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By now, the Ron Paul campaign's plan to storm the delegate selection process of smaller states is well-known. Paul's camp first took the majority of delegates in Minnesota, and has since pulled off similar feats in Nevada, Louisiana and Maine—despite the fact that Paul didn't win any of these caucuses*—with more states on the way. If Paul's people gather enough delegate positions, and Mitt Romney doesn't get the necessary number of delegates in the first round of voting at the Republican National Convention in August, these delegates could cause serious trouble for Romney.
Why? Doug Mataconis goes through all the various theories at Outside the Beltway—including getting Paul's name on the nomination ballot, swaying the running mate selection process, or securing his son TSA McGalt a speaking position or similar exposure at the convention—and concludes they all have the same endgame: chaos.
This exposes a serious challenge for the Paul movement. The Ron Paul Revolution (ugh) has been remarkably successful at building its brand, though the vote tallies of the GOP primary suggest that it has hit its ceiling, hard, in terms of actual human support. Paul's ideas have been successful, though, at infiltrating the mainstream of the GOP, priming the party for future Paul-inspired candidates, including Paul's first born. But the power that Paul's followers have built by stacking the delegate selection process doesn't lead to any of this—it leads to an ugly floor fight that will embarrass the Republican Party, potentially cost them the election and ostracize future Paul-ites, just as the movement is gaining a modicum of mainstream respectability.
Paul fans on reddit.com/r/ronpaul and comments sections worldwide delight in the idea of sticking it to a complacent and ossified Republican old guard, and there's something mildly exciting about the extent to which they really invest the "revolution" part of their movement with some of the mischief implied by the word.
But if Paul's movement wants to outlast its charismatic authority, who is retiring from Congress this year, it has to do more than just prank the establishment. Its best hope for doing that is Rand Paul, who has been better than his father at working with the GOP mainstream while staying true to his (wildly inconsistent) ideological views. If he has a future, it's within this negotiation between his lineal libertarianism and the Republican establishment, the exact pas de deux threatened by the more anarchic plans of Paul supporters.
For his part, Paul has said he doesn't want a floor fight. For all that the eccentric Texas congressman has marched to the beat of his own tiny drummer, he understands politics at least so far as to know which battles to fight. The question now is whether his supporters are still listening to him. Paul supporters, as anybody who has ever spoken to them knows very well, aren't the listening type, and they may have taken this unrelenting commitment to their internally-regenerating reality so far that they're no longer listening to their leader. In which case, Ron Paul will have made a monster, a motley crew of followers who believe fervently in his ideas even as they become the biggest implement impediment to their promulgation.
* With the possible exception of Maine, which featured some shady vote counting.
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Related: Ron Paul Campaign Plots To Steal Nevada Delegates Despite RNC Warning
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