He did this in 2008, too – trying to hijack state conventions by getting his people nominated as delegaates for other candidates (betting that supporters of other candidates would not be as motivated to seek convention delegate positions, and thus he would be able to hijack the process).

Fortunately, he failed then.

And he will fail again.

The party convention process is still controlled by the party, it is not a legal proceeding. State parties in ‘non-binding primary/caucus’ states can still say ‘No, we will NOT nominate Ron Paul, no matter how many people he snuck in the door’…

If they have to, they will.

Same goes for the Buchananites & other fringe groups…

With the exception of isolationisim before WWII, it’s hard to find Ron’s views in the Republican party platform any time in recent history.

Republicans were the ones who CREATED the Federal Reserve, for example…

A Republican /(Nixon) finally ran a stake through the (extremely anti-capitalist) gold-peg in 1972.

Reagan was the consumate interventionist, opposing the ‘live and let live’ policy of detente, and sending US troops to Grenada, bombing Lybia, and using the CIA (which Ron would ‘take out’) to fight proxy wars world-wide….

Ron is a Democrat on every position except government spending…

The committed ‘Freedom Movement’ types are unsalvagable – they won’t be happy until the Constitution is gone & the US is either broken up into individual states or turned back into a 1777-style confederacy.

And the issues in question will cost us more in ‘core base’ support than they will ‘pick up’ in Paul voters (youth, wishy-washy democrats, and so on) who actually show to the polls.

For example, if you compromise on drugs & social issues, you may gain some of the ‘Potheads for Paul’ or ‘War on drugs = police state’ types… But you will LOSE a huge chunk of the social conservative/religeous-right vote (currently split in the polls between Bachmann, Santorum, Perry and (curiously) Gingrich)…. This is critical not only because these voters are a large part of the base, but also because they tend to be *OUR* fanatical volunteers – the only group with ‘energy’ similar to Paul’s fanatics….

If you compromise on the Federal Reserve, you quite simply are willing to toy with the economic ruin of the common citizen to appease a fanatical faction. ‘Hard money’, let alone a gold standard, is a death sentance for the average American, who has no savings, huge personal debt, & stores all their wealth in possessions instead of money. And the idea of Congress – authors of the 2008 meltdown – having direct control of the money supply? It’s like giving an angry 3yo a hair-trigger Glock (only safety is on the trigger, ya know) with a full magazine…

Foreign policy? There’s already a party-of-surrender, the Democrats… And very few people are liberal on this issue but conservative on the others. Most are just plain liberal. at best, or at worst are liberal racists who mistake the GOP’s opposition to welfare as a racial thing rather than a principles-thing (and don’t realize that most welfare recipients are white)….

However, Ron has another type of supporter – the type who thinks what he says sounds good because said supporter doesn’t know enough about history, foreign policy, and economics to know better.

Rather than bowing to the fringe & altering our positions, we need to find a way to reach these people & explain to them why Ron is WRONG.

On monetary policy, most of these people DO NOT UNDERSTAND the damage that Ron’s deflationary policy would do to their personal finances and that of their employers… They seem to think that shrinking the monetary ‘pie’ can choke off government spending without strangling them first – which is wrong (government would be the last to be impacted). They also buy Paul’s Wilson-bashing, ignorant to the historical fact that Wilson (in true Jacksonian form) generally opposed the Fed, whereas the Republican Party created it…. The GOP needs to DEFEND the FED as an institution, especially emphasizing that Congress can not be trusted with our money.

On drugs, we need to point out that legalizing drugs will no more eliminate gang crime than ending prohibition eliminated the Mafia. Point out that right now most drug crime is criminal-on-criminal, but in an ‘Amsterdam’ world those who made their living in the illegal drug trade would now make it in bank robbery, car theft, and human trafficking – the crime would be the same, but the victims would be more likely to be honest citizens instead of other criminals.

