Saturday, May 17, 2008

Say what you will about Ron Paul but at least he's not boring

The Washington Post is still taking notice of Brazoria County's Favorite Son presidential candidate, even though we don't think about him that much anymore cause we're politically exhausted.

Anyhow it says here that Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr could inherit the dogged supporters of Congressman Paul, which might be a Big If, but still could be uncomfortable for John McCain in November.

Why so?

The newspaper says:

More than a million votes have been cast for Paul, about 5 percent of the total cast in Republican primaries so far.

Paul's activists are swarming local Republican party committees and conventions, quietly capturing or lining up delegates in states such as Alaska, Missouri, Minnesota, Florida, Texas and Washington.

And on the Web, the Paul movement -- which, astonishingly, generated enough grassroots support to make him the top Republican presidential money-raiser in the fourth quarter of 2007 -- is still going strong. His Web site is getting about 50,000 unique visitors per week, compared to 90,000 for McCain, according to data marketing company Compete.com. (The two Democratic candidates' combined traffic is about six times higher.) On Google, people are searching for the term "Ron Paul" almost as often as "John McCain." And Paul's new book, "The Revolution: A Manifesto," which has been topping Amazon's sales chart for weeks, hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list today.

1 comment:

Todd Mason said...

The Constitution Party will probably inherit some of Paul's supporters as well, particularly since refusing to let Alan Keyes waltz in and take their nomination. I suspect McCain, and certainly Bush's legacy, will hurt McCain much worse than Barr will. Assuming he bests Root and Gravel in the running for the LP nod, which is a pretty safe assumption.