Ron Paul’s Big Win!

July 25, 2012

(Formerly posted as Ron Paul’s last stand!  Sorry, I decided to change the title.)

Today, Ron Paul, and you and I, are on the verge of a great triumph, a victory that would have been unthinkable only four years ago. No, I am not talking about the GOP presidential nomination, I am talking about the bill before congress to audit the Federal Reserve.  There is widespread support in congress. It is likely to pass.  Now, more than ever, we should be sticking together.  This is Dr. Paul’s moment.  This is our moment.  Stay positive.  Stay tough.  Let’s finish this.

This latest bill to audit the Fed won’t mean an end to corruption.  It won’t mean that “insiders” who cheat the system and have become rich off our labors will not find another way to get easy money.  It won’t mean that it will make it through the Senate, where many opponents lurk, and where the corporate porkers will enlist the media to make a stand.  But it does mean that the American people, thanks to Ron Paul, and many of you, are finally, fully awake to the theft and injustice of a few.  The power elitists of the left and the right have been stripped bare, their robes of self-righteous and phony altruism pulled away for all to see their naked ambition and cruel greed.  They have helped employ the largest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich in all of American history.  They have made a mockery of the U.S. Constitution.

Now, more than ever, those who have supported Ron Paul and the Liberty Movement should stick by him and pressure the House and then the Senate to finish this task.  The crooks are on the run.  Incredibly, with all of their advantages, with the national media in their pocket, they are losing this war of public opinion. 80% of the nation now wants to see a legitimate audit of the Federal Reserve.  This was Ron Paul’s doing.  This was the work of the Campaign for Liberty and hundreds of thousands of Americans like you. It is wonderful to see.

And yet, despite our advances the forums are still crawling with accusation and recriminations about the Ron Paul campaign.  Some are in denial or anger over events.  Some are making accusations of betrayal.

Was this campaign perfect?  No.   But I have been part of seven presidential campaigns and this was one of the best I have ever seen. There is no such thing as a perfect campaign, even winning campaigns.

Compare it to the campaign of GOP nominee Mitt Romney, a campaign that couldn’t even organize the delegates in his own home state of Massachusetts and whose national spokesperson regularly misspeaks. And who manages to offend powerful allies who only want to help, like Rupert Murdoch.

Or compare it to the Rick Santorum campaign, who couldn’t field a full delegate slate in his own state of Pennsylvania and who dropped out when he was leading in some polls.

Or compare it to the Newt Gingrich campaign, who wasn’t even on the ballot in his home state of Virginia.  For all the criticism they have taken, Jesse Benton, John Tate and the campaign staff have run a very effective campaign against an entrenched system who owned the airwaves. In state after state the campaign exceeded all expectations and Dr. Paul actually won four states.  In my opinion, had the process happened naturally, without manipulation, he would have easily won 1,000 delegates and alternates and won eleven states.  Ron Paul supporters succeeded in taking over no less than three state Republican parties and scored hundred of victories in county and district GOP leadership.

I find it highly ironic that critics who only a year ago had no conception of a “delegate strategy” at the precinct level, now second guess the execution, legally or procedurally, of how it was done in one state or another.  Don’t you realize it was Jesse Benton and John Tate who secretly laid that strategy out a year and a half ago?  And now you call them traitors because you disagree over some part of a strategy that they, themselves, dreamed up and executed?

Remember Iowa?  We were doing everything we could to win Iowa and came within one week of doing it.  We spent every dime we had on it and almost pulled it off.  We peaked in the polls only seven days too soon and the media pounced.  Do you remember that week?  Only days to go and we were actually leading in the polls for the Iowa Caucus and the media was frantic.

Well, from the very beginning, when Ron Paul HQ was opened, when Jesse and John laid out the strategy, they talked about Iowa and NH and the sequential power of winning the early contests but then they also talked about the backup plan, the delegate strategy, how we would be an insurgent army within the GOP at the precinct level.  This was their idea, their plan, in the first place.

Some are attacking Senator Rand Paul, who has done more for our cause in the last year than any other Senator has done in a career.

Some are critical of our legal team. One ad hoc field organization of lawyers has said, “We are taking over the campaign.” But anyone who knows anything about law knows that we cannot be making headlines by announcing what we are doing.  What I can say is this, the campaign has quietly but effectively taken action in Massachusetts, Louisiana, Oregon and other states where there were clear violation of rules and our people were cheated or hurt.

