Media Criticism

I have to apologize for not posting in the last few days. I wanted to take in the collective experience of the Florida primary and the debates on both sides before posting. I watched the CNN Republican debate in the Ronald Reagan Library with great interest, mostly to see how ugly it would get between John McCain and Mitt Romney. I also tried keeping track of Ronald Reagan references but I ran out of fingers.

I think that John McCain has the same problem in debates as George W. Bush had in 2000 and 2004. Bush smirked and smiled his way through the debates while his opponents earnestly wrote notes and listened attentively. I am not sure if sitting down in front of Reagan’s Air Force One made McCain more prone to smiling at his new momentum but the Arizona senator was smirking his way through the entire debate. I cannot believe that I am siding with Mitt Romney in this debate but I thought he seemed more presidential, for whatever that is worth.

I don’t want to get into my problems with CNN’s debate rules notably the lack of strict time restrictions (check out my next entry on the Democratic debates). My bigger problem was the utter lack of coverage for Governor Mike Huckabee and Representative Ron Paul. The stage was not that big and there were only four candidates to speak with over 90 minutes. I found the fact that Ron Paul got the biggest applause of the night for his anti-war stance to be heartening considering the Republican audience.

I saw this piece in the New York Times Caucus section this afternoon that indicated that Ron Paul won a straw poll among New York Republicans. Since there hasn’t been a strong Republican since Thomas Dewey was governor in the 1940s, I thought it was strange that the Republican Party even met in the Empire State. As I suspected, Ron Paul’s victory in New York was relatively hollow as a total of 60 Republicans narrowly placed Paul ahead of second place Rudy Giuliani.

I have railed against the use of straw polls in past articles especially when Mitt Romney funded his victory at the venerable Iowa straw poll this summer. Ron Paul’s supporters have been incredibly active on the Internet as well as street corners of city nationwide promoting their candidate. This grassroots campaign should be successful in straw polls in restaurants, convention centers and homes throughout the United States. I know that Ron Paul has been successful in raising a substantial amount of money as well as garnering the support of independents and Democrats but an exhaustive list of straw poll victories means nothing. Paul better win in January 2008 (or December 2007, depending on changes in primary laws) if he has any hope of turning potential into reality.

Straw polls are like any other poll: flawed and misleading. Hillary Clinton’s bloated lead in national polls, Giuliani’s lead in national polls for Republican polls and the diffuse nature of American politics heading into 2008 make statistical analysis impossible. Howard Dean was leading heading into the Iowa caucuses in 2004 and a smear campaign by John Kerry, Richard Gephardt and DLC Democrats helped derail his populist campaign. If Ron Paul gets any more support before the caucuses, expect Mitt Romney to use some of his money to find faults in Paul’s platform. I say enough with straw polls and lets leave the polls to political pundits that need to fill 24 hours of cable news space.

Any good politician thinks about their short term prospects especially during an active campaign. If John Kerry had said he was building the Democratic Party for 2008 while running for president in 2004, he would have been creamed at the polls. Many politicians simply fail to realize that their place in politics is to compact the snow that will eventually become a massive snowball. Ron Paul fits into this camp with his grassroots campaign in 2008.

I think that Ron Paul has been receiving enough attention in the press based on the competition in the Republican field. There are plenty of candidates beyond Romney and Giuliani so why should Paul get more attention? The media has only begun to realize that Paul’s campaign is different from that of other candidates in the Republican AND Democratic fields. The problem for Ron Paul is that the media won’t help him in the short term. Ron Paul stories revolve around the shock of the candidate actually beating people financially on a quarterly basis. His aim should be a reform of the Republican Party back to roots laid down by people like Bob Taft in the 1940s: isolationist and libertarian.

His platform is appealing to Americans frustrated with the Bush Administration’s love affair with bureaucracy. Bush is not a traditional Republican but a tinkerer that benefited from a terrible attack on American soil six years ago. Paul would reorganize and decrease the size of government, recommit the country to the gold standard and draw back our influence in the world to reflect concerns over domestic defense. I think the gold standard idea is unrealistic in the modern economy but everything else sounds great to me. The problem is that as much as the American people complain about big government and overreaching presidents they are used to these malformed institutions.

Ron Paul will continue to gain supporters as the Republican debates continue into the primary season. Fred Thompson is a Reagan conservative that fails to realize that the Cold War is over, Mitt Romney is a stuffed suit and Rudy Giuliani is not desirable to a) conservatives, b) religious conservatives and c) libertarians. The problem is that Ron Paul does not fit the ridiculous form that we apply to each president. His frank manner is great to distinguish him in debates but Americans find it difficult to support people that speak common sense to power.

Since a reformed Republican party seems unlikely in the next generation, I am hoping that Ron Paul leaves the Republican Party and takes the mantle of the Libertarian Party in 2008. The major problem for parties like the Libertarian Party is that they get little press. If Paul is able to accomplish anything in the early primaries, he can bolt the party once partisan drones chose their leader. He will have run ads in the early primary states, built a following among independents and gotten his name in every major newspaper for months before the primaries even start. I hope that someone emerges from the Democrats to run as an independent to throw the two-party system into array and show Americans how fundamentally flawed our system is.