Dedicated Paul supporters are poised to take control of the movement he sparked. Paul backers continue revolution

Ron Paul started what his supporters call a revolution. Now, that revolution is threatening to march on without him.

Despite suspending active campaigning this week in upcoming primary states, Paul went to Minnesota on Friday night to deliver a speech before the state’s Republican convention as it chooses its delegates to the national one in Tampa this summer. The Minnesota meeting is just one in a string of state party conventions that have seen the Texas congressman’s backers infiltrate their top ranks and nab delegates.


In what amounts to public pleading with his passionate supporters, Paul’s campaign has made clear that he wants them to tamp down the rhetoric, and to be respectful of Mitt Romney at the national convention in August when Romney is crowned the GOP nominee. That isn’t sitting well with some Paulites, who have made their anger clear on message boards and in videos over the past week.

( PHOTOS: Ron Paul)

The question for Paul now is whether the movement he sparked will overtake him.

Since Paul effectively declared the end of his campaign, missives posted on the fan page DailyPaul.com have been brutal about Paul national campaign Chairman Jesse Benton, who declared, to some supporters’ disgust, that the retiring congressman simply can’t mathematically secure the GOP nomination. Benton has pleaded for “decorum” from Paul’s notoriously raucous backers, who drowned out Dick Cheney with boos at CPAC in 2010 and greeted Josh Romney with similar disdain at the Arizona convention last weekend.

“Jesse acknowledges we have stealth Ron Paul supporters among the Romney delegates,” wrote one supporter on the DailyPaul.com, whose cyber-handle is Bob-45. “He knows delegates can abstain or may even be unbound. This chops the legs off the Ron Paul campaign at a critical juncture. I no longer have any confidence in Jesse Benton; and, if Ron Paul keeps him after this, I will have lost a great deal of confidence in Ron Paul.”

Adam Kokesh, a radio host and head of Veterans for Ron Paul, went further in a web video this week, first reported by BuzzFeed, in which he said, “It’s been extremely disappointing to see that the official campaign — Jesse Benton, John Tate — have failed to contest this with the Republican Party. We didn’t come here to play nice.”

Kokesh, who the campaign was once close to but says it’s split from, urges Paulites to convince delegates to flip at the national convention.

But a more likely form of protest is likely to come from Paulites like Ashley Ryan, a Maine committee-woman elect who will be a national convention delegate. She says she believes that Paul can still win the GOP nomination.

“We’re all registered Republicans, we kind of just outmaneuvered them … we played their game and we played it better,” Ryan said. “Because we have been continuing to win the majority of delegates in a lot of states, I think there’s still a good chance that Dr. Paul will be the nominee. If he’s not, I would hope the Romney campaign would at least recognize that the Paul campaign does have a huge amount of support and [that] if the Romney campaign does want to continue governing … we do need to take a look at the platform.”

Ryan is referring to the fact that at the Paul’s campaign’s urging, Paulites have been attending state conventions and attempting to steal bound and unbound delegates from Romney, and other former GOP candidates, that will then go to the national convention in Tampa this summer. It’s a message Paul has been preaching since he started his presidential run and has not changed since the Texas congressman effectively dropped out of the race this week, saying he wouldn’t spend money in any states yet to hold their primaries.

But Paul and his senior staff made clear they don’t condone any violence or disruptions such as those that have taken place recently at places like the Nevada state GOP convention. There also has been a string of departures from the Iowa Republican Party because of an influx of Paul forces.

Al Gerhart, former state director for Paul in Oklahoma, said he witnessed open brawling at the melee-infused Oklahama state GOP convention last weekend. He says that Paul fans he knows would like nothing less than a “brokered convention” that would give them significant influence in a Romney administration.

“Maybe about five to six rows, 10 rows directly in front of me, an altercation occurred,” said Gerhart. “There were a couple of instances where people were dumping trash with food scraps on top of the Ron Paul supporters. It was ugly.”

But Paul supporters chafe at the idea that they are the instigators at conventions that are now getting national headlines for being unruly.

“[It] wasn’t necessarily on the Ron Paul side,” Gerhart said. “The Paul folks, they were passionate, certainly try to drag things out to get some points across, but just not the kind of people who would use violence. Most of them, when they see something like this they get uncomfortable. [The] whole convention was such a mess.”

Paul’s Arizona state director Shawn Dow was more blunt about the outcome in his state: “Team Romney that was at the convention on Saturday — they were just like little vicious pit bulls attacking at every opportunity they could.”

Benton, on a conference call with reporters earlier this week, made it clear what a careful line the campaign is walking right now between sympathy for Paul’s supporters, who are part of the only movement that materialized this cycle on the Republican side in the presidential race, and deference to Romney.

“What we learned this past weekend is that our supporters are going to get an excessive amount of blame for problems that arise in heated moments at conventions, and state conventions are in particular known for heated moments, and our supporters are going to get much more than they deserve when it comes to blame for any kind of [problems],” he said. “So, we’re going to emphasize that our people really need to emphasize respect and civility.”

Paul is not ending his campaign, but nor is he campaigning, a political netherworld that is tolerated because of the size of his support, and the GOP’s recognition that it needs all the grassroots help it can get.

There wouldn’t likely be an endorsement of Romney by the candidate, Benton said. But they’ve had “a very civil, professional, genteel relationship.”

The Paul supporters have a simple ask for the Tampa convention, Gerhart said: “A brokered convention. They want basically some say in how the Romney administration runs things, and that’s how it works. Following the process Ronald Reagan used …The GOP has got to make up their mind about whether they want to drive the Ron Paul people off, or they want to bring them in. They need to treat them with respect and that was not done on Saturday [in Oklahoma].”

All of this raises the question: How can Paul, whose interests are believed to lie not just with his small-government message but with his son Sen. Rand Paul’s national ambitions, keep his supporters engaged, without unleashing them on Romney?

“We have been trying to make clear to them and all Republican candidates,” said a Paul campaign source, that his main concern is how his rivals “approach a long-term effort to win the battles of ideas.”

That “battle of ideas” will play out at the convention, where a number of Paul-affiliated delegates are hoping to get on the platform committee.

And several state activists insist things are simply not that bad. They say that the delegates who will be headed to Tampa either are well-trained, or simply know better than to stir the pot in ways that would reflect poorly on everyone else.

“Our people are respectful, they are courteous they are level-headed,” said Dow. “The innuendos that Ron Paul people are rude and nasty, it’s just not true. That’s just the opponents trying to make their opponents look bad.”

Dow added, “Most of us that have been working so hard for Dr. Paul have been doing this since 2007 so we’re already in leadership positions — state committeemen, county chairmen. We’re already there — now it’s taking to the next step. If we can just get enough of our people to run for those offices, it’s pretty much — the GOP will go back to its roots. It will be a limited government party again. It will be the party of the individual liberty.”

Maine committeewoman Ryan said, she expected people would be calm when the time comes to go to Tampa.

“I know that the Ron Paul movement tends to have the appearance of the hippie libertarians, the tie-dye T-shirts instead of the red ties, but I think all of our delegates we elected, in Maine at least, we all conducted ourselves very professionally, were all very thoroughly vetted.”

She added: “We all prepared well for the Maine state convention and most of the Ron Paul delegates are dressed very well, most of us had suits and ties and button-down shirts. …We need to continue to grow the party and if we want to further the movement of liberty we need to conduct ourselves professionally.”