No Treason

I want to be upfront. I like Ron Paul. I like his approach, his character and his message. It’s not perfect, but it is active and it is encouraging people to discover Mises, Rothbard, Lysander Spooner amongst other libertarian heroes.

That said, his staff during the political campaign for President was not considered very good by the people following Ron Paul. There seemed to be a distinct lack of organization and expertise.

Now that Paul has wound down his political campaign, and has started the “Campaign for Liberty“, he’s held over some of his staff, and brought some so-called “grassroots leaders” on board as well. Unfortunately, thus far the results are similar to what happened with the Presidential Campaign.

For example, Jesse Benton, and the organizers of the Rally for the Republic, apparently are not aware that guest speaker and former Paul surrogate Barry Goldwater Jr. has sold out to support partisan politics and John McCain. Surely it will not do for a John McCain endorser to be a headliner at the shadow convention, and yet Benton on a recent satellite radio interview, was unaware that Goldwater had come out for McCain some time ago, stumbling to respond to the host.

Then take the recent Ticket Bomb, in which half of the tickets were sold for the shadow convention, to be held at the Target Center in Minnesota. This was typical campaign thinking, they would create, manage and discharge the bomb. The only use they had for supporters was to do some word of mouth promotion, possibly paste up a banner or three, and buy tickets.

Even with the legendary [sic] Trevor Lyman, who has now began spamming the email lists he accumulated through Ron Paul grassroots money bombs on behalf of Bob Barr (we can only assume in return for financial compensation) the lack of decent creatives and viral marketing has probably set the entire “bomb” concept back to 2004.

So the bomb was more of a flash. Half of the tickets are sold, and the weekend has been a dud. Apparently the TicketMaster fees (which the blog staff didn’t seem to know about) were a major turnoff. They could have asked Pearl Jam about that.

Like the now limping Campaign for Liberty signup counter, which I can’t see getting to 80,000, let alone 100,000 by the Rally for the Republic, I think the organizers need to seriously question if they will be able to sell out all 13,00 tickets.

Now, it’s easy for me to complain and point fingers. But I’ll try to offer something better in return for any C4Lers who have tolerated my abuse and made it to this point in the post;

1. More creatives. The C4L and Rally for the Republic need multiple banners in multiple formats in all common banner sizes. The C4L needs to generate BBCode for forum signatures, and Ron Paul/C4L Avatars. The current creatives are complicated, gaudy and in bizarre sizes that don’t fit into any sort of standard web or blog design.
2. Jonathan Bydlak had mastered the art of begging for help. It wouldn’t help to beg the grassroots to take over promotion of the membership counter and money bomb. They can’t possibly do any worse than the official C4L staff.
3. C4L needs to work closer with the Ron Paul Forums and Liberty oriented bloggers. That means outreach.
4. Stop setting numerical goals for bombs. You guys are overestimating what you are capable of. Which brings me to…
5. Spontaneous grassroots organization. The grassroots drives the bombs not you. Secrecy about the execution, details and timing only undermine any grassroots ownership and potential for success. You’ll all look a lot smarter, if you stopped trying to control everything and believe in what made the PCC a success. The supporters!
6. All of the C4L social networking sites are dead except Facebook. It’s embarrassing. Where is MeetUp? This ties into the issues with the creatives.

So there. Criticism with suggestions. Take it or leave it, but in my opinion, Dr. Paul deserves better. Y’all should grab your lunchpails, or find another campaign to fiddle with. This is too important, not just to Americans, but to everyone in the world who wants to be free and experience liberty.

PS, please handle the media in Minnesota better than the PCC treated the media at the Philly rally. With the exception of the beat blogger from (t)Reason, they should be treated like petit royalty.

PPS, someone needs to sort out the Barry Goldwater Jr. / John McCain monkey business pronto.