Ron Paul Won't Reject Any Donations
David Weigel | November 6, 2007, 7:23pm
A few hours ago Ron Paul's campaign met reporters at the National Press Club to confirm that, yes, their candidate had shattered the record for one day of primary fundraising. Campaign manager Lew Moore and Jonathan Bydlak marshalled FEC data to prove that they'd beaten Mitt Romney's January take (he got $2.5m on one day and $4m of pledges, which keeps getting reported as a $6.5m haul) and Hillary Clinton's numbers at the end of June (she raised $2.6 million at a Ron Burkle fundraiser).
"I think it says something that the Clinton campaign challenged these numbers," Moore said. "They don't want to run against us."
I asked Bydlak about attention the campaign is getting from creepy white supremacists, and whether if they discovered donations from specious people they'd give them back. "If people hold views that the candidate doesn't agree with, and they give to us, that's their loss," he said. What if the campaign keeps getting scrutiny as its coffers grow? "The scrutiny is a perfect sign of how this campaign is growing."
Meanwhile, David Frum's take on Paul's 11/5 fundraising is really stupendously wrong. Here's his first argument.
[I]t is worth recalling that in the much lower-intensity race of 2000, Ralph Nader raised over $8 million for his presidential bid. It would be interesting to know how many of today's Paul donors were Nader donors then... the United States is a very big and rich country, and that its political fringes are likewise big and rich.
The "Paulites=Naderites" bit is too silly to address, but comparing $8m over one year with $4.3m in one day—that's not apples and oranges, it's apples and nuclear submarines. And if you start from January 2007, Paul has raised $15.5m. He's probably going to triple Nader's haul by the end of the campaign. And Nader was an internationally famous consumer activist with 40 years in the spotlight. When this campaign started Paul was an obscure congressman who'd occasionally light up the House floor at 11 p.m.
Howard Dean in 2004 attracted 318,000 individual donors who donated 454,000 times for a total of almost $40 million... True, Dean did not do it in one day. But almost all that money arrived in a single quarter.
No, he didn't. He raised $2.6m in the first quarter (of 2003), $7.6m in the second quarter, $14.8m in the third quarter, and $16m in the fourth quarter.
My conclusion from this is that Ron Paul is actually underperforming his potential. I'd guess that he would do much better if he dropped the gold standard stuff, and ran a pure anti-war campaign, spicily seasoned with 9/11 paranoia.
And Dr. Paul, when did you stop beating your wife? Frum's missing out on one of the campaign's big surprises: people actually respond to the "gold standard stuff." I have a few theories why, but I'm still shocked when I see hundreds of college students whooping when a presidential candidate pledges to kill the Fed.
Of course I am saddened to discover that many thousands of Americans have rallied to a candidate campaigning on a Michael Moore view of the world.
Yes, just like Michael Moore. Coming next Fall: Michael Moore's Recess. America's favorite guerilla filmmaker makes the case for abolishing the Department of Education!
Yes, yes, Frum is talking about foreign policy. Let's get back to his Nader comparison. When Nader ran an ego-and-umbrage-driven campaign in 2000 you had some people calling his supporters crazy, but more Democrats took them seriously. Gore and his surrogates campaigned in the swing states to rebut Nader's argument that Clinton was a right-winger or that the big parties nominated clones of one another.
There's next to no institutional respect for Paul. Frum thinks (I do not) that Paul will break from the party and run an independent campaign, and he's mocking him and his supporters as deranged flat-earthers. Punters at the Fox-moderated GOP debates heckle the candidate. RedState.com bans his supporters. Are Republicans flying so high that they can just amputate a wing of their party? Obviously not. So why are they doing it?
Mad Max | November 7, 2007, 7:57am | #
A good enough opportunity to post this link:
http://l4l.org/library/bepro-rp.html
Being Pro-Life is Necessary to Defend Liberty
by Congressman Ron Paul, 1981
A libertarian's support for abortion is not merely a minor misapplication of principle, as if one held an incorrect belief about the Austrian theory of the business cycle. The issue of abortion is fundamental, and therefore an incorrect view of the issue strikes at the very foundations of all beliefs.
Libertarians believe, along with the Founding Fathers, that every individual has inalienable rights, among which are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Neither the State, nor any other person, can violate those rights without committing an injustice. But, just as important as the power claimed by the State to decide what rights we have, is the power to decide which of us has rights.
Today, we are seeing a piecemeal destruction of individual freedom. And in abortion, the statists have found a most effective method of obliterating freedom: obliterating the individual. Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the "right" of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the "property rights" of slave masters in their slaves. . . .
I encourage all pro-life libertarians to become involved in debating the issues and educating the public; whether or not freedom is defended across the board, or is allowed to be further eroded without *consistent* defenders, may depend on them.
Milan Skarka | November 7, 2007, 7:45pm | #
"It's amazing how much money Paul is raising... unfortunately, ultimately it will do absolutely no good. Nationwide, he's still polling behind everybody else. Even if by some miracle he were to get the Republican nomination, he couldn't win the election. Face it: the liberals and mainstream Republicans are offering what everyone wants. The American
people want to be taken care of by the government. They don't want to have to shoulder any responsibility, pay for their own health care, suffer any misfortune, no matter how well-deserved, or be exposed to any risk, no matter how miniscule or trivial. At the same time, they wish to impose their own morality upon everyone else. Americans are becoming ever more servile, authoritarian, and intolerant. Can there be any desire for liberty
left in this country when even smokers respond in surveys by saying that they approve of smoking bans because it might help them give up the habit? Not merely the Founding Fathers, but even our own fathers, who fought World
War II, must despise the current generation of servile, cringing, cowardly weaklings. Our generation is the worst and the source of all the evils that have arisen since the sixties, but we have so corrupted the following
generations that I do not believe there is any hope for this nation. I believe those now in high school and college are even more authoritarian and intolerant than their parents. If so, what can we expect but the total destruction of liberty? The great difficulty is that liberty is now
perceived to be synonymous with democracy, when in fact democracy is merely a tool for securing liberty (and a very imperfect one at that). In a true democracy one has merely exchanged a single tyrant for a multitude of them. Indeed, even the most despotic ruler must sometimes be restrained by public
opinion, but when public opinion rules, there are no restraints upon its savage tyranny. This is precisely the reason the Founding Fathers created a republic--which unscrupulous demagogues have been seeking to subvert almost
since its founding; and in which endeavor they have been increasingly successful. Even so late as the fifties, when I was in school, we were told that "the majority rules, but with respect for the rights of the minority."
The second part of that statement is now entirely ignored. Any measure, even the most despotic, can now be justified with the pretence that it is the will of the majority (whether it in fact be so or not) and the rights of the minority trampled upon at will. This is not freedom, but mere popular tyranny. What is Ron Paul but a voice crying in the wilderness? we can only say with Cicero, "O tempora! o mores!""