The campaign has not taken action in places where, regardless of how we may have been treated, we were going to lose anyway. And there are reasons for this. We also are not taking action in states where we controlled the process. If we lost in those states it was our own fault.  The campaign has not wasted valuable financial or staff resources on meaningless lawsuits that have no basis in law and are destined to fail.

Some of the criticism coming from the field is legitimate. None of us are perfect.  And we are learning from our mistakes. Others are only seeking attention and money, selling books and promoting websites. By attacking Dr. Paul or his campaign they know they will get more viewers. I don’t begrudge them that and I certainly cherish their opinions and ideas and warnings.  They have earned a following, and I, too, like to hear what they have to say and I am learning from them.  But there is a time and place for us to fight it out and a time and place for us to stick together.

We have only another few weeks until the Republican National Convention, and then a few months left in Dr. Paul’s 22 year career in congress. In those days and weeks the battle to audit the FED will be in full force. Can we stick together till then?  We have all worked hard for Dr. Paul and the cause of liberty. Can we be loyal for a few more weeks, months, YEARS?

No one, especially Dr. Paul, would ask for you to blindly trust him, or any other man, but hasn’t he earned enough trust by his example to stick with him, and stick together, for a little longer?

Can we follow him to Tampa and hear what he has to say?  And let him play the cards we have given him?  And help him in the remaining months of his career in the U. S. Congress to walk this audit the Fed bill through the den of thieves?

Have we become so used to losing that we are paralyzed by the chance of a win?  Unable to accept it?  Like a jinxed football team who cannot believe we are actually leading in something and so we are still trying to find a way in the last minutes to lose the game?

The Audit the Fed is a real victory, a surprise victory that has been four years in the making and it is because of the leadership of Dr. Paul, the Campaign for Liberty and the thousands of activists around the country.  And it is suddenly, amazingly, upon us at the end of a losing campaign for the presidency.  Keep in mind, even if Ron Paul had won the presidency, this is one of the things he would have wanted to do and now it is happening without the White House.

We must stay the course,  and get this done.  And if we win in the House today, we must make the Senate feel our heat in the coming days.  And we must count our blessings that Ron Paul may have lost the election but he has won the argument.  And America and the world will never be the same.

 

Doug Wead on today’s Mike Huckabee Show talks about children of politicians in the business.

314 Comments | Presidential History | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Doug Wead

All Eyes on Nebraska

July 14, 2012

All eyes are on Grand Island, Nebraska today.  Will it be a Soviet style fraud?  Or will it be a real convention?  Today’s event will be telling.   It will provide clues on what to expect at the Republican National Convention in Tampa next month.

This is clear, what happens in Nebraska cannot be blamed on the Nebraska governor, or the strong arm privately financed army he has hired to muscle the masses of people into line.  Nor can it be blamed on Mitt Romney’s mean spirited campaign team, the same losers who ran Bob Dole and John McCain’s campaigns, whose motto is “only us.”  No, today’s activities will be a clear reflection of how Mittens himself sees the Ron Paul insurgency.  And how he will handle it in Tampa.

By now, even the most obtuse politico, at the most isolated, rarified level, would have seen the youtubes of people’s bones being broken in his name and of his own privately hired off duty police arresting people.  By now he knows that his captains have confiscated the delegate rolls and run out to parking lots and locked them up in their trunks to make it impossible for roll call votes.  He knows that they have ignored voice votes and brazenly declared “Nays have it,” when they didn’t.  He knows that his people have had to move money out of GOP accounts to keep it out of the hands of the new, duly elected state chairman, who support Ron Paul.

So what happens today in Nebraska is Mitt Romney’s show.  He is responsible.  If it happens orderly and fairly?  Hey wonderful.  We should be very grateful.  Mitt Romney, Obama’s Goldman Sachs twin candidate, has agreed to let the peasants play at democracy for a few hours.

But if Mittens is so frightened, so worried about that piggy bank, the Federal Reserve, that he cannot   allow the Ronluans to have even a handful of their own duly elected delegates in Nebraska, that they must all be personally approved by the candidate, himself, well then we will all know that he will not tolerate a challenge to the “wars without end” nor to the raiding of the poor and middle class.

