10/04/07 – Joe Dumas – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
I am your host, Scott Horton, and I read this great article the other day in The Chattanooga by Joe Dumas, Why the GOP Must Nominate Ron Paul.
Welcome to the show, Joe.
Hi, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today to share some of your insight.
Well, I'm happy to do that.
I know that you're interested in getting us out of this horrible quagmire we're in in the Middle East, and I think that Ron Paul is the man to do that.
Oh, boy, you couldn't have said that better, and I certainly couldn't have said it better.
There is no other presidential candidate of any stature.
I'm sorry, but I have to completely count out Kucinich and Gravel.
There is no other candidate who wants to end this war.
I'm sure you know that in the Democratic debate last week, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, the three Democratic frontrunners, refused, and we're talking about politicians who will lie about what time it is, refused to promise that American soldiers would be home from Iraq by the end of their first term in 2013.
Isn't that just amazing?
They got this big lift in the elections last year, the Democrats did, because people thought, well, if we elect Democrats, they'll get us out of the war.
And of course, the Democrats in Congress, never mind the presidential candidates, are not even slightly interested in standing up to the Bush administration and cutting funding or doing anything to get the troops home any sooner.
The Democrats have bailed on it in a big way, and of course, all the other Republicans or neocon interventionist foreign policy will not only keep us in Iraq, but they'll probably invade Iran also.
Yeah, the only one is Ron Paul.
And it's for this reason, primarily, you say in your article here at chattanooga.com, that's the reason why Ron Paul is the only Republican who could beat Hillary Clinton in the general election in November 2008.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, if you give people a choice between Democrat and Democrat-lite, they're going to choose the real Democrat, and specifically in this election, they're going to choose the person that they perceive is going to do the most to end the war and get us out of that part of the world, and as you correctly point out, Hillary won't really do that, but she will be able to sell herself as the anti-war candidate if she's running against any of Thompson or Giuliani or Romney or McCain, because they're clearly neocon pro-war candidates, and so by comparison, she'll look good to the anti-war people, even though she's not really anti-war.
The only Republican who can outflank her to the left, so to speak, on that issue is Ron Paul, because he's been against the war from the very beginning, and he's been consistent, and he's making that a big theme of his campaign, and I'm convinced because of his honesty that if he is elected, he will follow through on that and he will get us out.
Well, I have to tell you that I agree with your analysis 100%.
The polls show that the American people are sick and tired of this war, that they're begging for leadership to do something about it.
It's clear that the low poll ratings for the Congress are because of their unwillingness to stand up to Bush, not because they've done anything to stand up to him, and so I absolutely agree with you that if it's Hillary Clinton versus Giuliani, McCain, Romney, or Thompson, all of whom, as you say, avowed neoconservative adherence to the Trotskyite national security strategy of the United States, she'll beat them.
None of them can possibly stand up to her.
Only the anti-war Republican can, and that's Dr. Paul.
The question, Joe, is whether Republican primary voters are going to be able to consider this when they walk into the voting booth on primary day.
Don't primary voters just vote for the guy that they like the most rather than thinking ahead to who's going to be able to help keep Hillary Clinton out of the Oval Office?
Well, I mean, that's a good question, and it's part of the reason that Ron Paul has to get his message out, and the good news on that front is he did raise $5 million in the third quarter, which was up 114%, when most of the other candidates' fundraising was down since the second quarter, so he's going to be able to get his message out there, and he's got to get the primary voters to consider it, and that's part of the reason I wrote this article, is I'm trying to get the primary voters to think ahead as who can actually win against Hillary in the general election as opposed to who their favorite darling of the month is, and of course the media tend to focus on the other candidates rather than Ron Paul, because frankly, they don't want to hear his message either.
But I think it's important if you don't want President Hillary Clinton for the next eight years to figure out who can beat her, and I think Ron Paul is the man who can beat her.
I'm not worried about the general election, I'm worried about the primary.
The vote is being splintered so many different ways on the Republican side that it's no telling what's going to come out of that.
