Brian Miller wrote: BM) Starve the party of resources, support, manpower and candidates to support a Republican, and candidates either decide not to run (due to a lack of resources), or they become scarce to recruit. (BM
The $27M that Ron Paul has raised, and the 1000+ people that marched on the Santa Monica pier, were obviously not siphoned from the LP. (If you haven't seen the Santa Monica images, visit http://libertarianintelligence.com/2007/12/thousand-for-ron-paul-at-santa-mo nica.html .) Our candidates in previous cycles haven't been deterred by a lack of financial or volunteer support, so this theory just doesn't pencil. In fact, our candidates this cycle have three resources they've never had before in any LPCA cycle that I know of: * Access to recent RegLib voter data for every Sacramento and federal office. * A wonderful 100-page candidates' manual by Jim Eyer and Allan Rice. * Access to the 4600 messages of the previous cycle's LPCA candidates' forum. As I've gotten word about candidate recruitment from Ted Brown for purposes of feeding our candidates RegLib data for signature gathering, I've heard no mention of Ron Paul in the sketchy reports of candidate lack of interest. The most definitive anecdote I heard was of a candidate who is moving to Alaska. Ted Brown could give more details, but he may not be interested in dignifying the above sort of comment with a response. Bruce Cohen wrote: BC) Support for Ron Paul has nothing to do, or at least, very, very little to do with the LPCA's failure to recruit Candidates. (BC Right. BC) In point of fact, it was one of the things the current Chair and much of his so-called 'team' ran on, was their interest and skills in Candidate recruitment and support. (BC As I reported at http://knowinghumans.net/2007/04/lpca-convention-day-2.html, the current leadership team ran on a platform of building a farm team at the local level, as opposed to Sacramento or D.C. Ted Brown's report was on recruiting candidates only for Sacramento and federal office, and so doesn't necessarily reflect on the leadership's efforts at the local level. BC) It's the lack of any effort or accomplishment by the current LPCA Board of Directors that's the real problem here. (BC As I reported at http://knowinghumans.net/2007/12/leaner-lpca-2008-budget-approved.html, there's been some significant progress made in budgeting, office operations, and expense control since around the time that Beau took over the office this summer. More progress is imminent on membership operations, and Chair Kevin Takenaga has been working hard to network our local elected Libertarians together. See http://knowinghumans.net/search/label/LPCA for all my reporting on the LPCA. Brian Holtz http://LibertarianIntelligence.com <http://libertarianintelligence.com/> Signal Intelligence About The LP
