Ron Paul supporters filed en masse to run for Republican Party precinct committee officers, grass-roots elected seats that will be on this year’s primary election ballot.

The goal, said one PCO race newcomer, is to return the party to the principles it used to have.

“It needs to change,” said Greg Parsons, who is running against PCO Kathy Kershner. “I do have some issues with establishment Republicans. On the contrary, I think we are, in fact, the real, true conservative Republicans.”

PCO seats, elected every two years, often receive no interest, or only one person files. This year, because of a flood of interest in Republican PCO seats, many more contested races will be on the ballot…

But nearly an equal number of names unfamiliar to party officials appeared on the filing list, and many challenged longtime PCOs. By comparing them to the list of caucus participants, they learned they are Paul supporters, Van Werven said.

“I suspect that they are interested in organizing – reorganizing – the local Republican Party,” Van Werven said.

I suspect I know more about the Ron Paul candidacy than any other journalist in America.

I’ve been speaking with him for five years now, which is about four more than anyone else.

Most of the other journalists who dealt with Paul basically asked him the same stupid question over and over: “Will you be running as a third-party candidate?”

They never asked Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry that…

Meanwhile Ron Paul stayed in the race the longest and is still accumulating delegates for the Republican National Convention in August.

NPR political commentator Ken Rudin, on whose show I appear now and then, has a good grasp of the situation, and he displays it here:

For most of the past year, nearly every journalist who interviewed Paul felt compelled to ask him if his ultimate goal was to run as the Libertarian Party nominee (as he did once before, in 1988). Paul kept saying he had no “intention” to do so, but few believed him. 

Everyone seemed to miss the obvious: It is all about the future of the Republican Party.

Paul says his campaign will not spend any money in the 11 states that haven’t yet voted, and he won’t. For one thing, he doesn’t have the money. But he will be — and has been — packing county and state conventions with his supporters and electing Paul-friendly activists as delegates … even if they are committed to voting for Romney in Tampa. “I hope all supporters of liberty will remain deeply involved,” Paul wrote. “Become delegates, win office and take leadership positions.”

Read the whole thing. No matter what happens in November, the liberty faction within the Republican Party is not going to go away.

NYT:

In Minnesota, Paulites stormed the Republican gathering in St. Cloud last weekend, bumping aside two conventional Republican candidates to choose one of their own, Kurt P. Bills, a high school economics teacher, to challenge Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, this fall.

Backers of Mr. Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, crashed Republican conventions in Iowa, Maine, Minnesota and Nevada in recent weeks, snatching up the lion’s share of delegate slots for the Republican National Convention in Tampa this August, a potential headache for the national party and its presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney.

Reason/Doherty:

It’s not “crashing,” New York Times. These conventions are open to Republicans of all sorts to follow the rules and vote as they wish. Winning elections on any level is not “crashing.” It’s succeeding at politics, which the Ron Paul people are proving unexpectedly good at. Ahem, OK, back to the Times‘s wisdom:

NYT:

And Paulite candidates for Congress are sprouting up from Florida to Virginia to Colorado, challenging sitting Republicans and preaching the gospel of radically smaller government, an end to the Federal Reserve, restraints on Bush-era antiterrorism laws and a pullback from foreign military adventures.

“I’d call it a strict constitutional approach,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and Ron Paul’s son. “And I think it’s spreading.”

Ron Paul finished a distant second in the Kentucky primary, despite his son being the state’s junior senator. But a Paul supporter — a backer of both Ron and Rand (who reciprocated) easily won the Republican nomination in the fourth congressional district.

Thomas Massie defeated his nearest opponent in a four-way race 44.8 percent to 28.6 percent. The district has been represented by a Republican for all but six years since 1967 — when quite conservative Democrat Ken Lucas held the seat — making Massie a heavy favorite to win the general election in November. Politico referred to it as “another Randslide.”

This is part of the movement-building I’ve been writing about for a while that will have impact beyond Tampa.

In spite of the success of Paul’s strategy in accumulating delegates, many pundits insist that Paul remains a non factor… they miss the truly “big story” of the 2012 election. That is, that Ron Paul, mobilizing both young and old with his message of liberty tempered by personal responsibility, and government power tempered by accountability, has already won far more than the election.  He has won the trust and the imagination of the people, Rocky Balboa-style.

