Avorysuds
Gold Member
Do Ron Paul's GOP rivals try to present Ron Paul as a "wacko"? Yes - I believe so. Smirks, eye-rolling send a clear message.
Does the media try to present Ron Paul as a "wacko"? I believe that sometimes they do - or at least they are buying into that effort by Paul's rivals for the GOP nomination. Or maybe they are picking up on some of the things that Paul and his supporters do that make it all too easy to write him off as a wacko.
I don't think Ron Paul is a wacko.
Yes, his positions are significantly different from many "mainstream" politicians. That - in and of itself - doesn't make him a wacko. But it does put the onus squarely on him to explain and educate people in a way that they can understand. His failure to accomplish that makes the "wacko" label that much easier to stick.
So many of his supporters who engage in poll hacking and absurd delegate total claims are so obviously preposterous that it makes it way too easy to write them off as wacko and that makes it easier to write Paul himself off as a wacko.
When they hack post debate polls producing absurd results like "87% of debate viewers believe Ron Paul won the debate" it makes them look stupid when he consistently draws 8 to 12% in actual voting.
Ron Paul is as much a victim of himself and of his own supporters as he is of any media bias or attacks from opponents.
What constitutes hacking these polls? All Ron Paul supporters do is vote in them like everyone else. Just because they have more dedication than supporters of other candidates doesn't mean they're hacking anything.
As for the delegate claims, there's nothing preposterous about it. Ron Paul supporters are getting elected at the county level far more than the straw poll results indicate. Now we won't know the exact delegate total for months, but it can at least be expected that Ron Paul will have more delegates than the "official" tallies would indicate. Does that mean he's going to win the nomination? No, but it does mean if there's a brokered convention with multiple rounds of voting that things could get very interesting.
No matter how you slice it, Paul's 50 or so delegates will have little weight
I agree, Big Government progressive rule both parties. Just look at the frontman for the Republicans, a guy that ran his stae much like Obama runs the country. Funny story is Mitt's state has to get massive federal funds to keep from going under for their HC system.