Thanks to three days of campaigning in NH, some good publicity was generated. For a summary of Dr Paul's trip, check out dailypaul. There was a couple of good articles in the Nashua telegraph (here and here). Foster's had a decent article that pointed out that "Texas Congressman Ron Paul received the loudest ovation." You may want to write some LTE's to your local papers giving your reaction to the weekend's events. Finally, our good friends at Video Tours of New Hampshire made the following video:
1 - Dr. Paul will be at the UNH debate on September 5th. 2 - Tickets are now available.
Click here to purchase tickets (at $50 a pop) for both the debate and the pre-debate reception. That's right: no lottery, no nonsense. If you want to go in and cheer (politely, of course) for Dr. Paul, you can definitely do so.
This report is from Dave Mincin, the Strafford County Co-chair for Ron Paul:
What a fantastic day for Ron Paul supporters! We had a steady stream of folks stopping by the table to chat, pick up literature, signs, t-shirts, buttons, whatever. One couple drove up from Long Island, the Mrs went to high school with the Paul's back in Dormont, PA, and even attended their wedding.
We distributed over 100 signs, sold in excess 60 t-shirts, and what buttons we had went too. Late in the day we had to tell folks wanting signs to take one off the road on your way out. As I left I didn't see a Ron Paul sign standing.
I had a chance to talk to Phyllis Woods, the Strafford County Chair. She was elated that we all came out to support their event, and our candidate. Sam Cataldo, organizer of the picnic, and a well known and respected Strafford County Republican said, "We invited all the presidential candidates, and their supporters." Later Sam said, "Thank you for helping make our Picnic a success."
My thinking is that thank you should go to all you folks who helped with the booth, and even more so you folks who came out to support Dr Paul.
Foster's had a decent article on the event, although it seems they must have left before the results of the straw vote came out.
Just a quick note because a quick check of the news doesn't turn up this little tidbit: Ron Paul won the Strafford County GOP Straw Poll yesterday with 73% of the vote. You can see the vote tally announcement, with Romney coming in a close second at 9%, here.
For a little background... The Strafford County GOP is, to my knowledge, pretty much the most active and supported Republican county committee in New Hampshire; the picnic yesterday drew not just Ron Paul himself, but Tom Tancredo, Mike Huckabee, and a few stand-ins for those candidates who've decided that they're above Granite State face-to-face campaigning. I'm sure some folks around the state are grousing this morning that those damned Paul people went and packed the poll again—that we must have trucked people in, bought their tickets, and offered them untold riches and glory in exchange for their support. But aside from being untrue, that really misses the point.
Which is? That an arm of the battered, bruised, and crouching NH Republican Party got a boost yesterday from people who support Ron Paul and his platform. Multiply Dr. Paul's vote tally by the price of a ticket, and you see that we raised over $4,000 yesterday for the Strafford GOP—a lovely group of people, by the way, who are working hard to pull this state back from the brink of big government. The head of the state party, Fergus Cullen, was there watching, and I hope what he saw in the sea of Paul shirts and signs was opportunity. We're not invaders; we're standard-bearers, carrying the flag that used to keep this state red.
Ron Paul continued his strong performance in votes requiring active participation and informed voters, racking up wins this week in straw polls in New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Alabama, and placing third in Illinois.
Today's Alabama straw poll win was the most impressive, an incredible 81% showing in a poll of 266 Republicans who paid $35 each to participate, and was billed as Alabama's only Republican straw poll. Dr. Paul followed that up with a 73% showing in the Strafford County Republican Party straw poll in New Hampshire, after putting in a personal appearance this afternoon. (Huckabee and Tancredo also attended.) He placed third in the largest of the four straw polls, earning 19% of 922 votes cast at the Illinois State Fair.
West Alabama Republican Assembly, August 18th (266 voters) 81% -- Ron Paul 5% -- Mitt Romney 4% -- Duncan Hunter 3% -- Fred Thompson 3% -- Rudy Giuliani 2% -- Mike Huckabee 1% -- John McCain 1% -- Sam Brownback 0% -- Tom Tancredo
Strafford County (NH) Republican Party, August 18th (288 voters) 73% -- Ron Paul 9% -- Mitt Romney 7% -- Mike Huckabee 3% -- Tom Tancredo 2% -- John McCain 2% -- John Cox 2% -- Duncan Hunter 2% -- Fred Thompson 1% -- Rudy Giuliani 0% -- Sam Brownback
Illinois Republican Party, August 16th (922 voters) 40% -- Mitt Romney 20% -- Fred Thompson 19% -- Ron Paul 12% -- Rudy Giuliani 4% -- John McCain 3% -- Mike Huckabee 1% -- Sam Brownback 1% -- Duncan Hunter 0% -- Tom Tancredo
Gaston County (NC) Republican Party, August 14th (41 voters) 37% -- Ron Paul 32% -- Fred Thompson 10% -- Mike Huckabee 7% -- Newt Gingrich 7% -- Mitt Romney 5% -- Rudy Giuliani 2% -- John McCain
The next big test is the Texas Straw Poll on September 1st. In an apparent move to prevent Ron Paul's enthusiastic supporters from dominating the results, the Republican Party of Texas has limited participation to delegates to past state or national conventions. Ron Paul has not been deterred by the tactics, and will be treating the delegates to a pre-vote Texas Pride party at the Worthington Hotel in Fort Worth the night before, featuring Texas blues legend Jimmie Vaughan.
