The young Paulistas gathered to receive their marching orders.
Get a haircut. Wear a tie. Be polite. Don’t gratuitously annoy
mainline Republicans. Leave the discussion of political philosophy
to the candidate. Your job, they were instructed, is to win votes
for Ron Paul.
That was the scene as described to me in New York City this
summer. Since then, it has become standard operating procedure for
the activists once dismissed as the “Ron Paul kids” during their
long march through the GOP.
“No tats,” one young Paul volunteer
told the New York Times he was advised. No
“fraternizing in the dorms, nothing like that.” No scruffy beards,
boozing or even impolitic tweets either. Don’t do anything that
will hurt the cause. Instead ask yourself, “What would Ron Paul
do?”
In 1968, door-knocking hippies cut their hair and dressed in the
wardrobe of the establishment in order to support Eugene McCarthy’s
antiwar candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Their slogan was
“Get clean for Gene.”
McCarthy didn’t make it to the White House, but he did unseat a
sitting president with a stronger-than-expected showing in New
Hampshire. Paul has already moved into the top tier in Iowa and New
Hampshire. Few will be surprised if he eclipses his 2008 tally of
more than 1 million votes.
Getting clean for Ron would seem a taller order, since the
target audience includes evangelicals and other cultural
conservatives. But Drew Ivers, the man chairing Paul’s Iowa
campaign, previously guided Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan to
second-place finishes in the caucuses. Having taken the silver
twice, as Mitt Romney might put it, Ivers is looking for his first
gold. This time Paul is making much more of his pro-life views and
common ground with pro-family voters.
But the Ron Paul activists aren’t just visiting the barbershop.
They are mastering the arcane details of caucuses and conventions
across the country in a quest to maximize their candidate’s
delegate totals. BuzzFeed
reports that the Paul campaign has an organization in
place “in ten caucus states besides Iowa: Colorado, Washington,
Maine, Idaho, Minnesota, Nevada, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri and
North Dakota,” plus a base in Alaska and Hawaii.
It may not add up to a “secret plan to actually win,” as the
news website put it. But it could allow Paul to go into the
convention with enough delegates to be noticed rather than
relegated to a
counter-convention across the street. That will create its own
problems for the GOP, but also opportunities for a young
movement.
“We learned a lot of lessons from last time around,” says Jeff
Frazee of Young Americans for Liberty, a group not affiliated with
the Paul campaign but made up of the candidate’s supporters. “We
know how to channel the enthusiasm into productive purposes.”
Those “productive purposes” include making inroads into the
mainstream of the Republican Party, where Paul’s strict
constitutionalism and stringent fiscal conservative is more in
vogue than four years ago. Even the antiwar stance has a wider
reach than in 2008. This is especially true among Republicans
between the ages of 18 to 34, where Gallup finds Paul
leading the field.
In some cases, Paul supporters are becoming the mainstream
Republican Party. They have achieved critical mass in GOP central
committees in states as diverse as Iowa, Nevada, and Maine. A bona
fide Ron Paul Republican, Rep. Justin
Amash, holds a House seat in Michigan. Paul’s son Rand is the
junior senator from Kentucky, after beating both an establishment
Republican and the Democratic nominee — who ran very similar
anti-Paul campaigns — by landslide margins.
Not every Paul backer has gotten the memo to behave according to
Emily Post-approved etiquette. The online contingent can be as
obnoxious as ever, alienating even people who are sympathetic. As a
poster
lamented on one of the largest pro-Paul forums, “Some of our
supporters have the marketing skills of Joseph Stalin.”
Yet for many of these youthful activists, the Ron Paul campaign
will end up being a formative experience like the Goldwater
campaign — and yes, the McCarthy and McGovern campaigns — were
for their elders. Win, lose or draw in Iowa, they will be a force
in politics for years to come.
