counts. So, yes, it makes sense to maximize whatever you can maximize (and don't think that the Romney campaign is going to just allow the Paul people to grab delegates uncontested, by the way). But it just isn't very likely to make much of a difference.

Slow Down

Dave Weigel writes this morning that Ron Paul's newsletters are "either a boutique issue that isn't connecting with people, a confusing issue that raises 'liberal media bias' hackles with conservatives, or both." That's based on comparing last week's PPP poll with the one released last night.

He could be right! On the other hand, as he says the newsletters were first back in the news in a Weekly Standard story late last week, which for normal people was probably swallowed completely by Christmas. They didn't really get a lot of traction until just the last couple of days -- while the poll was already in the field. And it's not clear to me to what extent those newsletters were brought to the attention of rank-and-file voters in Iowa, as opposed to die-hard political junkies.

To be fair: Iowa caucus attendees are hardly typical voters. They're more interested in politics, and far more likely to encounter this kind of stuff than are regular general election voters. But still: this sounds to me a little like all of the people who were claiming a week into the anti-Newt onslaught that he was immune to attacks for whatever reasons. It's very possible that it just will take a bit of time to sink in.

Those Newsletters

The flare-up over the Ron Paul newsletters is in full swing, and makes life difficult for some of his libertarian-leaning supporters. I think there's some confusion on this, however, so it's worth a bit more of a look.

Start with the point that Alex Massie makes, which should in fact be the jumping off point for any discussion of this: Ron Paul isn't going to be president, and he isn't going to be the nominee, and everyone knows or should know it:

[O]utside the wholly committed, Paul's support is in large part a well-deserved protest vote against the dreadfulness of the other Republican candidates. Again, there's nothing wrong with this. But one should admit it, not try and pretend that it's not really all that important or it's just old news...And of course it would be important if this were Romney because Romney might be the next President of the United States. Ron Paul, who is not a very convincing racist, will not be and so it is easier to forgive or quietly ignore these awkward blemishes. It's not disqualifying because he won't really win so let's just talk about the better stuff, ok? That's fine but you can see why this might be a tough sell to people who don't already know the whole story.

So support for Paul from folks such as Andrew Sullivan and E.D. Kain and Conor Friedersdorf and others should be understood, then, as a protest vote.

Which then leads to the next question: a protest against what?

If it's a single-issue protest, then I don't think it matters very much who Ron Paul is at all. If support for Paul means opposition to the War on Drugs, or torture, or an internationalist foreign policy at all, or modern government...he'll do, more or less.

But if one believes that there's something really wrong with the current Republican Party, then it matters a lot what baggage Paul brings to the party. Look -- a protest vote is a symbolic vote. So symbols matter. If you believe that part of what's wrong with the GOP is casual indifference or even hostility to science and facts, then Ron Paul's goldbuggery really does matter a lot. If you believe that part of what's wrong with the GOP is bigotry, or tolerance of bigotry, or a point of view that being accused of bigotry is a greater evil than actually practicing bigotry -- then the newsletters matter a lot. If he's going to be your symbolic way of protesting what's wrong with the Republican Party, you had better be very clear on what he symbolizes.

Just don't tell me, as Kain and Fredersdorf do, that publishing ugly newsletters is bad, but not as bad as various policies that the president or the other Republican candidates support. That's the wrong standard; it's the standard by which to judge an actual candidate for president. Supporting Paul isn't about that. You don't have to convince anyone that he'd be a good president; you don't have to believe it yourself. Basically, if you believe he's the right protest candidate to change what ails the GOP , I think you have the wrong guy; if you're just using him for a particular issue position, then there's no need to even pretend that he'd make a good president or to hesitate at all in rejecting whatever baggage comes with him.

Q Day 4: Ron Paul, 3rd Party Candidate?

A bunch of questions about libertarian third-party runs, including:

Do you see a Ron Paul third-party run happening next year? how do you imagine it would effect the race and the national conversation? I'm hoping you'll tell me it's inevitable and that it'll give Obama a landslide

Would Paul jump? That goes back to the earlier post: it's hard to get inside their heads. What we can say is that on the one hand, Paul certainly hasn't displayed long-term loyalty to the GOP (since he ran as a libertarian before), and he doesn't have a political career to lose by doing it, especially since he's already announced his retirement from the House. On the other hand, a jump would presumably hurt his son's status within the Republican Party. Hard to know how much he cares about any of that.

If he did it...well, he'd be a poorly financed general election candidate with a very strong but very small base of supporters, but the advantage of a ballot line everywhere (presumably strong Paul supporters would secure a spot in those states in which the Libertarian Party doesn't already have a line). 5% plus or minus 4% seems like as good an estimate as any -- but of course there's a huge difference between a candidate who takes about 9% from one side and a candidate who takes 1%. At the end of the day, I'd suppose that he would be unlikely to cost Republicans the presidency. If the election appeared close, Republicans, even the most libertarian-leaning of them, would drift back to Mitt Romney or whoever the nominee was. Meanwhile, if Obama is generally unpopular and getting clobbered, some liberal civil liberties fans might drift to Paul, but that will dry up if Obama is popular enough to have a fighting chance.