It's no telling who's going to win, and it's pretty obvious that Hillary's going to win on the Democrat side, but if they don't think ahead and if they nominate one of these lame candidates who can't get out there and turn out the vote, and you're probably, I'm guessing, not a Republican, but...
Well, I'm a Libertarian.
I was going to ask if you're a Republican.
I am a Libertarian myself.
I have supported the Libertarian Party.
Interestingly enough, the candidate who first got me to support the Libertarian Party was Ron Paul back in 1988, when he ran for President on the Libertarian ticket.
I am willing to work within the Republican Party if he is.
We've gotten shoehorned into this two-party system, and it's very hard to make a breakthrough if you're running as a third-party candidate, and I think Ron Paul found that out the hard way in 1988, so I understand why he's running as a Republican.
I support the person more so than the party, and I think Ron Paul is the right person to lead the country, and I would vote for him if he were running on the Martian Party ticket.
I don't really care.
As long as he's running and has a chance, I'll support him because I think he's the only one who's going to turn this country around and put it going back in the right direction.
Well, I really appreciate the point of this article, and I wish you the best of luck in beating this into people's heads, and I hope that you write things like this over and over again.
This is the point that I keep trying to make.
I know for a fact that Republican voters do not want Hillary Clinton to be the president of this country.
I also fear that the Newt Gingrichs of this world and the Republican National Committees of this world and the George Bushes of this world would be perfectly happy to see Hillary Clinton as President of the United States for eight years, because then they can point their finger at her like she's Osama bin Laden and try somehow to put their party back together again, and her policy will not differ in any large measure from theirs.
As was reported in the papers last week, George Bush is advising Hillary Clinton on her foreign policy right now.
Absolutely.
Well, there are close ties between the Clinton and Bush families, and there's not a dime worth of difference between them, really.
Bush's father and Bill Clinton are close friends.
You see them together all over the place.
I would have corrected you and said, well, Bill Clinton has killed far more Iraqis than George Bush, but now breaking news in the last couple of weeks out of Great Britain, Bush has now tied Bill Clinton for a number of dead Iraqis, so you're right, they are just the same.
Yeah, they're peas in a pod, and electing Hillary versus electing George W. Bush isn't going to change a thing.
You think she's going to magically give back all these powers that Bush has accumulated for the executive in the last several years?
You think she's going to do anything to get rid of the Patriot Act or domestic spying or close down Guantanamo or anything like that?
She's not going to change a thing.
When they asked her about torture, she said, it should not be policy.
It should not be the policy that we torture people, which was a pretty non-denial denial about whether she would torture people, if you ask me.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the question to follow up with that is, well, what makes you think she's going to suddenly start following policy?
She's going to do whatever she wants to do, just like Bush does.
And I'll tell you, the one who really scares me, and the only good thing that I can say about him is I don't think he has a chance to win against Hillary is Giuliani.
That guy is scary.
I mean, he's scarier to me than she is.
Yeah, I have to admit.
He's a fascist.
They're pretty neck and neck for how much fear they inspire in my heart.
I guess I would say that, yeah, you're right, that Giuliani, well, I don't know, see, Hillary may be able to get away with more.
I'm not sure.
I guess it also depends on who controls the Congress.
There's another thing to harp on here, is that you really, really don't want Hillary Clinton to be the president when the Democrats have a lock on both houses of Congress.
Exactly.
We've got to have divided government.
We've got to have a Republican.
And wouldn't it be nice to have one who is nothing at all like George W. Bush?
Right.
And the only one who's significantly different, and in a good way, is, of course, Ron Paul.
But yet, the one thing that sort of semi-saved us a little bit from really going into the tank during Bill Clinton's presidency was the fact that the Republicans, for most of that time, were in control of Congress.
And even though you and I know there's not a nickel's worth of difference between them, they think, or at least they have to act as though there are differences, and so they fight each other.
And it's always better to have the Congress fighting the executive than going along with everything that he or she wants to do.
Right.
Ambition must be made to check ambition.
And so if Hillary gets in there and manages to hang on to both houses of Congress, it's scary what could happen, because there won't be any check or balance on what she's doing.
