As an elected officer of the California Republican Party, I stayed officially neutral in last year’s GOP Presidential Primary. That was not easy to do. As a matter of fact, hands down the biggest negative about being in party office has been the requirement to stay out of primaries at the risk of losing my party office.
That said, despite the chains on me, we did have a vibrant debate on this website about all of the candidates. We featured columns from the most viable contenders, we had advocacy pieces from their prominent supporters, and various bloggers on the site weighed in on behalf of their favorite picks. We had video, podcast, or regular interviews, exclusive to this site with Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Duncan Hunter.
The reason I am throwing all of this out there is to make it very clear that while I kept required commitment to stay neutral, that did not keep me from fostering a discussion, and weighing in a lot about the campaign and our Republican candidates.
While there is no need for me to do so, as the Presidential primary of last year is long gone, I thought it would be appropriate to share with FR readers which candidate I ended up voting for when I got into the booth. When I went into my polling place, and reviewed the GOP candidates, it was a fairly easy call for me to cast my ballot for Texas Congressman Ron Paul.
To be straight forward about it – when I cast my personal vote, the ONLY consideration that is important to me is which candidate do I agree with most on the issues. I make no bones about the fact that while I consider myself to be a well-rounded conservative, it is domestic and not international policy issues which are the most dominant on my personal priority list. And after watching this President, under the guise of so-called compassionate-conservatism, preside over such large increases in domestic spending (yes, facilitated for many years by a Republican-controlled Senate and House), I was immediately drawn to the candidate who had the most credibility in opposing this kind of behavior, and who would, if elected, truly be committed to aggressively scaling back the size and scope of the federal government.
I understood, as I am sure that most voters for Paul did, that he was ultimately not a viable candidate to win the nomination. So a vote for him was truly one of principle, and to send a statement – a libertarian (small “L”) message about the disappointment about the massive growth in spending in this country (yeah, I guess at some level I also knew that Paul’s position on the War in Iraq was factored in there, but his position on the war was not my reason for voting for him).
Why am I sharing my private vote with FR readers (aren’t I supposed to keep it zipped, and let everyone assume I voted for their favorite candidate?) – I mainly decided to share this with you because lately I have been getting e-mails, and reading in blogs about references to “Ron Paul supporters” as a chaotic and negative impact on the Republican Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. At an overwhelming level, the supporters of Congressman Paul’s candidacy to whom I have spoken (and I ran into a LOT of them on the campaign trail in ’07 and early ’08) were passionate people who were fed up with the fact that the Republican Party had shifted to become “Democrat Lite” and that the GOP needed to return to its roots of being a party of limited government. Hey, I am all for that!
Now don’t get me wrong, I know that there are some supporters of Ron Paul who I would agree are eccentric and, frankly, in some cases, are not the kind of folks with whom I would prefer to spend quality time. But I think that I could say the same about every candidate who was running (like a supporter of Mike Huckabee who refused to show any concern about the former Arkansas Governor’s record of signing tax increases; or a supporter of Mitt Romney who thought the government-run healthcare scheme in Massachusetts was good public policy; or a supporter of John McCain who thought that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulatory act was a good idea).
I was not on the campaign trail for Ron Paul, and a “Ron Paul ‘08” bumper sticker did not adorn my car. But I did want to make it clear that it pains me to see people that I know try to dismiss or in some way lesson the value of someone in the political process because they were a supporter of Paul’s – old or new to the political scene. Ron Paul attracted a large number of voters to his banner, and I would hope that there is a large role to play for them – for us – in the GOP as the party seeks its path out of its largely self-inflicted trip into the wilderness.
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