The kind folks at Video Tours of New England made a great video of Kelly's walk from Dover to Concord. I won't say more, because the video says it better than I ever could.
It's good to get out from behind the desk here in L.A. and find some perspective. I just spent a long weekend in southeast Texas, home of 100+ degree temperatures, finger-licking-good BBQ and...... Ron Paul. In the tiny town of Driftwood (population: a few hunnerd) there were a host of signs along the main drag touting the maverick Republican -- dozens of them, in numerous front yards, all hand-painted. One said: "Ron Paul will end the war." Throughout the Hill Country, there were tons of Paul bumper stickers on the backs of trucks. Nary a sign of support for Giuliani nor Romney. None of that surprised me too much though. After all, Paul is a Texas boy with a libertarian streak and it makes sense that the pickup-and-gun-rack crowd would rally behind him.
But I was really shocked during the time we spent in Austin -- an oasis of blue in one big red state. Yeah, there were a few Obama '08 t-shirts, some Hillary stickers. But not a lot. Then my friends started pointing out the Paul bumper stickers alongside the Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age decals on the backs of beaters, presumably the cars of UT students. The owner of one old pickup truck had painted "What do you think of Ron Paul?" on the sides of his vehicle, along with Paul's web site address.
In a bar I spotted a dude -- tattoos, rocker haircut -- in a Ron Paul shirt with the sleeves ripped off. We chatted briefly and he told me he's never voted Republican in his life but is pulling for Paul because of his stated intention to yank U.S. troops from Iraq immediately. Wow.
Obviously all this is anecdotal and the random counting of bumper stickers is hardly scientific polling. But if Ron Paul is a fringe candidate, as he loves to say he is, he's got to be awfully pleased with his support on the fringes. Down there in Texas, the grassroots appear to be growing strong.
Health care is shaping up as one of the top issues in the 2008 US presidential election. The Democratic contenders are falling all over themselves to offer federal health care plans, with the latest idea, from Bill Richardson, proposing to increase Medicare to cover people as young as 55. The Republican candidates are joining in the act, with Mitt Romney touting his Massachusetts mandated-coverage plan, and Tommy Thompson and Sam Brownback going so far as to promise cures for cancer.
Only one candidate, Dr. Ron Paul, is asking the right questions to discover the right diagnosis for our health care ills: Why is our health care system in such bad shape? Could previous government interventions in the health care market be part of the problem? Is more government intervention a step in the wrong direction? Would increased freedom and a return to market forces benefit health care consumers more? Only with the right diagnosis can the proper course of treatment be determined.
Dr. Paul combines his own medical experience with his free market philosophy to answer those questions. He has been around long enough to remember past government interventions, such as the 1973 HMO Act and the 1974 ERISA Act, and what the health care industry was like before them.
For decades, the U.S. health care system was the envy of the entire world. Not coincidentally, there was far less government involvement in medicine during this time. America had the finest doctors and hospitals, patients enjoyed high quality, affordable medical care, and thousands of private charities provided health services for the poor.
Doctors focused on treating patients, without the red tape and threat of lawsuits that plague the profession today. Most Americans paid cash for basic services, and had insurance only for major illnesses and accidents. This meant both doctors and patients had an incentive to keep costs down, as the patient was directly responsible for payment, rather than an HMO or government program.
The move to the current system of corporate managed care pleased the big health care companies, drug companies, and insurance companies, but took away much of the market discipline of individuals controlling their own health care dollars. Ron Paul would restore that ideal with tax-free individual medical savings accounts, without the "use it or lose it" provision that turns existing plans into little more than prepaid medical services accounts favored by industry lobbyists. Ron Paul has consistently sided with individual consumers in the health care market, rather than the big insurance and pharmaceutical companies, which support candidates like Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
Many liberals want to see the United States adopt a national health care plan similar to those in Canada or the United Kingdom, seeing more government involvement as the only way to improve the problems with our existing system. But government-run systems have their own set of problems. By separating the costs of health care from the benefits, such systems create increased demand, leading to rationing and discrimination in treatment.