Consider the issue of the Federal Reserve, where Dr. Paul has been an outspoken critic of the Fed’s policies for years. When Paul proposed a bill to audit the Federal Reserve in 1983, he had not a single Republican or Democrat who was willing to co-sponsor the measure. When he reintroduced it in 2011, every Republican and several Democrats in the House signed onto Paul’s bill.

Almost every Republican candidate vying for the nomination this year supported a full independent audit of the Federal Reserve, and many demanded that Chairman Bernanke be fired… Paul’s views on the Federal Reserve are no longer outside the mainstream. According to a survey published by Bloomberg in 2010, most Americans believe that the Fed should be severely reigned in or altogether abolished…

Some Republicans like Ron Paul’s ideas when it comes to issues that are economic, but most haven’t completely embraced his views on foreign policy. Despite GOP objections, most of the American people and American troops agree that it is time for the United States to stop policing the world and engaging in nation building missions. Several polls have shown that more than half of the American people agree that it is time for the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan… This probably explains why Paul receives more campaign contributions from members of our military than Obama or Romney. 

Republicans are beginning to slowly come around to Paul’s view of foreign policy. This was evident when many conservatives stood with the Congressman in opposing the Libyan conflict overseas. In a recent speech, Florida Senator Marco Rubio talked about the growing divide in the Republican Party between interventionists and non-interventionists. He went on to say: “Until very recently, the general perception was that American Conservatism believed in a robust and muscular foreign policy … But when I arrived in the Senate last year I found that some of the traditional sides in the foreign policy debate had shifted. On the one hand, I found liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans working together to advocate our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and staying out of Libya. On the other hand I found myself partnering with Democrats … on a more forceful foreign policy … I recently joked that today, in the US Senate, on foreign policy, if you go far enough to the right, you wind up on the left.”

Paul’s adherence to Austrian economics is also meeting with greater acceptance in mainstream America. This theory of economics, once unknown and obscure, is now beginning to receive interest and respect. In fact, Austrian economist F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” was recently on the bestsellers list…

Every day, more people are coming around to Ron Paul’s way of thinking. Paul’s message continues to attract and inspire many young people, challenging them to question their government and to change the status quo. These leaders of tomorrow will take the ideas that Paul espouses and inject them into their respective professions, be they academia, politics, business, law, health, or other. This timeline will ensure that Paul’s ideals will continue to enter into the mainstream long after Paul’s campaign for the presidency ends. Ron Paul may or may not win the Republican nomination, but he has won the battle of ideas. Many are moving in Paul’s direction, and that is a victory larger than winning the Republican nomination.

In other words, Massie is a true Ron Paul Republican in every possible sense. And he won. We all won.

A big score tonight for the rEVOLution.

LAKE JACKSON, Texas – 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul was endorsed today by the Hon. Jordan Mason, City Councilman, Ward 4 of Rapid City, South Dakota.

In making public his endorsement, Councilman Mason said he was doing so as a private citizen and not on behalf of any organization with which he is affiliated.

“I stand for strong fiscal policy.  I stand for solving our problems at home before we try to solve other countries’ problems abroad.  I stand for liberty and I stand for the American dream.  And so I stand behind Ron Paul,” said Councilman Mason.

Councilman Mason is the youngest member of the Rapid City Council, which does not hold partisan elections.

Prior to his service as a city council member, Mason served four years in the U.S. Navy as a CTT3 (Cryptological Technical Technician) in the Global War on Terrorism while on a SNMG-1 Tour in 2004-2005, and in the War on Drugs during 2006-2007.  During his service he received two Letters of Commendation, a Good Conduct Medal, a Defense Ribbon, and a Battle “E” Ribbon, to name only a few such honors.

Mason was honorably discharged from the Navy as a Petty Officer 3^rd Class and then pursued his college education from 2007-2011.  During that time, he ran for city council in 2010 against the sitting President of the Common Council and won on June 28, 2010.  Last year Mason graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.S. degree in Interdisciplinary Sciences (Pre-law).

1. Ron Paul wants to change the soul of the GOP

Paul’s most ambitious goal is to influence the Republican Party as a whole, making it more amenable to his libertarian principles…

“He’s gotten a lot of attention working through the two-party system and he’s gotten a lot of people involved,” said his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky, in a Fox News interview earlier this month. “I mean, the chairman of Iowa now was Ron Paul’s campaign chairman. The chairman of Nevada was a Ron Paul campaign person. We’ve won several states and are influencing the party and becoming the Republican Party.”

