First off I'd like to comment on something here.
I think Ron Paul has been greatly underestimated.
He went up against a RINO funded by the GOP, endorsed by BOTH Bushes and Newt Gingrich and the rest of the GOP AND WON! This may sound a little familiar and could be foreshadowing if it comes down to Mitt and Paul at convention.
After winning the Republican nomination W. Bush was an ass and only gave Paul a small written endorsement. This is after the national GOP spends MILLIONS against Paul. This is after not one other major GOP member at the time took his side.
He beat the Democrat he was up against and won the seat. What thanks did Bush give Paul?
'Well, you ran one hell of a race!'
So basically, if it can be done one time, it can be done again. Paul knows how to run a successful campaign and I see a lot of political chess playing going on on his side. This isn't his first rodeo.
My favorite part of this story is how he embarrassed both Bush's and Newt after they tried to take him out.
Original Article Found Here:
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080105/FRONTPAGE/801050301
While Ron Paul mostly has been depicted in the media as a political oddity whose following is limited to libertarians and bloggers, Paul's past shows he knows how to win tough campaigns - even when he has to fight his own party's power brokers, as he did to win a congressional seat in 1996.
It was just two years after the "Republican Revolution" of 1994, led by Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America. Republicans were trying to expand their first House majority in decades. But Paul was hardly the kind of reliable partisan the party wanted to boost its ranks. Although he had served as a Republican congressman in the late 1970s and '80s, he had run for president against George H.W. Bush as the Libertarian Party's nominee in 1988, and he had a reputation for harboring quirky passions, such as restoring the gold standard for U.S. currency.
He visited the state's Republican congressmen in Washington to discuss his plans before announcing his candidacy. The Texas delegation could have decided to help Paul with valuable financial support and endorsements.
Paul said in an interview that he thought they'd be happy to have another Republican in the delegation, but that's not what happened. "I didn't think they were going to do what they did," he said.
What they did, to hear Paul tell the story, was to recruit Greg Laughlin, the incumbent Democrat, to run as a Republican.
Laughlin said that he had a good relationship with many of the Republican activists in Texas long before his switch and had considered becoming a
Republican soon after the party's resounding 1994 victory in the national elections. Either way, Laughlin's party switch was the first sign of trouble for Paul's nascent bid.
Both Texas senators endorsed Laughlin in the primary, as did Gingrich, who was then the House speaker. Both George Bushes campaigned for Laughlin.
But Paul won the Republican nomination, and then the seat. And he did so in much the same style he's employed in his current presidential campaign. He combined a folksy manner with a savvy political strategy. His ideals inspired dedication in his supporters and staff. He drew on the support of longtime backers who shared his libertarian philosophy, while tailoring his stump speech to mainstream Republicans.
"He was a very competent, very savvy opponent," Laughlin said. "One observer said to me he was almost deceptive in how he delivered his message."
Personal campaigning
In January 1996, Tom Lizardo was preparing to fly to Texas to start working for Paul's campaign. The night before his flight, Paul called him and said that he was polling at 6 percent, far behind Laughlin, at 44. Lizardo came anyway.
"He was the type of person who struck me very clearly as capable of taking an uphill battle and doing something with it," said Lizardo, who is now Paul's chief of staff. Lizardo met Paul in the 1980s, as a member of a conservative activist group called the Young Americans for Freedom.
Paul's district in southeastern Texas comprised 22 counties and bordered the expensive media markets of Houston and Austin. Most of the population was white, conservative and church-going.
Every weekend, Lizardo joined Paul on the campaign trail across the Texas plains, where Paul liked to listen to elevator music or financial news as he drove his pickup truck to the next stop.
Paul's family often joined him in his campaign travels. His 11-year-old granddaughters wore red, white and blue dresses sewn by his wife, Carol. Local supporters would meet the family, she said, and help with the campaign.
"We would all fan out," Carol Paul said. "Two of our granddaughters might go to a door, with one of their moms. And they'd say, 'I'm Laura and I'm Valori, and our granddad's walking in the neighborhood. Would you like to meet him? He's running for Congress.' "
That approach usually worked, Carol Paul said. The adult chaperone would hand out campaign literature while the girls ran to fetch their grandfather. Older grandchildren would sing and play the guitar.
Lizardo said that voters who lived hours away from the Paul family home in Lake Jackson would recognize Ron Paul, a former obstetrician, as the man who delivered their children.
"It had a lot to do with personal connection in the end," Lizardo said.
Paul produced and distributed 30,000 copies of a video describing his political positions and biography. In it, his wife told the story of the family's move to Texas after Paul's medical internship in Detroit and talked about his joy in delivering babies. Paul said that the primary job of the federal government was to defend the country, not control education. The video was interspersed with words of praise from Ronald Reagan, The Wall Street Journal, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. (After the release of the video, former attorney general Edwin Meese flew to Texas to clarify that Reagan had not endorsed Paul for the primary. Like most other Republicans, Meese endorsed Laughlin.)
