World Affairs Brief, February 15, 2008. Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.
Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief
AN INDEPENDENT CHALLENGE WITHOUT RON PAUL?
One thing we have learned from the current primary campaign is just how manipulable the American voter is by a media onslaught for or against various candidates. The slick campaign to eliminate Romney from the campaign, using Huckabee as the spoiler, was very revealing. So was the extreme media bias against Ron Paul. There just aren’t enough thinking people among voters to amass any more support for a principled, Constitution-based platform than 5-10%. That doesn’t bode well for a third party or independent run. The mainstream media will deny any meaningful news coverage to third parties–unless it’s one of “their” third party spoilers like Ross Perot, who collaborated with the PTB in order to get the Clintons installed in the White House. Only in those cases do they get lots of coverage and are allowed into the debates.
Without substantive media attention, within our “winner-take-all” system, a third party/independent run for the presidency is not capable of winning the election outright–though it can act as a spoiler for one party or the other. However, as I just pointed out, the PTB get their way with either the Democrat or Republican–they just get it done in a different order and slightly different time frame.
In any case, no third party or independent candidacy is going anywhere unless all the disparate parties and forces agree on supporting a single candidate–and that person is Ron Paul. He is the only candidate capable of attracting partisans across the principled political spectrum of constitutional conservatives, independents and many anti-war Democrats as well. Almost all of the small third parties would be willing to join forces if Ron Paul were the standard bearer. Such a unified coalition has not been possible in the past hundred years. Only Ron Paul is capable of engendering the necessary trust to put together this large a coalition. He says this movement is not about him, but it is, in one significant way: A proper ideology is absolutely essential, but it has to have a human being to be its champion and get elected to office. Ideas don’t get elected on their own without a person the people can rally around. No one else has the elected track record of Ron Paul. No one else has his absolute reputation for trust.
The only problem is that Paul has announced that he will not run as a third party or independent candidate–that he is staying loyal to the Republican party.