And we will turn into a socialist country, even more so than we already have.
I think at this point, we can still turn it around if we can elect somebody like Ron Paul.
But if we have another eight years of the same leadership, and worse in some ways because of cooperative Congress, it may be too late to reclaim our country.
Joe DeMoss, you write in your article at chattanoogan.com that Hillary Clinton, you fear, will be worse than Bill Clinton.
And I thought you cited a pretty good reason why.
Bill, I'm convinced after watching him for all these years, he was just in it for the chicks.
I mean, to put it bluntly, I mean, of course, if you were married to Hillary, you might be in it for the chicks, too.
I don't know.
But I think all through his political career, even in Arkansas, it was clear that the popularity of being the big guy and the big politician apparently attracted a lot of wayward women his way.
And I think he was more into it for that reason than because he is the true believer in his causes.
I think politics for him was a popularity machine.
Yeah, I think Bill, he's a true believer in himself, but that's about it.
But she's a true believer in socialism, and if you get eight years of Hillary with the Democratic Congress, none of us will be able to own guns.
There'll be even further expansions to the welfare state in terms of health care, she'll probably try to introduce universal single-payer, what do you mean with single-payer, it's all of us, health care and all that, and it'll go through because the Congress will cooperate with her.
It's scary what's going to happen, but of course it's equally scary to me if you get somebody like a Thompson or Giuliani in there because they're not really any different from Hillary Clinton.
The only one that's different is Ron Paul, and the only one who will fix this country instead of making it worse is Ron Paul.
And the good thing is we've got a real chance now, he's got some momentum, he's got some money in the bank, he can make an impact, and I really think he's got a shot to win this.
When you talk about Hillary as a true believer, I saw her on TV, I turned around and made a bumper sticker out of it immediately when I saw her say this, she was I think at some Hollywood function, and she said to them, well, you know, look, we're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.
It was like she was palling around with her friends and she was basically cutting to the chase.
I think you're right, that really does represent the core of her belief system.
She really does think that she's smarter than everybody else, she can run the world better, and that if we'll just give her all of our money and all of our freedom and the whole nine yards, that she can fix the world and mold it in her socialistic image.
And yeah, I think she really wants to do that.
She wants to leave her imprint on the world through being president, and the imprint that she wants to leave is not one that I'm comfortable with.
Well, let's go through some reasons here why these other Republican front-runner types might not measure up.
Let's start with Rudy Giuliani, besides just being an avowed and blatant fascist, in his own words, defining freedom as obedience to him and so forth, what specific things about Rudy Giuliani do you think make him not a good candidate for the Republican nomination?
Well, I don't think he can turn out their conservative base.
Let's face it, the guy is a gun grabber, he's the mayor of New York City, and it's obvious that he'll ban guns just as fast as Hillary Clinton will, so he's a Yankee, which doesn't help him play in those southern and western red states.
They want somebody that they think they can identify with, and they can't identify with some New York City former mayor who has been shown on the internet dressed in drag and trades in a wife every chance he gets.
I mean, these are values voters from the South and the West, and they want someone who's conservative in their personal life.
I don't know, what, three or four wives now?
One of them was his cousin, and who knows?
They're just not going to turn out and support him.
They'll stay home or they'll vote for third party.
Yeah, the cousin was the one that he broke up with at the press conference with his mistress by his side.
Yeah, I mean, I just can't see the Republican conservative base turning out, and they don't have to necessarily vote for Hillary.
All they have to do is not show up, or show up and vote for the Libertarian candidate or the Constitution Party candidate.
If that happens, just the absence of those people turning out for him means that Hillary wins.
He won't even carry New York.
Right.
You know, ask Al Gore how likely you are to win the overall election if you don't carry your home state.
Yeah.
Everybody made the big deal about Gore not carrying Florida.
Well, if he carried Tennessee, it wouldn't have mattered.
And Romney is basically the same without the charisma and the cachet of being, you know, I was at the helm during 9-11.
I don't know why that's a good thing.