This inevitable shortage is normally dealt with through increased waiting times, extending into multiple months or even longer. Reports of a six-month delay in treatment for a suicidal patient, or an eighteen-month delay for a hearing aid for a 108-year-old woman are only a couple of the more egregious examples in the British system, where over fifty percent of hospital patients wait more than four months for treatment.
The British system has taken an even more ominous approach to rationing care, withholding it from those who fail to conform to public policy health goals -- denying or delaying treatment to the obese, to drinkers, and to smokers. Denying care to the latter group is particularly unfair, since tobacco taxes are a key source of revenue for the system. Turning health care over to a government bureaucracy risks taking life-and-death-affecting decisions and politicizing them, something that proponents of universal health care should stop and consider.
What about extending coverage to more Americans, the admirable goal of the various proposals for increased government involvement in health care? Dr. Paul points out that the free market is the only proven system for delivering the maximum level of service to the maximum number of individuals, and that central economic planning invariably fails. His quote from a recent interview with the Kaiser Family Foundation states the case for freedom:
...all services and goods are best delivered in the marketplace under a free system. If you want cell phones, you don't ask FEMA to set up a bureaucracy and say, we want to deliver cell phones at the maximum effort, you know, to give them to the most people possible at the cheapest rate. The market did that, prices keep going down, whether it's computers or televisions or cell phones, those prices go down in spite of inflation.
Some skeptics of Ron Paul's plans to cut taxes and government spending have wondered what his policies would do for those who are currently dependent on Medicare or Medicaid, but he has proposed a gradual approach, not abandoning those who have become dependent on the existing system.
Well, there's not a shortage of money. There's a shortage of wisdom on what the priority should be.... I can't bring up medicine without talking about the amount of money we spend overseas because we are spending - our foreign policy involves up to nearly a trillion dollars a year, and I think it gets us into trouble. I can cut three or four or five hundred billion dollars from that, still have a strong national defense and have funds available to tide people over. People who have become dependent, whether it's medical dependency or Social Security, there's no reason why we should put them out in the street...
An often-overlooked aspect of increasing government control of health care is the loss of individual choice and the availability of alternative approaches. Ron Paul has made "Health Freedom" one of the main planks of his campaign platform, and has introduced the Health Freedom Protection Act in Congress.
I have been the national leader in preserving Health Freedom. I have introduced the Health Freedom Protection Act, HR 2117, to ensure Americans can receive truthful health information about supplements and natural remedies. I support the Access to Medical Treatment Act, H.R. 746, which expands the ability of Americans to use alternative medicine and new treatments.
As someone who has worked in both the health care industry and the federal government for several decades, Ron Paul has a unique perspective on America's health care problems. Since many of the existing problems have been created or worsened by government involvement, Dr. Paul prescribes moving in the opposite direction, toward a freer and more efficient health care economy, driven not by insurance companies and government bureaucrats, but by doctors and patients.
Here is Ron Paul's spotlight video on health care, from YouTube's You Choose '08:
Hard as it is to believe, even though Ron Paul is on the road it would appear that an ounce of common sense managed to sneak across the Capitol Beltway this week, creeping past the welfare state watchtowers and vaulting over the homeland barbed wire fence to safety. This just in from the Aug. 14 edition of the Financial Times.
The US government is on a "burning platform" of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country's top government inspector has warned...
The fiscal imbalance [U.S. Comptroller General David Walker warned] meant the US was "on a path toward an explosion of debt".
This fellow's job, as I understand it, is to audit the federal government with an eye to Congress's constitutional responsibilities and accountability to the American people. For the longest time now, the American public has pretty much ignored the position, but Mr. Walker here seems intent on screaming "Iceburg!" from the crowsnest of the Titanic. If we can help the American people listen, their choice in both the primary and the general should be painfully clear.
Carol Paul, wife of Congressman and presidential hopeful Ron Paul, was hospitalized today in Iowa, where the couple was awaiting results of a statewide straw poll on the GOP presidential contenders.
Carol Paul, 71, was taken to a local hospital after suffering shortness of breath and low blood pressure, said Kent Snyder, a spokesman for Ron Paul's presidential campaign.
A presidential campaign is a serious grind on all concerned and the fact that it is now starting two-years out doesn't help. The candidates spouses are there for nearly every event and have to glad-hand and smile the entire time, a process that has got to be tedious at best. The fact that she is 71, where most of the other candidates wives are younger is something to be taken into account as the travails of the stump must be trying for someone twenty years younger.
I hope that Carol Paul takes a break from the rigors of campaigning and gets some rest as there are more important things than campaigning for primaries that are 4-5 months out.
