David Hill… who has really got to consider a non de plume, if he’s going to continue working at The Hill [1], says:
While Texan Ron Paul’s stock is soaring nationally, there is trouble on the home front. In September, Paul finished third in a straw poll of 1,300 Texas Republican activists who had been delegates to recent Republican conventions.
The congressman corralled just 17 percent of the votes cast, trailing California’s Duncan Hunter with 41 percent.
This outcome says Texas Republicans aren’t terribly concerned about viability. Otherwise, one of the national front-runners like Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney would have beaten these long-shots. But if they were willing to “waste” their votes on Hunter, why didn’t most back a fellow Texan? The truth is that Ron Paul, the angry prophet, has little honor in his own land. He’s about to lose his congressional seat.
The mistake Hill is figuring that Ron Paul has any stock at all, nationally, other than his small band of admittedly loud supporters, in the Cindy Sheehan wing of the Democrat party.
Here’s the problem; Hill apparently is assuming that because the polls the mainstream press bothers to report on show Paul doing well, it’s a fact. Well, he IS doing fairly well, for a whack-job. 14% is nothing to sneeze at. Then again, when you’ve got a press willing to hawk your virtues all day, and particularly when the Democrats are fielding such duds, you’ve got publicity that Paris Hilton can’t buy.
Bottom line, here: Ron Paul is The Ross Perot of the cycle…. with less money. That Paul is getting less support back home should be a sign to the rest of the country that what the press has been feeding us is pure plant food.
It’s entirely possible that Paul will be wreaking havoc in early-primary states across the country just as his base in Texas implodes. What kind of impact would that have on his presidential candidacy? It would be like a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station hearing that his home back in Texas burned down and firefighters discovered a meth lab in the smoldering embers. The trip home would, at once, be both devastating and embarrassing.
No less to his supporters… at east the lones who aren’t full-goose-bozo leftist. THey will consider it a job well done.
Think, now…. is it possible that the reason Ron Paul gets such support from the Sheehans of the world is because they’d like nothing better than to split the right?
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