The bitter end

FIGHTS often break out in ice-hockey arenas. Usually, however, they happen during ice-hockey games, not major political-party conventions. But on the first full day of the Republican National Convention, the party adopted by voice-vote changes to two rules: one strengthening penalties for delegates who vote for a candidate other than the one that state law requires them to support, and the other allowing the Republican National Committee (RNC) to change the party’s rules between conventions, rather than putting them to a full vote at the convention itself.

Those changes prompted some supporters of Ron Paul, a 12-term congressman and candidate in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries representing the party’s libertarian wing, to storm out of the convention hall, firing off charges of “voter suppression” and “election fraud”. Many of the storm-outs came from Maine, where Mitt Romney narrowly edged Mr Paul in the non-binding popular vote (the one who stayed on the convention floor shouting, “Fuck you, tyrants!” came, of course, from Texas). But the superior organisation of Mr Paul’s supporters won him 21 delegates to Mr Romney’s three. A few weeks before the convention—and after some of his delegates had bought their tickets from Maine to Florida—the RNC filed a complaint alleging multiple irregularities at the Maine convention. Mr Paul’s delegates claimed that the RNC wanted to avoid the embarrassment of Mr Romney losing a state on the night he officially clinched the nomination. The RNC said the rule-change simply closed “a loophole in our nominating process”. In the end, Maine awarded 14 delegates to Mr Romney and ten to Mr Paul.

Mr Paul’s supporters can seem callow and obsessive, as can Mr Paul himself, who is prone to secreting sound sentiments—a fondness for limited government, distaste for American sabre-rattling—amid mounds of batty rhetoric. Still, his views attracted passionate support, particularly among younger voters, where Republicans often struggle.

The question now is where those voters go. Mr Paul is 77, and will not seek another term in Congress. The foreign policy of a President Romney would lean far more towards neoconservatism than non-interventionism, and though he is likelier than Barack Obama to slash spending, he will not “End the Fed”, as one of Mr Paul’s books demanded. Party insiders are no doubt hoping they will simply mature into mainstream Republicans. But they may look elsewhere. To Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico and current Libertarian presidential candidate, perhaps, or to another Paul: Ron’s son Rand, an ambitious junior senator from Kentucky.

(Photo credit: AFP)

via Democracy in America http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/08/ron-pauls-campaign?fsrc=gn_ep