If there is violence against Ron Paul supporters, as in the past, Romney and his governor can count on the national media – whose holding companies and advertisers are fattened off of the Federal Reserve – to turn look away.  But stay tuned.  The internet is not yet shut down.  The videos will be coming any second now and we will all get to see the truth.

206 Comments | Media, Presidential History | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Doug Wead

A Ronulan inside the dragon’s lair

July 12, 2012

Yesterday, some people commented on my blog post, accusing me of selling out the revolution for money.  Not true.  Just the opposite. The revolution has been a huge personal loss for me.   But a loss that I have embraced with joy.

The charge was made because I defended Gary Howard’s appointment to a post inside the Republican National Convention.

Howard, an African American, has been Dr. Paul’s able press secretary throughout the campaign.  His appointment to the RNC was being roughed up by Barack Obama attack dogs and I saw that as hypocritical and I wanted to reply to that.  It doesn’t mean that I support the Federal Reserve or the New World Order or Goldman Sachs.  It doesn’t even mean I support Mitt Romney which will only, slightly slow down the Obama descent into socialism, and as of now, will do nothing to redress the oligarchy’s rape of the poor and middle class in this country.  (Not to mention the military industrial complex.)

First, let me  say, I understand the frustration.  So I have no hurt feelings toward those who are lashing out.  But there is a biblical injunction in Romans that says this, “Let not your good be spoken of as evil.”  So I have an obligation to respond and speak up.

I have done a lot of bad things in my life but supporting Ron Paul was not one of them.  And once the fog lifted and I began to see how corrupt the monetary system had become, and how it was used to debase the currency and defraud the poor and the middle class, and how both Republican and Democrat presidents have played that game, I have joined the Revolution and never looked back.

It has not been a financially rewarding experience.  First, I lost my number one corporate client, who was LDS, and wanted me to support Mitt Romney.   I love the LDS people and appreciate their principled stand for the constitution but within months of supporting Ron Paul, 70% of my income was lost.  And much of my future income was, as well.  For example, I was suddenly told that a large business network I had spent years and thousands of dollars building, was no longer mine.  Just like that, it was given to someone else.

When the campaign was asked by a television network to send over a spokesperson to talk about Dr. Paul and the campaign suggested Doug Wead, the producer on the other end of the phone line said, “No, we’ve been told we can’t use Doug Wead.”

Yes, sometimes I slipped through the net.  Sometimes the television networks just need a good presidential historian and honest ones are hard to come by.  And sometimes, during the campaing the teleivsion network executives were so apoplytic about how to stop Ron Paul that they briefly decided, “let’s give him some rope and let him hang himself,”  or “let’s give his crazy ideas some exposure.”  And so they had me on, diverting me by giving me a false subject to prepare for, sending me phony articles to read and then ambushing me with the worst possible questions they could think of about Dr. Paul.

Ha.  The great thing about working for a man who is honest and can’t be bribed and for a cause that is based on truth is that you don’t need to remember what to say.  You just tell the truth.

So those brief moments backfired on them and you didn’t see me any more.

It is not easy taking on a system that is making a very few rich and powerful people, even richer and more powerful.  And the price of challenging the corruption is huge.  If Gary Howard, a man who has paid his own price for supporting Dr. Paul, can get appointed to a position inside the RNC, well great.  How are we ever going to win if the RNC is owned by the enemy?  We need more congressmen, more Senators, more TV talking heads, more staffers at the RNC, not fewer.  Maybe if Gary had been appointed in 2008, this election cycle would have been a bit more fair.

So I am in favor of every incursion we make into enemy territory.

When Dr. Paul decided to run as a presidential candidate for the GOP in 2008 some in the Liberty Movement called THAT a compromise.  They were outraged.  After all, the GOP was just as guilty as the Dems in ignoring the Constitution and in treading on civil liberties.  But Dr. Paul ran anyway.  And I’m glad he did.  Because I never would have heard of him or learned his message if he hadn’t.

So good luck Gary.  If you will feel lonely at times inside the RNC remember that we support you and are praying for you and we know that you will do what you can.  And don’t forget us.