On foreign policy, remind them that isolationism KILLS both civilian & soldier in much higher numbers than intervention. Point out that if Hitler had been stopped at the Rhineland & Tojo stopped in China, 500,000 American troops would not have been killed fighting them when their armies were actually ready to contest the issue. And the financial cost of keeping a prepared & ready US military would have been far less than the ‘Pull an Army out our butt’ emergency mobilization we undertook after the 7th of December. Also point out that a properly sized, equipped & forward deployed military, serving as a deterrent, is far less expensive than the cost of turning a stateside garrison force (or worse, a force of border guards with guns) into a proper fighting force & then finding a way to push it forward under combat conditions…

The solution is to confront Paul, not accommodate him.

Woodrow Wilson ran on a platform of opposing the ‘Money Trust’ and the creation of a central bank. He later caved & gave the GOP Congress what they wanted, in return for concessions on the governance of the new bank – specifically having Presidential appointees share the job with private bankers (the original GOP plan, was for the FED to be 100% private, just like the 1st and 2nd Bank of the United States).

The ‘Communist Plank’ argument is quite spurious, but common among the right-wing fringe… The flaw in the argument, is the contention that just because the Communists saw certain institutions or actions as useful to their cause, does not make these institutions ‘bad’ IF we can insure they are NOT controlled by Communists.

It’s especially spurious when referring to a debate that has existed in US politics back when the Democratic Party was brand-new (but still radical and populist in nature), and the ‘Conservative’ party was the Federalist Party, and later the Whig Party. Marx hadn’t even put pen-to-paper at the time, so to characterize the Central Bank debate as a communist-vs-free-world one is disingenuous at best.

As for currency-systems, YES, a gold-standard IS anti-capitalist, in that it involves government fixing the money-price of gold in law (for example, under our old gold-standard, 1oz of gold was ‘declared’ to be worth $25 (and later $35, IIRC) by law). There is nothing more anti-capitalist than legislative price-floors & ceilings, and that’s exactly what a gold-peg is. To contrast, so-called ‘fiat’ money is valued on the open-market, based on what currency traders believe it is worth. All that policy-makers can do, is increase or decrease the base-level supply of money & hope that the market follows suit, but in the end the market is the final authority (Witness the current situation, where the monetary base has expanded tremendously, but the money-supply & velocity-of-money have flatlined. The market is saying ‘NO’ to a larger money-supply (And thus also ‘NO’ to growth, as they go hand-in-hand), and there’s not a damn bit the government can do about it).

Austrian Economics is as much a ‘road to serfdom’ (excuse me Mr Hayek) as Keynesian – all it does is change who the ‘lords’ and ‘serfs’ are. By essentially shuttering credit markets & forcing people to live off ‘savings’, all hope of financial mobility & business innovation is dashed – no one can afford it until they’re too old to do anything about it. It’s great if you want an old-Europe (or antebellum Old-South) style rigid class system… Not so great if you want to be a world-leading innovative economy.

As for isolationisim, one must distinguish between a party policy, and the happenstance position of being ‘the Loyal Opposition’ during major conflicts. Of all the conflicts you listed, US involvement was a necessity of the geopolitical situation – or in the case of WWI & WWII a direct result of per-involvement isolationism.

The alternatives are unthinkable: Letting our shipping be molested (WWI & WWII), letting Japan get away with bombing Pearl or letting Germany’s declaration of war (remember: The Nazis declared war on US, not vice-versa) go unanswered (WWII)…. Letting Communist aggression go unanswered in Korea and Vietnam…

Beyond that, one will note that the GOP did not put up any serious opposition to the Democrats involvement overseas during the major wars (Anyone note any serious challenge to FDR for terms 3 & 4?) – something an ‘antiwar’ party WOULD do… And the GOP did not call for unilateral withdrawal from Korea or Vietnam, but rather for peace through military victory – which was achieved on a lasting basis in Korea & a temporary basis (due to our failure to live up to our treaty obligations, thanks to the Dems & Nixon’s corruption) in Vietnam. Hardly a pacifist stance.

The fact is, there is no place in the GOP for ‘liberals who don’t like welfare’ – which is what most of Paul’s supporters are. Similarly, there is no place for the ‘We want the Confederacy Back’ crowd, or for Pat ‘Closet-Nazi’ Buchanan & Co….