It looks as if Ron Paul is going to be an active participant in the Republican National Convention in Tampa this August. That will mark a big change from 2008, when Congressman Paul held a rival convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul while the GOP nominated John McCain nearby. Here’s our take on the five things Paul hopes to gain from staying within his party’s tent in 2012.
1. Ron Paul wants to change the soul of the GOP
Paul’s most ambitious goal is to influence the Republican Party as a whole, making it more amenable to his libertarian principles. That appears to be the point of his so-called “delegate strategy," whereby Paul supporters out-organize rivals in caucus states to win as many delegates as possible. In some cases, such as in Maine, the Paul forces have won outright control of state party organizations.
On May 19, for instance, Paulites won 12 of the 13 delegate slots up for grabs at Minnesota’s GOP convention. Combined with previous victories in the North Star State’s complicated selection process that means 32 of the 40 Minnesota delegates to Tampa will be Paul supporters. Sorry about that, Rick Santorum. (Mr. Santorum won Minnesota’s nonbinding caucus presidential nomination vote on Feb. 7 with a plurality of 45 percent of the vote.)
This is why Paul has eschewed any interest in a third-party bid.
“He’s gotten a lot of attention working through the two-party system and he’s gotten a lot of people involved,” said his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky, in a Fox News interview earlier this month. “I mean, the chairman of Iowa now was Ron Paul’s campaign chairman. The chairman of Nevada was a Ron Paul campaign person. We’ve won several states and are influencing the party and becoming the Republican Party.”
2. Paul wants an orderly show of force on the floor
Paul is not going to be the Republican nominee for president, and he knows it. By August, Mitt Romney will have long ago accumulated the 1,144 delegates needed to win. But Paul’s forces won’t be inconsiderable. Campaign strategist Jesse Benton estimates that the Texas libertarian will end up with “several hundred” delegates pledged to him, and several hundred more stealth supporters who are bound to vote for Mr. Romney or a withdrawn candidate on the first ballot.
Some of these supporters haven’t given up hope of a Paul victory. In Nevada, for instance, Paul supporters who control the Clark County GOP structure voted to rebuke Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus for his efforts to start merging the Romney and RNC campaign machines.
But Paul campaign officials insist they do not want to cause any kind of disturbance in Tampa. There’s no discussion of getting Paul supporters who are bound to vote for Romney to abstain from casting ballots in the first round, for instance.
“Decorum” will be the name of the game, Mr. Benton said in a recent conference call with supporters. That makes sense when considered in the context of the campaign’s long-term, makeover-of-the-party goal.
“We’re going to respectfully show that our supporters are here, and we’re the wave of the future,” said Benton.
3. Paul wants to irritate Ben Bernanke
The Federal Reserve has long been one of Paul’s favorite targets. He insists that the nation’s central bank is not an engine of American economic development, as many economists believe, but a massive Ponzi scheme that “creates money out of thin air, manipulates interest rates, and interferes with the free market,” according to the Paul campaign website.
As a House Financial Services subcommittee chairman, Paul has had occasion to spar over these issues with Fed chief Mr. Bernanke. What he wants to do in August is bring his objections to the conventional wisdom on this issue to the Tampa GOP convention – specifically, to platform committee meetings.
Paul wants a platform plank on Fed transparency, according to his campaign. He has said that if elected president he would work for comprehensive audit legislation, so presumably that is what he’s talking about – a push to get the Fed to open up its books.
It’s possible he’ll get Romney to agree on this. In the course of the primary campaign Romney said he agreed that there is a need for greater transparency at the Fed. (He also said he wouldn’t reappoint Bernanke.) But the presumptive nominee is on record as opposing Paul’s longer-term goal of ending the Fed. He’s also said he does not think Congress should be in the business of micromanaging monetary policy.
4. Paul wants to prohibit indefinite detention
In the wake of congressional passage of an authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda and its allies in 2001, the White House asserted that it had the authority to seize suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial.
That position was codified into law with the passage of the Defense Authorization Act in 2011. However, the Obama administration has issued rules barring the indefinite detention of American citizens.
Paul has long wanted to chip away even more at indefinite detention, seeing it as an overreach of executive power that’s unconstitutional.
“If we don’t change this, believe me, this country is in serious trouble,” he said earlier this month at a press conference of lawmakers who are pushing to end indefinite detention authority.
Paul would like to the Republican Party platform to reflect this position. That’s what he said in May when he issued a statement that he would no longer campaign in states that had not yet held primary votes.
That is unlikely to happen, however. Romney is already on record as supporting the indefinite detention power. He, like many in the GOP, sees it as a means of treating terrorists like military enemies.
“I do believe that it’s appropriate to have in our nation the capacity to detain people who are threats to this country and who are members of Al Qaeda,” said Romney at a Fox News debate in January.
Some audience members at that debate booed Romney’s answer – presumably, they were Paul supporters, or at least people who support Paul’s position on this issue.
5. Paul wants the Internet to remain wild and free
In keeping with his libertarian philosophy, Paul has long opposed any government regulation of the Internet, however well-intentioned. In the past, he’s co-sponsored (with liberal Rep. Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts) a bill to allow greater Internet gambling, for instance. He was the first House Republican to come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) earlier this year, saying that it was a form of government censorship.
“Internet freedom” is the third issue Paul’s supporters have said they’d like to see become a plank in the 2012 GOP platform. Will the rest of the party agree? Perhaps, if the formulation is vague – after all, many party lawmakers did end up opposing SOPA, which helped lead to its defeat. Romney called SOPA a “threat to freedom of speech.”
But this is an area of law where interests clash, leading to unpredictable partisan effects. Would the GOP oppose all antipiracy efforts, for example? That seems unlikely, given the big businesses hurt by pirated movies, music, and so forth.
In any case, do platform planks matter? Few people read them, and few nominees feel bound by them, as conservative author Edward Morrissey pointed out in a recent piece in the newsmagazine “The Week.”
Paul’s real endgame, according to Mr. Morrissey, is not platform planks, but gradually gaining control over as many party organizations as possible, as we noted at the beginning of this article.
“The real goal was to seize control of party apparatuses in states that rely on caucuses. With that in hand, Paul’s organization can direct party funds and operations to recruit and support candidates that follow Paul’s platform, and in that way exert some influence on the national Republican Party as well, potentially for years to come,” writes Morrissey.