164 Comments | Presidential History | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Doug Wead

RNC hires Gary Howard, Ron Paul press secretary

July 11, 2012

The RNC hiring of Gary Howard is now coming under attack from Democrats because he was the press secretary to Ron Paul.  They say that the Romney camp should dump him because everyone knows that Ron Paul is weak on Israel.  Here is the kicker, Gary Howard is an African American and he is a darn good press secretary.  That’s why they don’t want him.  An articulate, African American Republicans drives them nuts.  Hypocrites.

As for weak on Israel?

How could anybody get any weaker than President Barack Obama who publicly announced in advance the negotiating positions he wanted Israel to take, agreeing that she should give up all of the land taken in the Six Day War, land that guarantees her defense?

How could any RNC appointments compare to the anti-Israel staff Obama gathered around him when he ran for president last time?

Onboard the Obama foreign policy team was Jimmy Carter’s brilliant national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who once famously declared that “Israel is an apartheid state” and whose views greatly worry the Jewish community.

There was Robert Malley who according to the Jerusalem Post, is “an unabashed advocate for the Palestinians, co-authoring a spate of anti-Israel propaganda with former Arafat advisor, Hussein Agha.”   (Jerusalem Post, Feb. 21, 2008.)

There was Susan Rice, who as an advisor to John Kerry once suggested sending  Jimmy Carter and James Baker, to the Middle East to find a solution.

There was General Merrill McPeak, Obama’s chief military adviser and national-campaign co-chairman.  McPeak has criticized Israel for not returning to its 1967 borders and handing the Golan Heights back to Syria.  He has accused Jewish and evangelical voters of placing their interest in Israel above the nation, telling the Oregonian that world peace was held back by “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote …. here in favor of Israel.  And no politician wants to run against it.”

And while most of the Obama team was smart enough to keep their heads down in 2008, there were others who couldn’t resist leaking their views.  Obama advisor, Samantha Power, warned obliquely that the Obama Middle East policy could result in “alienating a domestic constituency.”

It sure has.  Mitt Romney is poised o pick up the largest Jewish vote since Ronald Reagan.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul, not Romney or Obama, was the first serious presidential candidate to declare that Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel.  “The real issue here is not what America wants but what Israel wants.  We have no right to chose their capital,” Dr. Paul said, “If they say it is Jerusalem, then it is Jerusalem.”

46 Comments | Democrats, Presidential History, Republicans | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Doug Wead

Another media lie about Ron Paul

July 3, 2012

Throughout this presidential election cycle the national media has been the subject of widespread ridicule for systematically ignoring the Ron Paul candidacy.   Well, they have finally found their legs.  They have a story that their corporate executives will let them publish.  Ron Paul, they say, is a hypocrite because he has long proclaimed that he doesn’t believe in the government’s social security program but nonetheless, now, takes a monthly social security check for himself.

The big news was apparently revealed in a recent interview on MSNBC.  It is a hilarious story and shows how the media risks alienating its more observant viewers to play to the general ignorance of the public.  I guess they figure, the cat’s out of the bag, the more savvy now know we are all corporate puppets who say what we are told to say for the privilege of being famous and rich and popular with our cousins back home, so we might as well shamelessly argue the absurd.  Most people are too dumb to notice.

So once again, here I am, a humble an amateur blogger, offering the real story for those who love truth and enjoy these waning moments of liberty where we can still spread it around.  (Enjoy this season while it lasts, the internet is a loop hole that the elitists in this country are trying desperately to plug.)

In the first place, the money Ron Paul put into the social security fund over the years is HIS money.  Just as the money you put into the account is your money.  It does not belong to MSNBC or to the US government.  It is not Obama’s money.  It does not belong to the Social Security Administration.  It belongs to Ron Paul. And your money belongs to you.  That was the whole idea of social security.

Secondly, Ron Paul did not have a choice.  And neither do you.  Unless you are an ordained minister, who makes a one time decision and opts out of the social security program altogether, out of moral conscience, you are forced to pay money into the program all your life.  If you are employed it will be taken out of your paycheck.  The government says it is for your own good. It is not an option.

If, when he was young, Ron Paul had refused to participate in the program and not paid into it, he would have been thrown into jail for tax evasion.

