Message From Dr. Paul: Onward to the Convention, and Beyond!

Let me tell you my thoughts. With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties — just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.

I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.

(via Wonkette)

OK, he actually is NOT officially ending the campaign. But he is scaling it way back and moving on to concentrate on his congressional race. But essentially this is a dropping out. The remaining “Paultards” as Wonkette so endearingly called them will slowly start to drift away except for some of the hardest true believers.

I’d say more than 50% of the people who were excited by him months ago had already drifted away. The way he reacted to the newsletter scandal just killed him for a lot of people, including me. Regardless of how many issues I may agree with him on when I just look at policy and issues, that scandal showed that his judgment was fundamentally flawed, that his integrity was questionable, and that his ability to handle a crisis effectively was essentially zero. These are all critical qualities in a president. So even though on an issue by issue basis, I “match” views with Paul at a greater percentage than any other candidate running, I would no longer feel comfortable giving him a vote in a caucus. Or the general election. And he knows he was harmed that way, so although he has been consistent on this all along, he is not wavering at all about his no 3rd party decision. If he was losing in the Republican process, but was still gaining more and more momentum and support, he might be changing his tune. But the momentum sputtered and stalled due to his own faults. So he is done.

I hope that SOMEDAY a viable candidate with a strong Libertarian bent, but who is not fatally flawed, and has the ability to make enough concessions to reality to not just be a doctronare ideologue. And no gold standard talk. Please. I mean, I bump ito people ALL THE TIME who are financially conservative but socially liberal. How hard is it to get someone with that combination to have real strength in national politics?

Pretty hard it seems.

Oh well.

Bye Dr. Paul. It was fun.

And although I had pretty much made my decision, this makes it now completely clear how I will be caucusing five hours from now.

I gather that McCain will be in my area within the next few hours too. I won’t be going to see him either.

Huckabee’s wife was here earlier too. Missed her.

Oops.

Dunno if Paul has been in town lately. I don’t think so.

I’m just not seeing any of these people. Oh well.

CNN is still updating delegate totals as things get finalized from Super Tuesday. A bunch of delegates got added in both parties, but the new delegates added were added in almost the same proportions as the existing delegate counts, so from a percent of delegates point of view, the lines only move very slightly.

Since my update yesterday CNN updated their estimates a bit. On the Democratic side it changed things only a tiny bit in percentage terms. But the gap between Hillary and Obama widened just a smidge. But it changes nothing about the general conclusions on the results of Super Tuesday. Main result: a dramatic closing of the delegate gap by Obama.

On the Republican side the update was a bit more dramatic, with McCain increasing his lead even further. Remember my points yesterday about how crazy the folks are who are trying to say the Republican race isn’t essentially locked up already because of the unrealistic percentage of delegates the others would have to win to catch him? Yeah… even more so now.