Ron Paul’s GOP Battle Reveals Some Truths About Political Parties by Ryan McMaken

Ron Paul, member of the United States House of Representatives from Texas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When things didn’t go the way the pro-Romney leadership wanted them to go, they simply created a new GOP to replace the old one. That’s what happened in Nevada when Ron Paul supporters managed to gain control of the state’s Republican Party apparatus at the state convention.

In response, the pro-Romney and establishment Republican forces broke off and formed Team Nevada which is essentially a shadow Republican party. In addition, by pledging support to Romney, Team Nevada is receiving funding from the Republican National Committee. If all goes as planned on the Romney side, Team Nevada will provide Nevada’s delegates to the Republican National Convention. The duly-elected Ron Paul delegates, who were elected through state and local conventions in Nevada, will be barred from the convention floor.

The many ways in which the old guard of the Republican party has repeatedly sought to disenfranchise Ron Paul voters and delegates are too numerous to count. Some cases have been noted by Doug Wead and by others with anti-Paul strategies ranging from smearing Paul supporters with carefully edited videos to having Paul supporters arrested for no reason.

People unfamiliar with how parties have functioned historically, may be shocked by such things, but these actions are really just more of the same from the GOP and from American political parties in general.

This year’s efforts to simply destroy anyone the party leadership dislikes are hardly the first instances of occasions on which an American political party has taken steps to nullify or ignore primary and caucus results that it did not like. For example, in 2010, Dan Maes, a businessman who ran for governor in Colorado against former Congressman Scott McInnis, was abandoned by the GOP after receiving the nomination. McInnis was heavily favored as the moderate, establishment candidate while Maes was regarded as an upstart from the populist and conservative wing of the party. Near the end of the primary campaign, however, McInnis was accused of taking money from an employer for written work he allegedly stole from someone else.

McInnis’s support collapsed and Maes was able to win the nomination as the Republican candidate for governor. The GOP leadership didn’t care for Maes for a variety of reasons (some of them very good) and instructed him to pull out of the race so a candidate more to the party leadership’s liking could be appointed outside the established nomination process. When Maes refused, the party leadership threw its support behind former-congressman Tom Tancredo who ran on a third-party ticket. Maes was denied all financial support from the Colorado GOP and the RNC.

The analogy here is less than perfect, of course. Maes was a political novice with a shady background, while Ron Paul is a twelve-term Congressman with a well-funded and highly-organized national organization. Paul’s base of support is broad and deep while Maes’s base was narrow and temporary. Maes’s campaign ran on issues quite different from those that drive Paul’s campaign, although both did draw support from the populist and anti-establishment wings of the Republican Party against moderate center-left candidates supported by the GOP establishment………

EXCERPT

via Ron Paul’s GOP Battle Reveals Some Truths About Political Parties by Ryan McMaken.

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