Ron Paul confirmed to CNBC's "Sqwuak Box," a salon of economic critique, that he will not be exiting the race for the GOP nomination.
"The market tells us we're doing pretty well," Paul said, inaccurately. "The crowd gets bigger, the money keeps coming in, the enthusiasm grows. We can get up to 8,000 people on a college campus. Yesterday, in very, very bad weather in Philadelphia we had almost 4,500 people show up and stood out there in the rain for two, three hours."
This clip features the two common arguments circulating round ye olde Reddit.com/r/ronpaul: that the libertarianish candidate's big crowds are indicative of a groundswell—Paul has been attracting thousands at isolated events (though nowhere near the numbers Obama regularly drew in 2008)—and that he has more delegates than anybody realizes, as his supporters are trying to snatch up delegate positions to potentially wrest a few states at the GOP convention.
Alas, none of these things translate into anything close to a victory. Paul gets event attendees because his fans often cross the line into fanaticism, and are more likely to trek to a campaign event than are Romney's or Gingrich's supporters. But his movement is as sparse as it is intense; the impressive 8,000 in attendance are representative more of the ceiling of Paul's support than indicative of a larger movement, as seen by his anemic primary vote totals. Having 4,300 people stand in the rain for you doesn't do much good if they only garner you 4,300 votes.
Meanwhile, even best case unpledged-delegate scenarios put the candidate in the lower ranks of third place. Paul might swipe enough delegates to beat Newt Gingrich, but at this point Newt Gingrich is beating himself. What will 150 or 200 delegates earn Paul in Tampa?
But what's most striking about the delegate-snatching is how counter it runs to Paul's ostensibly democratic message. Paul won only 27% of the Minnesota caucus—actually a good showing for him—but now has 20 of the 24 of the delegates. Paul and his fervent supporters have been promulgating the theme that they are speaking for the masses, but swiping 60% of the vote that Paul didn't earn would disenfranchise millions of voters. The entire effort rests on the idea that Paul has a right to coopt the nomination process because people would vote for him if they really knew what was good for them, an ironic negation of the very impetus behind Paul's campaign.
It's one thing for Paul's internet army to shotgun these arguments, but another thing for the candidate himself to do so. His "maybe somebody might stumble" approach, if it is a cover for pranking the delegate process, is cynical in the extreme. It's also wasteful: Paul, the second-highest funded candidate in the GOP race, has easily run the least cost effective campaign of the cycle, paying almost $600,000 per delegate (by contrast, Romney has paid just north of $100,000 per delegate).
Paul's refusal to quit the race is at this point an act of petulance more than anything.
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