If, now that he is old, he refuses to take his money out of it, he is saying that the money wasn’t really his to begin with and he has no claim on it.

Third, while the original program was passed with the promise that the money would be separated from other government monies, after all, it does not belong to the government, that promise broke down long ago and the government had been spending it on wars and social programs that will help presidents get re-elected.  And thus the Social Security funds have almost been depleted and the program cannot be sustained.  It is one of the great moral failures of the American government.

No president of either political party will face this coming debacle of a bankrupt Social Security system.  They each continue, taking us to the brink, betting that the other party will be in power when the crash happens and will thus be blamed.  It is like a game of musical chairs and when the music stops, whoever is in office at the time will suffer for decades.  In fact, both parties are obviously morally corrupt, as this issues shows that fact in glaring colors, for millions of people will suffer.  Meanwhile, the national media plays its role of dumbing down the public right to the very end.

Now the reasons the media is so shameless in promoting this latest Ron Paul story is because they have been stung by Dr. Paul’s honesty and integrity in the face of rampant corruption.  This corruption is ongoing in government, banking, Wall Street and in the corporate world, including those corporations who own and run the media.

It is not like there are good congressmen and bad congressmen.  Don’t think there are congressmen who take the bribes of lobbyist money and those who don’t.  There is only ONE congressman who refuses to play the game.  Only one congressman who refuses to go on congressional junkets because he knows they are tax payer paid vacations.  Only ONE congressman who rejects the congressional pension plan, refusing  to take a dime because he knows the public can’t get such a break.  Only One congressman who never voted for an unbalanced budget or a pay raise.  And that ONE congressman is Ron Paul.  He has been consistent for 22 years.  But all of the above is  never mentioned by the national media.  It is studiously avoided.  You only hear it when one of us slips through the net and gets on television, and that is usually during the daytime when few are watching.

And it is not just about the corruption.

Ron Paul has been right about the consequences of these policies and how they are leading us to the brink.  Ron Paul called the housing bubble, years before it happened.  He predicted the crisis in Greece.  (With the advent of the internet, the public suddenly has access to a medium with a long memory.  That is why there is a battle raging to shut down the free use of the internet.)

And so, the media is embarrassed.  His honesty and his prescience is a hard thing to stomach and they only hope that it will go unnoticed by the majority.

The corporate world, who lives directly or indirectly off of their little piggy bank, the Federal Reserve, is furious because Ron Paul has pulled back the curtain to show how they maintain monopolies and shut out small business competition.  It is the banks that own them.  The banks tap the FED for interest free loans, into the trillions of dollars, and then pass the money onto the companies who advertise on television, and in some cases directly to the very holding companies who own the networks, themselves.  Nice, huh?

It is why in a nationally televised debate, with Ron Pau running neck and neck with Barack Obama in polls, and running second in the GOP, they limited his speaking time to 89 seconds.

So the media will continue to play up what they will declare is Dr. Paul’s hypocrisy.  He takes his social security check.  He has the nerve to take back a small amount of the money he put in over the years as a promised, government supervised, mandatory retirement.  He dares to take them at their word.  Of course, the money he gets back is diluted by inflation and worth much less than what he put in which is why he wants a better, more honest method of retirement for the next generation.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, both of whom have presided over the second worst depression in American history, have doubled their own salaries as president.  Together, on their watch, they have seen the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history.  The national media slavishly worships and protects one or the other just as they now promote either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

Who cares?  The number one donor to both men is Goldman Sachs.

So who’s the hypocrite?

And that’s the real story behind Ron Paul and his social security check.

190 Comments | Media, Presidential History | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Doug Wead

Why be tortured about torture?

June 25, 2012

There is no need to be tortured about torture?

Is water boarding torture? Some say yes and others say no.

Does it work?  Does it save lives?

Some, like a former adviser to a president, insist that it did work and that it did save lives.  Others, like the man who actually conducted the interrogations of water boarded suspects, said on television, that water boarding is torture and it had nothing to do with the results of their interrogation.

There are some simple ways to resolve this argument.

1.) We can water board the former assistant to the president and the man who led the interrogations and see if either one will recant and change their mind.

2.) We can round up all accredited journalists of major news agencies, water board them, and then let them tell us first hand.

3.) We can water board the Supreme Court and then let them vote on the subject.