Basically, that means to me that you were in charge when the ship sank, but Romney doesn't even have that.
He's a northern, basically liberal, but he's from Massachusetts, one of the most heavily taxed states in the union, and he's not a solid conservative.
He tries to portray himself as such now, but he's flip-flopped back and forth on every conservative issue you can think of, and the mainstream Christians won't support him because he's a Mormon and they don't trust Mormons.
And you've got to have that to win as a Republican.
Do you know where Romney got his millions of dollars?
I'm not that familiar with his personal history, but I don't think he actually worked for them.
Yeah.
I'm trying to figure.
He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would ever work for a living.
I know his father was a prominent politician.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know that much about his personal history.
I don't think he married into it the way Kerry did, but I don't think he has any credibility as a conservative Republican.
He's trying to sell himself that way, but if people look at his record, if by some miracle he gets the nomination, which I don't think he can, I don't think he'll stand up to the conservative base in the general election, and again, they'll stay home, just as they'll do with Rudy, or they'll vote third party, and he, just from lack of solid support, will fall down short.
And now, he is the guy with the hair and teeth.
I mean, he's Mr. Television.
I think most people, including myself, know very little about the guy.
As you said, I know that he's a former governor of Massachusetts, which ought to automatically disqualify him for the Republican anything.
I know he's anti-gun.
I know he had his own Hillary healthcare program there in Massachusetts.
I know that southern conservative Christian types don't really like Mormons that much.
I don't really think I know anything else about him, other than I don't believe a word he says.
Everybody says he's a flip-flopper on every issue.
He is.
He's basically the Yankee version of Thompson.
They're both empty suits.
They both dress up and try to look presidential, and then they open their mouth and start contradicting themselves and flip-flopping, and you realize that their policy is, I want to get elected, and I'll say whatever it takes to get elected.
What about Thompson?
I mean, there's a guy who I guess media is saying that he's coming off pretty bad.
He stumbles worse than I do, and he tries to talk and doesn't really make much sense to anybody.
Just a couple days ago, he was quoted as saying that the Iraq war in 2003 was justified because everybody knows Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons back in the 1980s and these kinds of things.
But on the other hand, he was hilarious in Eddie Murphy's The Distinguished Gentleman and was a real tough guy in the hunt for Red October and locked up the bad guys on Law and Order.
It seems like he's pretty familiar with media presentation and talking into cameras and so forth.
In fact, they even say about him, he's so very Reagan-esque in his seriousness and his demeanor and his federalism and so forth.
Is it really a smart idea to write off Fred Thompson?
What do you think?
Well, I think the mainstream Republicans who are looking for a character they can sell are looking hard at Thompson, and they're switching their support to him.
He looks good in the short term right now because he just declared and people are all enthusiastic about him, but he has to put up or shut up, and I don't think he can.
The only thing he has in common with Reagan is that they're both actors.
In other words, they're both good at reading somebody else's words and sounding convincing.
He's not a bad actor.
He's not a great actor, but he's a reasonably good actor, and he can bring off a character pretty well, but that's when someone else is supplying the thoughts and the words.
Where he falls down is when he has to think on his feet and actually express himself in his own words, because he really doesn't have a whole lot on the ball in terms of his own actual intelligence and articulation of anything solid.
Like I said, he's an empty suit when he has to participate in, for example, a debate.
There's a reason he declared his candidacy so late, and it's not because he couldn't have declared earlier.
He was stuck in the debate.
They've had several debates on MSNBC and Fox and so forth, different locations around the country with the other candidates, including Ron Paul, and Thompson, I think, and people who are familiar with him personally think that he did that because he didn't want to have to face off against these other Republican candidates in a debate because he'd look bad.
He cannot express himself well in a forum like that, and so he just waited around until most of those were done with so he wouldn't have to participate.
Instead, he goes on Jay Leno, where he doesn't have to debate anybody, and he can interact with the host and joke around with him, but not have to say anything substantive.
But the problem is that may have worked for a while, but now he's in the race, and he has to start debating, and particularly if he somehow does win the nomination, and he's got a shot at that, but then he has to debate Hillary, and she'll kill him.
