And now for a quick little political roundup. And speaking of that, wouldn’t it be nice if we had enough Round Up to spray all over Washington, but I find I have stumbled into the common error of confusing things that sound alike, and I also really need to work on focusing.
The turnout for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, in a uncontested primary, was massive, indicating high levels of support in the upcoming recall election. The voters of North Carolina very cheerfully, and with landslide margins, amended their constitution to say that marriage consisted of a man and a woman, one each. Who would have thought? Sen. Lugar did his best imitation of the Hindenburg, and lost bigtime to his Tea Party primary challenger Mourdock. In West Virginia, a felon residing in the slammer walked away with 40% of the vote in the Democratic primary in his challenge of President Obama. And James Carville, a man who knows how to read tea party leaves, warned his fellow Democrats that assuming they had this election in the bag could be a very big mistake.
And Ron Paul . . . let us call him Old Redoubtable . . . continues to rack up delegates in an impressive way. Since Romney became the “presumptive nominee,” this has had the interesting result of getting everybody else to stay home, pretty much, except for the Ron Paul supporters, who are, shall we say, Highly Motivated, and who still have a play to run. The other players are in the showers, and the Paul team remains on the field. This would normally be silly, except that the clock is still running, and the refs are still out there also.
The strategy adopted by Paul is starting to become clear. What is he after? If Ron Paul were pursuing this strategy as a way of trying to secure the nomination himself, all this would mean is that he is willing to exploit loopholes in the rules of the Republican Party to thwart the will of the people who voted in all those elections. The Republican Party could amend their rules after the fact, but that wouldn’t make the whole thing any less distasteful. Bleh.
But I don’t believe he is doing that at all. And I don’t think he is doing anything so (relatively) insignificant as securing a prime speaking slot at the convention. I think this is all about the party platform, and driving the whole thing hard right, and perhaps about the vp selection. If this is the case, he will have the cooperation of a lot of hard conservatives who supported mainstream candidates for pragmatic reasons, but who, having nominated Romney, could really go in for tying his moderate hands and feet. A number of Paul’s positions are attractive to ordinary conservatives (fiscal policy, monitor the Fed, civil liberties issues, etc.), and to compromise with them on these issues would not be compromise so much as agreement. We shall see.
This is not an argument for voting for Romney, which I am not going to do. But it is an argument for electing a Congress that will make life miserable for any president to the left of Tammerlane. And the early indicators show that this is a real possibility.