In the video, Paul did not mention his Libertarian run for president eight years earlier, but he did explain his belief that a limited federal government was in line with the Constitution.
Laughlin said that was consistent with the approach Paul took during 1996 campaign.
"When he was asked about his run for president, he said that it was an experiment," Laughlin said. "He was back in the Republican Party."
Casting a wide net
Even as he courted voters as a traditional Republican, Paul looked beyond the party and the state of Texas for support and money. Throughout the campaign, Paul raised money from a nationwide base of supporters dating to his Libertarian Party days. Starting in the 1970s, Paul's Foundation for Rational Economic Education (FREE) published and mailed a newsletter to thousands of people. One adviser said that Paul had 100,000 subscribers in the late 1970s.
Paul began FREE when he was first elected to Congress in 1976 as a Republican in a special election. His policies appealed to members of the Libertarian Party, as well as Republicans who supported a limited government. He said that he ran to raise awareness about an American dollar that he said would plummet because the gold standard had been ended five years earlier. Paul also wrote several books that called for a return to a sound currency. Through the foundation, Paul was able to keep in touch with many like-minded people across the country.
Many of them lived outside Paul's district, which stretched from the west side of Austin, south of Houston to Corpus Christi on the Gulf Coast. The Dallas Morning News reported that more than 60 percent of Paul's funding in the 1996 race came from outside Texas.
"He was offering them something that was bigger than his congressional district," said Hans Kaiser, Paul's pollster for the 1996 race. "He wanted to get rid of taxes, and he meant it. And he wanted the government to get out of lives, and he meant it."
Kaiser has advised campaigns across the country. Many local candidates try to build the national base that Paul had in 1996, he said.
"It is really hard to do," Kaiser said. "You have to have a national cause to raise money through a national audience."
The fact that Paul could raise money without the support of Republican leadership in Washington helped him remain independent, said Mark Elam, who managed Paul's 1996 congressional campaign.
But Laughlin, his main competitor, complained about the strategy.
"He was running a national campaign against me," Laughlin said. "It wouldn't have mattered who I was."
Playing rough
Despite the folksy image he portrayed during the campaign, Paul wasn't above engaging in political combat. Laughlin had a reputation for accepting trips from lobbyists, and Paul and his advisers made sure voters knew about it.
"We just had one little ad that we put on," said Carol Paul. "And it had one little man in an airplane, and it said, 'He went here,' and the airplane flies to one side of the screen, and then 'he went here,' and then, 'he went here,' and then, 'He went here.' "
The negativity went both ways. Laughlin tried to attack Paul by highlighting and exaggerating what would happen if Paul's ideals of a strictly limited federal government became policy.
"It has made for facile fodder, that he is pro-drugs, and he wants everybody to smoke pot," Kaiser said. "The case was less about defending Ron and more about saying what he was for, and contrasting him with Laughlin, the former Democrat."
And Paul portrayed Laughlin as a Washington insider, detached from the interests of the district's voters.
Paul finished second in the primary with 32 percent, compared with Laughlin's 43 percent. Texas, like many Southern states, requires a runoff if no candidate polls over 50 percent in a primary.
A runoff election was scheduled for April, and the pressure against Paul from the Republican establishment only increased. The week before the race, former president George H.W. Bush endorsed Laughlin. His son, then-Gov. George W. Bush, recorded radio ads for Laughlin and flew to the candidate's hometown to help him campaign.
The governor told the crowd that Laughlin was a welcome addition to the Republican Party.
But in the end, Paul capitalized on Laughlin's Democratic past to edge past him in the runoff and become the party's nominee. The National Republican Congressional Committee had printed a brochure condemning Laughlin as corrupt when he ran as a Democrat less than two years earlier. "We weren't doing all that great," Paul said. "And somebody brought me this brochure by the NRCC blasting this guy. So all we did was, we reproduced the whole thing."
Laughlin's Democratic past led to a low turnout, Kaiser said.
"There wasn't that much enthusiasm to come out and vote for somebody who the Republicans had been excoriating for the past couple of races," Kaiser said.
Laughlin said that Paul won the runoff because he successfully organized Libertarians and others who were dissatisfied with Washington.
"He comes across very sincere, and he really attracts those who are against something that goes on in the government," Laughlin said. "Everybody has something they don't like that goes on in the government."
The Democratic nominee was an attorney named Charles "Lefty" Morris. Before the general election that November, governor Bush issued a short written endorsement of Paul, who went on to win by a margin of 6,000 votes out of almost 200,000 cast.
"Ron stopped to see him after the election," Carol Paul said. "Bush just leaned back, had his feet up on the desk, and said, 'Well, you ran one hell of a race!' "
------ End of article
By ETHAN WILENSKY-LANFORD