I can't stand Hillary, but she's not stupid, and she's not inarticulate.
She can present her case well, and to people that that appeals to, she can resonate and get them to support her.
She's a good retail politician.
She can sell her concepts to people who are swayable, and I don't think Thompson can do that.
I think if he gets in a debate with Hillary Clinton, she will just absolutely cut him up.
Did you see in the New York Times where they talked about Fred Thompson went to Iowa and spoke to an almost empty room, and then at the end he literally begged them to applaud for him?
Seriously.
Well, I mean, it was in the New York Times.
I don't know if Michael R. Gordon wrote it.
It may or may not be true, but it's pretty bad.
He's just, you know, he looks good on paper, he's got the actor factor, I mean, he's got that.
People are familiar with him because they've seen him on TV or in the movies, and the characters that he plays are what his supporters are hoping you'll confuse him for.
But those are just the characters that he plays.
I mean, if the guy that he plays on Law & Order were running, that guy would probably have a pretty good shot.
But that's not Fred Thompson.
That's just the guy who plays on TV.
The real Fred Thompson, you know, can't express himself that way.
He can't articulate those positions, and once he gets away from his writers and has to actually get out there on his own and defend his own ideas, such as they are, and I don't think he really has a lot of solid ideas, he's going to get carved up by somebody like Hillary that's an experienced debater and inexperienced at doing that sort of thing.
I think, really, by contrast, Ron Paul would hold up very well.
In fact, he's been baptized by fire because he's been in these debates with eight and ten other guys, and they've all gone after him.
Giuliani's gone after him.
He's being sharpened by having to debate the fellow Republicans, and he will be primed and ready.
Assuming he can get the nomination, he will go head-to-head and toe-to-toe with Hillary, and I think he will acquit himself very well.
But Thompson won't do that.
Thompson will fold up like a pimp as soon as Hillary starts beating on him.
I'm not a credible candidate, but I play one on TV.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
The thing about Thompson, too, is in the 1990s, he actually, I think, did the best job of all the different committee investigators in investigating the China Gate connection and how the Chinese government paid for Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996, until, of course, he capitulated after Trent Lott sold us out and made a deal with Tom Daschle that they would only impeach him for Monica Lewinsky and not for putting John Wong in the Commerce Department in charge of missile technology transfer licenses.
I actually had some grudging respect for Fred Thompson in the 1990s.
I'd watch him on C-SPAN and think, hey, somebody finally asked the question about John Wong instead of Johnny Chung.
Why does everybody want to talk about Johnny Chung all the time?
Ask about John Wong.
And Fred Thompson would actually do it there for a while before he and Trent Lott capitulated there.
I mean, I don't think of Fred Thompson so much as a bad person, or at least I didn't until he started parroting the Bush administration's rhetoric on the war, but I think he's a very bad candidate.
I don't think he's going to be able to inspire people.
I don't think he really has that fire in the belly like Hillary has.
I don't think he thinks of it as another acting job, I think.
He doesn't really have the desire, I think, to really step up to the plate and be like a Ron Paul that will really stand up for change and stand up for his ideas and really get out there and get people excited.
I think the only reason people are excited about Thompson now is because they perceive the alternative to be so dreary that by comparison to Romney and McCain and Giuliani, he looks pretty good if you discount Ron Paul.
But the thing that changes that dynamic now is you look at the third quarter fundraising trends and who went up and who went down, and McCain and Giuliani and Romney are not the ones that are going to be his competition.
Ron Paul is the one who's going to be his competition.
And who are you going to pick, the actor or the guy that's real?
I'm going with the guy that's real.
You know, Fred Thompson also is very close to the guys that the American Enterprise Institute was part of the Scooter Libby Defense Fund and has outright made common cause with the neo-cons on their foreign policy, not just with George Bush on the foreign policy, but with Pearl and Wolfowitz on their foreign policy.
And even was asked last week, they asked him, what would you do about Iraq?
He said, I would do what George Bush is doing.
Can you believe that?