2. Paul wants an orderly show of force on the floor

Paul’s forces won’t be inconsiderable… Campaign strategist Jesse Benton estimates that the Texas libertarian will end up with “several hundred” delegates pledged to him, and several hundred more stealth supporters who are bound to vote for Mr. Romney or a withdrawn candidate on the first ballot… But Paul campaign officials insist they do not want to cause any kind of disturbance in Tampa. There’s no discussion of getting Paul supporters who are bound to vote for Romney to abstain from casting ballots in the first round, for instance.

“Decorum” will be the name of the game, Mr. Benton said in a recent conference call with supporters. That makes sense when considered in the context of the campaign’s long-term, makeover-of-the-party goal.

“We’re going to respectfully show that our supporters are here, and we’re the wave of the future,” said Benton.

3. Paul wants to irritate Ben Bernanke

The Federal Reserve has long been one of Paul’s favorite targets… Paul wants a platform plank on Fed transparency, according to his campaign. He has said that if elected president he would work for comprehensive audit legislation, so presumably that is what he’s talking about – a push to get the Fed to open up its books.

4. Paul wants to prohibit indefinite detention

In the wake of congressional passage of an authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda and its allies in 2001, the White House asserted that it had the authority to seize suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial. That position was codified into law with the passage of the Defense Authorization Act in 2011…

Paul has long wanted to chip away even more at indefinite detention, seeing it as an overreach of executive power that’s unconstitutional.

“If we don’t change this, believe me, this country is in serious trouble,” he said earlier this month at a press conference of lawmakers who are pushing to end indefinite detention authority.

Paul would like to the Republican Party platform to reflect this position. That’s what he said in May when he issued a statement that he would no longer campaign in states that had not yet held primary votes…

5. Paul wants the internet to remain wild and free

In keeping with his libertarian philosophy, Paul has long opposed any government regulation of the Internet, however well-intentioned…

“Internet freedom” is the third issue Paul’s supporters have said they’d like to see become a plank in the 2012 GOP platform…

CSM concludes:

Paul’s real endgame… is not platform planks, but gradually gaining control over as many party organizations as possible…

“The real goal was to seize control of party apparatuses in states that rely on caucuses. With that in hand, Paul’s organization can direct party funds and operations to recruit and support candidates that follow Paul’s platform, and in that way exert some influence on the national Republican Party as well, potentially for years to come”

This question is paramount if the Republican Party is to ever become the party of limited government.

A few days ago I came across a column I wrote for The American Conservativeat the beginning of this campaign. In fact, I wrote it before I even joined the campaign. Titled “Constant Conservative Ron Paul” I explained how to the degree that the Republican Party ever becomes genuinely conservative in a limited government sense, it will find itself in-line with the philosophy of Ron Paul.

With our multiple victories in various states over the last few weeks, including over the weekend, it might be worth reexamining what Ron Paul’s rEVOLution is really all about. From April 2011:

When Ron Paul ran for president in 2008, polls showed that Americans-at-large were worried about an increasingly bad economy, angry at Washington for bailing out Wall Street and weary of the Iraq War. GOP primary voters found themselves defending a Republican president who was on the unpopular side of all three issues, supporting a Republican nominee who agreed with him, and having to choose from a Republican field of candidates virtually indistinguishable from their president, their nominee and each other.

Except one.

With Ron Paul all but declaring his candidacy for president this week, polls show that Americans at large are most worried about a bad economy, Obama’s high negatives indicate a persistent distrust and disgust with Washington, and this president’s three Middle Eastern wars are arguably more unpopular than Iraq and Afghanistan were three years ago.

Yet, even though they will have adjusted their various positions accordingly, 2012 GOP primary voters will generally find a field of candidates willing to bash the White House for basically doing the same things these same candidates once defended a Republican president doing. In fact, most potential 2012 candidates will be as guilty of contributing to big government as the president they’ll criticize. Mitt Romney gave us the blueprint for government-run healthcare. Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich gave Republican support for cap and trade. Rick Santorum ran cover for Bush’s entire statist agenda by touting the president’s alleged social conservatism. Adding ideological insult to injury, most of these candidates still promote an astronomically expensive foreign policy while they simultaneously and contradictorily claim we must cut spending. By and large, these candidates are conservative in rhetoric only, not their records, as has been the case with most Republican presidential candidates for decades.