In the meantime, let us prove to the world that we are better than the Nazi’s who also justified torturing suspects to save lives.  Our torturers should not wear scary black uniforms.  There should not be scary Wagnerian music in the background during torturing sessions as depicted in documentaries and movies of Nazis.   We are better than that.

Above all, we must remember the “slippery slope.”  We should not let our newly discovered recognition of the positive, humanitarian value of torture lead to the killing of our own citizens by the state without a trial and due process.

American Supreme Court Justice, Robert Jackson, who was our prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials, spent a whole day on that subject.  Jackson pointed out that Hitler’s execution of Ernst Rohm in 1934, without a trial, simply because he declared him a terrorist who threatened revolution, violated the German constitution and was the beginning of a lawlessness that led to war and  ultimately the Holocaust.

There are common sense exceptions, of course, such as when our own American president personally approves the killing of an American citizen who is deemed to be a terrorist.  After all, the president is “our leader,” not a German, and not a Nazi.  He wears a suit, not a uniform.  And he never, never wears an arm band of any kind.

Besides, we are a Republic, not only with a constitution but also a Bill of Rights.  Finally, the president is a known liberal, not a conservative.  Surely, a liberal would not torture unless it was duly called for.  And finally, in our case, “our leader” has a private panel secretly studying the subjects in question and offering independent  recommendations as to whom should be killed or not killed and why.  This is not like Goering and Himmler just making lists of enemies.

I hope this clears up this discussion once and for all.  There is no need to be tortured over torture when there are simple solutions to the questions involved.  The innocent need not be afraid.  We should each mind our own business and look to our own needs and not succumb to the propaganda of our enemies.  By the way, if you have traveled recently by air you know that those enemies are everywhere, by the thousands, and they especially seem to congregate at airports.

BTW, a quick solution to the congestion at airport security clearance would be to randomly water board passengers.  If, as experts insist, it is not really torture and it is very effective, we could break some of the old ladies and children being used by the terrorists to sneak things aboard.

55 Comments | Democrats, Presidential History, World events | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Doug Wead

In the trenches of the Washington State battle

June 23, 2012

In the last few months I have been inundated with emails and memos and got to this one late but I kept it for months and read it and re-read it.  This is from Peter Chiou in the Tacoma, Washington area and it was written in March when the Ron Paul and Rick Santorum people were working together to stop Romney.  There is good advice here for Ron Paul people still in the trenches.  And this is a good archival piece to have for the future.  It offers needed insight into the process.

One correction? Peter Chiou is a very humble, self effacing leader but he is wrong to blame himself.  We have taken on the establishment and it is no easy task.  There will be successes and times that we fall short.  It is a process and his experiences here will help others in others states win delegates and it will help in the future.

Pierce County Convention 3/25/2012

The 28th District

by

Peter Chiou

Do not give in to the prospect of losing but proceed ever more boldly against it!


This is a no-holds-barred self examination of how we screwed the pooch so badly in the 28th.  This paper is intended to educate in how to win.  I apologize to all those in 28th who worked so hard to only fail.  We missed a lot of opportunities.  No holding back.  No time for pride and ego.  Get it out and then fix it.  We must really hang up our egos at the door in debriefs like this if we are to learn.  When we’re done, let’s go have a beer.

It was a bloodbath yesterday in the 28th.  The results could have been very different had I known the rules better and had previous experience in a contentious environment like this.  JM (RS DL as well as GOP DL and Caucus Chairman), counter to the wishes of the Santorum campaign, crafted a unity slate with the Romney and Gingrich camps.  Their objective was to shut the Ron Paul people out rather than to ensure a brokered convention at the national convention.  This objective was achieved but to their own detriment.  It was a tactical win but an operational error on her part, IMHBAO.  However, their execution was nearly flawless (my hat off to them) but it took a lot longer than they had expected because a lot of their Santorum and Romney folks were also new and showed up unbeknownst to them.