Talk about he needs some new riders for his lines.
Linking yourself to Bush is not a good way to get elected, that's for sure.
This is McCain's thing too, McCain's thing is, I'm running as the Iraq war candidate.
How good is that going to play against Hillary Clinton in the fall?
Yeah, well, he's doing her job for her because her job is going to be to convince everyone if she's running against any of the other Republicans besides Ron Paul that she's the anti-war candidate.
And all he's doing is helping her, if he's basically saying she's the anti-war candidate because he's the pro-war candidate, so she gets that support by default.
Well, did you see the ABC News report last night where George Will said that Ron Paul is telling people not only is it okay to be anti-war and a conservative, but in fact that if you want to be a legitimate small government conservative, you have to be anti-war.
Did you see George Will say that?
I didn't see it live, but after the fact, of course, the wonderful thing about YouTube is you can always see stuff whether you see it live or not.
But yeah, I forget the original source of the quote, but the old saying, war is the health of the state.
Yeah, and Randolph Ford.
Yeah, endless war is how you maintain and enhance the big government that Ron Paul is so much against.
Yeah, the true conservative position goes all the way back to Washington, warning us about foreign entanglements.
You don't get involved with countries on the other side of the world because they will pull you into their wars, and there's nothing conservative about that.
That's a, quote, neo-conservative thing, but it's not the true conservative position.
The true conservative position is really essentially the libertarian position, which is not isolationism, but non-interventionism.
It kills me when people talk about Ron Paul, well, he's an isolationist.
You can't be isolated from the rest of the world.
And Ron correctly points out that it is, in fact, our aggressive foreign policy that does isolate us from the rest of the world.
No one likes this.
Hey, guess who understands this?
The military.
Ron Paul, two quarters in a row now, has raised more money than the rest of the Republicans.
And I don't know if this much is true now, but I know at the end of last quarter, he had raised more money than the rest of the Republicans combined from active duty military.
Absolutely.
I know.
They're the ones who are paying the price.
They're the ones who are over there getting shot at and blown up and their friends killed and suffering debilitating wounds, and they are the ones paying in their blood.
You know, we're all paying in treasure in terms of our money being siphoned away and our future and our children and grandchildren's future being mortgaged for trillions of dollars to financially support the war, but they're paying for it with their actual blood and their friends' blood.
We've seen people die, and they know what this war is costing us, and for the most part, I think they go over there because they feel it's their duty and they have to, but they don't want to be over there.
They know, and nowhere is that better evidenced by the fact that they're supporting Ron Paul financially.
And the military don't get paid a lot either, so for the fact of them contributing more dollars, there's probably, in numbers, there's probably even a greater disparity because these are not people who make a lot.
Right.
Yeah, lots and lots of small donations.
That is telling in itself there, of course.
And now, here's something else that you bring up in your article, and again, I'm talking with Joe Dumas from Chattanooga.com, and something else that you bring up here about Dr. Ron Paul is his character, and this is most telling in contrast to, dare I say, scum like Rudy Giuliani, but in his own right, even if the rest of the Republicans were a bunch of really great guys, your description of Ron Paul and his family life and so forth would lead one to believe that this guy really is, you know, straight out of Leave it to Beaver.
He is the American dream, self-made man, grew up on a farm, doctor, obstetrician, delivered 4,000 babies, married the same woman for 50 years.
Go ahead.
Well, yeah, I mean, if conservative voters are truly conservative, for those Republicans out there who are really conservative and not hypocrites, and they really are pro-family, they want to further family values, and of course, I'm not real keen on advancing family values through the power of government, but if you really want to support family values and you really want to vote for someone who exemplifies true family values, I mean, here's a man who's self-made, put himself through medical school, he served in the military during the Vietnam era, he got out, he got into private practice, he was the only obstetrician in the whole county where he lived and delivered all these babies, he has exemplified, he never took Medicare or Medicaid money from the government, he would just treat people for free rather than take the government handouts for medical programs, which of course were being phased in under Johnson and so forth back in the 60s, he wouldn't take any of that, he won't take the Congressional pension, like I say, he's been married to the same woman for 50 years, his children and grandchildren all love him and support him, as opposed to Giuliani, who can't even get his own kids to support him, because he's alienated them by, well, de-forcing their mother, and things like that.
