Ron Paul GOP Activism

Ron Paul supporters are indeed doing a good job in flooding GOP party conventions. What happened in Nevada is just one episode.

And GOP party insiders are starting to take note. One of those is Patrick Ruffini who raises his concerns about that very development in a blogpost titled The GOP and the Six Million. His analysis of the dynamics at play is sound and it reads like this:

The Internet empowers geographically distributed communities to fund campaigns, to set the tenor of media coverage, to explode little YouTube clips into a big, big deal. These are the 5-6 million people on each side who can be inspired enough to sign up for the nominee’s email list, visit blogs, spread messages and volunteer. In caucuses, these types of people represent 100% of the turnout universe (including older people if you take out some of the tech references). Let’s round up and call these groups the Six Million (this is a smaller group, I think, than “the base”)...

Even now, many envision they can create grassroots organizations from the top down, using an issues matrix conjured up by a pollster. Sadly, it’s not that easy. When the right idea to energize the Six Million comes, it won’t come from a “MoveOn of the right” occupying a D.C. office suite funded by an initial round of 7-figure commitments. It will come from someone working outside their den in far outside the Beltway hosting a little activist website that hits the right message at the right time on a $7 shared server.

And then there is the passage that probably best reveals Ruffini's concerns as he talks about the convention in St. Paul.: "Can the speakers safely voice a pro-victory message [sic] in Iraq without a significant amount of boos and catcalls?". No, they cannot because a substantive number of people in the base are fed up with spending frivolous amounts of treasury on needless wars that in no way make the country any safer but threaten its longtern well-being instead. And they are making themselves being heard more and more.

All in all this is reassuring. The powers to be are taking note. I highly recommend you to read all the posts in the discussion that follows this article. There are quite a few well thaught out points being made by some of the posters.

-- Johannes from NYC