Hence, the following are ideas derived from my experience yesterday:  (I hate losing due to stupidity)

  1. Expect a battle.
  2. KNOW ROBERTS RULE OF ORDER!!!!!!  http://www.robertsrules.org/  You have to know how to ask the questions and make motions without sounding dumb.  This way, you can challenge with confidence and perceived credibility.
  3. Appoint an experienced floor captain and not simply one with good heart and good intentions such as I but had no experience.
  4. Bring notebooks and each keep own notes.
  5. Establish roll call.  Know what quorum is!  And keep an eye on it.
  6. Establish coalition long beforehand.  Unless we have a clear majority, we MUST establish coalition to deny Romney the likely 1144 delegates.
  7. Point of Information and ascertain the number needed for Quorum.  Then see if a walk-out of the Ron Paul delegation will affect the quorum.  This can be used as a tactic to stall the proceedings.
  8. Must have a floor leader with personality of wanting to win so badly that he seeks every angle and every opportunity.  Not a milk toast like I was.  Could have raised a point of information and asked if all the Santorum and Gingrich people really want to help Romney get to the 1144 faster or do they want to slow them down.  And if I could affect quorum, lead the delegation out and force a hallway discussion before returning to order of the day.  Or, take a risk in walking out and hoping the Santorum/Gingrich people will walk out.  I could also have done this after the first ballot and got all the people outside and really laid everything out.
  9. Appoint a floor toughie.  If the leader is not assertive enough as was our case.  I was too concerned with building rapport and being nice instead of winning.  I made a lot of friends in the process and got people to like me but did not win any delegates at all.  This should be our main goal.
  10. After so many people had left because of exhaustion, we could have politely pointed to the lack of quorum and shut down the alternate election process.  They did not have to have any alternates at all!!!!  We FOULed this one up big time!
  11. Santorum and Paul people must be informed to know the plan to secure victory.  Be bold in who you support.  In other words, don’t be a stealth supporter.  Make it a sporting event where there is healthy competition and energy on both sides.  And everyone knows who the other side is.  At least the leadership should not be stealthy.
  12. There are no secrets in politics when it comes to real-time.  In the military, we safeguard  information and plans until execution.  Then it doesn’t matter because it’s often too late to respond to.  It is true in general but there are always exceptions.
  13. Go to your caucus room as soon as possible.  So that as your people arrive, you can greet them at the door.  Assume they know who you are.  No stealth was needed in our case because for speeches, we simply stood up and said our name, our preference, and if we’d support the nominee.  Most of us said yes.  Only one had the courage to say no.  It wouldn’t have made any difference if we had said no.
  14. Clear leadership presence in the room for each must be established early on.  We failed here in the 28th.  I did not make sure everyone knew I was there and who I was.  Santorum caucus leaders had leis around their necks to show who they were.
  15. Recommend that the two leaders working together know each other beforehand.  Agree that when one motions for recess to talk to your people, the each group will agree to the recess.  Otherwise, you’d just to have wait for an opportune time.  We had Jane Milhans so it was an impossible situation to begin with.  This may be the case with you as well.  However, if you make the case early on – like a week before, then you stand a chance.
  16. Have a Command Post established just outside the the caucus rooms with computer and printer for real-time printing of Slates.  Bring lots of ink and paper.  Exchange cell phones for real time texting.  Text to command post’s google voice account to be able to relay to appropriate personnel for action.
  17. Set the Santorum and Ron Paul tables next to each other or close by to collaborate.  Real-time IM or texting between the two might be helpful too.
  18. JCl, please make my Clear Channel Hotspot available for the conventions’ use if necessary.  We had good wifi yesterday but that may not always be the case.  This will facilitate the google voice texting by the command post, if desired.
  19. Have Ron Paul and Santorum leaders address their respective groups together.  NS had good success here in the 25th.  This builds trust between the two camps.  In the 27th, this fell apart because the Santorum people mistrusted the other side and we were thus screwed.  Our side trusted them, however.  So they got the lionshare of the delegate and we got one after Romney and Gingrich.   After church this morning, a bunch of Ron Paul people and Santorum people were exchanging war stories over coffee.  Remember, we are brothers and neighbors first before we were adversaries in this contest.
  20. DW, a very close friend of mine from church, made the front page of The News Tribune.  They lied and said he was a Ron Paul person when they knew he was a Santorum district leader.  I wish we had thought of this idea sooner.  He was trying to effect mutual support with RP in the 27th but failed.
    http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/03/24/2081205/people-are-passionate-pierce-gop.html

36 Comments | Presidential History | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Doug Wead

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