This is the real deal, Ron Paul, there's nothing fake about him, there's nothing dishonest about him, he is what he is, he represents what he represents, he's not dishonest, he's not fake, he's a genuine article, he lives his family values and his fiscal conservative values.
When he says he's going to eliminate the IRS, I believe him, it's not just talk, he really wants to do that.
Yeah, and you know those two issues, the family values and the economics there, this is another thing that you bring up in your article on chattanooga.com, which, by the way, is called why the GOP must nominate Ron Paul in order to beat Hillary in November.
The Libertarian party and the Constitution party command marginal votes that sway elections on a regular basis.
Right, it's happened in many states, all over the country, I think it was in North Dakota a few years back, the Libertarian candidate swayed the election.
Obviously on the other side of the political spectrum, you saw Nader, back in 2000, who swayed enough votes to swing that election between Gore and Bush.
It's not that they're huge parties, I think last election, Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian, got about 400,000 votes, and Peruca, the Constitution party candidate, got about half that, I think, a couple hundred thousand votes.
In recent years, their numbers have trended down because of the closeness, which is a fallacy, but the wasted vote thing, you know, you're wasting your vote.
Going back to 1980, the Libertarian candidate was polling close to a million votes, and I think, certainly, if a neocon gets the Republican nomination this time, you'll see an upswing in a third party vote, but those votes are critical when you have a close election and a polarized election like we've had in the last several go-arounds.
And I think you're right, too, that if it is Giuliani or McCain or one of these guys, that the Constitution party and Libertarian parties will probably do better than they have in a long, long time, maybe better than ever, after eight years of Bush and Cheney.
They'll do well enough to deny those votes to the Republican candidate, and therefore Hillary wins.
They'll peel off and they'll support their own third party nominees, but conversely, if Ron Paul is able to get the nomination for the Republican party, either the Libertarians in the Constitution party won't run a candidate or they'll run a paper candidate.
They won't run anybody that will take a meaningful number of votes away from Ron Paul, and those votes will be enough, I think, in the swing states.
All you need to do is flip it from 51-49 to 49-51, you know, if you've got that one or two percent and it's a really close election, those votes that would otherwise go third party are what you need to win.
And Ron Paul can come in as well.
Do the math.
It's purely a matter of mathematics.
Hillary's going to take New York.
Hillary's going to probably take Florida.
You've got to get all the red states, and some of the blue ones too, probably, to beat this woman, and Ron Paul is the only one who is better than her on the war, and coincidentally or not, better than her on every other issue as well, and is the only one who can beat her.
That's mathematics.
Absolutely.
Yeah, well, that's the whole premise of my article.
Now, obviously, as you stated earlier, the party hierarchy, you know, the big muckety mucks that are actually pulling the strings behind the RNC and all that, they would be just as happy to see Hillary win.
Their dream matchup is Hillary versus Giuliani or Thompson, because then they keep control no matter what.
But if you're a real, quote, real Republican, if you actually are a conservative and you're horrified at the thought of Hillary Clinton being president, you have to support Ron Paul.
The good news is that the powers that be, the party hierarchy cannot choose the nominee all by themselves.
They still have to somehow get people to get out and vote for that, or either that or they have to engage in much more massive and obvious vote fraud than they have in the past.
You've got to allow for the fact that the common people are still going to get out and vote, and unless you're just going to blatantly and obviously steal the election, even more so than in the last couple of elections, you're going to have to manipulate those people into voting for the people that you want.
But they still have free will, they still have freedom of choice.
When I go into the voting booth, I'm going to cast my vote for Ron Paul, and if enough people do that, they can't ignore it.
It will have an effect, but he's got to get his message out there, he's got to get the rank-and-file conservative Republicans to notice him and accept his message and realize that he's the one who can beat Hillary.