That is, again, except one.

During the periods when conservatives find themselves not defending big government Republicans and instead choose to stress the need for limited government and constitutional fidelity, they echo the sentiments of Ron Paul. The difference is Paul never changes his sentiment. When conservatives are not defending big government Republicans and instead choose to talk about the need to eliminate debt and deficits, they are repeating the philosophy of Ron Paul. The difference is Paul never changes his philosophy.

Paul’s conservative consistency remains true, even when—and perhaps especially when—his fellow conservatives disagree with him. When conservatives attack Paul for his non-interventionist foreign policy views, the Texas congressman is quick to remind them that it is mathematically impossible to reduce the debt or deficits without addressing Pentagon spending. Cutting NPR, Planned Parenthood and earmarks will do nothing to effectively reduce the debt, no matter how much each might excite conservatives emotionally. Likewise, ignoring the need for military spending cuts will continue to help sustain and grow the debt, no matter how emotionally attached some conservatives are in their support for maintaining the status quo.

Obsessing over Obama’s birth certificate might be fun for some conservatives—but it only distracts from the United States’ economy’s impending death certificate, says Paul. Excitement over a reality TV star with a bad comb-over may hold conservatives’ attention for the moment—another moment wasted, says Paul, by not addressing the stark reality that is our collapsing dollar and economy. Many conservatives draw a battle line between Republicans and Democrats. Paul draws his line between those who support limited government and those in both parties who consider it unlimited.

Indeed, Ron Paul is the conservative constant in US politics. To the extent that the American Right is consistently conservative, it is generally in line with Paul. To the extent that the American Right gets distracted from conservative principles—typically in the name of Republican partisanship or some emotional attachment to a particular aspect of statism conservatives generally like—it finds itself at war with Paul…

Ron Paul is the conservative constant in American politics. In 2012 and beyond, may there be more Americans willing to be as consistently conservative.

LAKE JACKSON, Texas – Supporters of 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul have propelled him to an historic win in Minnesota this weekend, with delegate gains having occurred in multiple other states as well.  The recent achievements affirm Paul’s delegate-attainment strategy, and support the notion that he and his platform will be featured prominently at the Republican National Convention in Tampa this August.

In Minnesota, Paul organizers won a decisive 12 of 13 delegates to the RNC at the Rivers Edge Convention Center in St. Cloud, wrapping up the North Star State’s two-tier nominating contest.  Earlier this spring, Paul supporters won 20 of 24 delegates at district conventions.  In all, the Paul camp has swept the state of Minnesota winning 32 of the state’s 40 national delegates.

In addition to Paul’s consequential victory in Minnesota, Paul organizers won delegates in Mitt Romney’s home state of Michigan.  There, Paul supporters estimate that they have won eight voting slots plus one non-voting delegate and 11 alternates.  Of the 14 Congressional District voting contests held this weekend, Paul organizers won RNC delegates in the 1^st, 2^nd, 4^th, 6^th, and 9^th Districts, denying Detroit-born Romney a clean sweep of his home state.  The Michigan victory occurred despite a heavy Romney campaign presence promoting a win for the establishment pick and presumptive nominee.

At the Vermont Republican State Convention this weekend, Ron Paul supporters won two of 14 national delegates, with two more considered potential allies, and they won 10 of 14 alternates.  In all, Vermont has 17 delegates including super delegates.

Finally in Virginia, 11 district conventions have been taking place in recent weeks and have ended this weekend.  In those contests Ron Paul supporters won 17 of 33 national delegates selected, with the remainder of the state’s 49 delegates including super delegates to be selected at the June 16^th state convention.  Also in Virginia, Paul supporters elected a Republican Congressional District Chair in the Third District, over a dozen liberty-oriented Republican State Central Committee Members five of whom are Ron Paul supporters, dozens of Republican county and city committee chairs, and hundreds of county and city committee members.

“Victories in Minnesota and other states demonstrate that Ron Paul supporters possess the adaptability, organizational muscle, and unmatched enthusiasm required to continue winning delegates in upcoming contests,” said Ron Paul 2012 National Campaign Manager John Tate.

“We’re also pleased to see Ron Paul supporters engaged in party-building to broaden the activist and voting base that will advance Republican majorities for many years to come,” added Mr. Tate.