I guess what I want to say that how many votes Paul would get is probably a function of what else is going on. If the election is winnable for Republicans, the Republican nominee will wind up popular enough among Republicans that most will come home, and same for Obama and Democratic voters. Of course, if the election is very close, then it's certainly possible that the difference between a Paul at 2% or 3% vs. a no-name libertarian at 1% might turn a key state or two, but once the contest is that close then all sort of stuff can flip it.

Real vs. Reality

My Plum Line post today is a fun piece (if I do say so myself) about the "party actor" track vs. the "reality show" track in GOP presidential politics. I think it holds up; let me know if you disagree.

One of the implications, or perhaps one of the things we've learned, is that practically any candidate can get a polling surge at this stage of the process, but those surges have very little to do with the actual competition for the nomination. Thus the current Herman Cain polling triumph, analyzed in depth and I think correctly by Mark Blumenthal.

...or, at least, it seems as if any candidate can get a polling surge. Rick Santorum hasn't had one yet, but I don't see any reason he couldn't. Almost anyone can.

Except one.

Ron Paul.

Apparently, he's immune from both real and reality success, beyond his consistent 10% or whatever it is.

Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and Press Bias

Will Wilkinson has a mostly very good piece up arguing not exactly that Ron Paul should be getting more attention in the press, but if I follow him correctly that whatever the appropriate coverage is of Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul should be getting more or less the same amount. I've been increasingly thinking that Paul and Bachmann are actually a pretty good match, so I'm glad to see his argument.

Kevin Drum has a good response, though, centering on Paul's 2008 run, and arguing that the real difference between Paul and Bachmann is that we already know Paul's ceiling, and it's far too low to make him a plausible nominee.

How else can we explain it? I'd say there are a couple of press biases at work. One is the obvious and important bias in favor of novelty: nothing (so far at least) about the Ron Paul campaign is new, while everything about Bachmann is new. I wouldn't underrate the importance of a "fooled us once" aspect to the Paul story, also. The highly visible aspects of the 2008 Ron Paul campaign wound up spooking a lot of reporters into wondering if they were missing a huge phenomenon. Since they weren't, it's going to be hard for them to extrapolate anything from Paul this time around. Bachmann, to the extent that she is thought of as a Tea Party leader, has something of the opposite situation; Republicans accused of being too extreme to win in 2010 did, in fact, win. So it's natural (whether correct or not) that reporters tend to give Paul less credit and Bachmann more for their objective measures of success.

But the truth is that while Bachmann and Paul have some important similarities (Members of the House, moderately popular in polls, fringe beliefs even within the GOP) their is one important difference that justifies a difference in press treatment. Bachmann's issue position profile compared to the rest of the GOP is basically: the same, only more so. Paul, however, really does oppose most Republicans on several issues, most notably by opposing the bulk of the party on a broad range of foreign policy and national security issues. If Bachmann could convince Republican party actors that she was electable and that she could be counted on to work closely with them if she was in the White House, then she might win, but there are simply too many important Republican individuals and groups who oppose Paul's policy preferences for him to have any chance of winning. I don't really think that's why the press covers one and not the other, but it is one of the things that should be guiding their coverage decisions.

Looking Back at Ron Paul 2008

Patrick Appel, ably holding down the Dish with Andrew Sullivan away, notes my skepticism about a Gary Johnson presidential campaign and responds:

[I]n order to become a standard-bearer for a cause it can be wise to advocate for a position before it is politically popular. I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, but his 2008 boomlet required a long bout of virtual invisibility. Paul preached the same sermon for decades and it only struck a nerve in 2008. His base of support wasn't large enough for him to win the nomination, but he proved a more viable candidate than almost anyone projected. 

Is that true? First, Ron Paul in 2008 was less viable than he was visible.  I think the right way to assess the Ron Paul campaign would be to compare him to a Phil Gramm 1996, or a John Connally 1980 -- campaigns that had one very obvious resource but little else.  In their case it was money; in his case it was the extremely enthusiastic support of a small group, but either way it was enough to fool observers into thinking there was a lot more to the campaign than turned out to be the case. 

Second, is it really true that Paul's 2008 run "required a long bout of virtual invisibility"?  Perhaps, but I'm not convinced.  I think it did require a weak GOP field, one in which no leading candidate had impeccable conservative movement credentials.  It also helped to have an outgoing big-spending GOP president (and a recent big-spending GOP Congress, or at least a president and Congress who could be portrayed as big spenders).  Given those circumstances, I could imagine a Paul 2008 campaign having happened at any point over the last thirty years. 

Really, what's striking about the Paul campaign is how little apparent success it had in affecting the Republican Party.  I'm not aware of any Republican nominees in 2010, at least not at the statewide level, who have adopted Paul's unorthodox stances on foreign policy.  It's true that some strains of Tea Partyism seem libertarian, but mostly it's just standard-issue GOP rhetoric, pushing tax cuts and unspecified spending cuts while in practice asking government to keep its hands off their Medicare, their farm subsidies, and certainly their defense contracts.  And, of course, Gary Johnson is going nowhere, at least for now.

If what Appel is saying is that rogue presidential campaigns do have the capacity for changing a political party, even if they don't actually win the nomination, then I entirely agree -- and it's a very important and good point.  But in this particular instance, I see no evidence that the real-life Republican party (or anyone else beyond a small but visible group of enthusiasts) are going to become libertarians any time soon.