The other thing that they're trying to do is move the primaries up so that he has less time to get his word out.
The other candidates have the built-in recognition, like Thompson for being an actor or Giuliani for being a mayor and so forth.
Ron Paul is having to build that name recognition, and he's starting to get there, but the question is, can he get there enough in time when you've got primaries moving all the way up to January and in some cases December?
I'd like to ask the Republicans out there, how hard is it to renounce the war?
So you were wrong.
Everybody else in the whole world says it was wrong.
Just go ahead and shrug and say, fine, you were an idiot for six years and you supported Bush-Cheney and now you're over it, and you're going to support the guy who agrees with you on every other thing but the war.
It's not like he's going to let Osama bin Laden run around the way George Bush and Dick Cheney has.
It's not like he's renounced all government violence forever.
It's just the general foreign policy he wants to get rid of.
What's so hard?
Come on, you can do it.
We won't even hold a grudge against you.
Go ahead and renounce the war and come on over.
Yeah, exactly.
I know it's hard to admit that you're wrong, or even if you don't have to admit that you're wrong, maybe you're still for this involvement, but you've got to realize that that's just one issue and it's an important issue to people like you and me, but whether there's a war going on or not, what are we going to do when our economy collapses because the Federal Reserve prints up more money?
What are we going to do when all these domestic policies come home to roost and we have to pay for Social Security in deficit for trillions of dollars and Medicare in deficit for trillions of dollars?
I mean, there's so many things domestically that have to be fixed for the country not to implode, regardless of war, that even if someone genuinely does believe that we should be over there, and I don't know how they still believe that, but there are people, 30 percent or so, I guess, who still believe that we have some purpose for being over there, but even so, even if they disagree on the war issue, good grief, I mean, none of the other candidates are going to change anything.
They're not going to reform federal spending.
They're not going to end the welfare state.
They're not going to stop taxing our income.
They're not going to stop printing more money and borrowing and spending our children and grandchildren into financial ruin.
I mean, the only one who's going to change any of those domestic policies is Ron Paul, and so you and I support him at least partially and maybe mainly because of his stance against the war, but there are so many other great reasons to support Ron Paul, and he's the only one who's going to fix domestic policy as well, and so even if they differ on that issue, I would hope that we can win these people over on the issues where they do agree.
I mean, why would you vote against somebody that you disagree with on one issue when there's a hundred other issues that you agree with, Iman?
Well, you would have to be a coward who thinks that there's a big boogeyman named Islamofascism that's going to take over the whole world if we don't stop him.
If you believe that nonsense, I can see how it would be pretty hard to vote for Dr. Paul, but other than that, assuming that we're talking about Republican voters out there being capable of reason and maybe even reading and stuff like that, then it could be done maybe?
Well, let's hope so.
I mean, the whole premise of this article is I'm trying to reach out, even though I'm more of the libertarian constitutionalist kind of person, but I'm trying to reach out to the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives and all those red state voters.
Ron Paul's going to get the libertarian vote, he's going to get the constitutionalist vote, but what he needs to win is the mainstream Republican conservative vote.
He's got to peel those people away who are currently supporting Romney or currently supporting Thompson or even people like Huckabee or Tancredo, and he's got to pull their people away and say, real conservatives, get behind me, because he can't win with just the libertarian vote.
He's got to have the mass of Republicans behind him to get the nomination.
Once he gets the nomination, they'll have to line up behind him because their alternative will be to vote for Hillary.
The real difficult part here is getting the nomination.
I am firmly convinced that if Ron Paul gets the nomination, he can win.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with your analysis, and I praise you for writing it in such a better manner than I could have possibly attempted to do.
The article is Why the GOP Must Nominate Ron Paul.
It's at chattanoogan.com, and the bottom line is this, only Ron Paul can keep Hillary Clinton out of the Oval Office, period.
If you just tuned in and you don't know why, then go to chattanoogan.com and read Joe Dumas, find out all about it, and then tell Republicans that you know and care about.
Thanks a lot for your time today, Joe.
Really appreciate it.
And thanks for having me on.