I attended the first meeting of the Pittsburgh and Western PA Ron Paul 2008 Meetup Group last night. By sheer coincidence, the guy organizing it happens to live right across the street from me (which I didn't find out until after I'd signed up for the group) and was holding the meeting at his house, so I didn't have to worry about traffic.
It turns out that we're a pretty diverse group. We have at least one Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist (yours truly), a Constitution Party member, several former Bush and Iraq war supporters (including the man organizing the meeting), one Georgist Libertarian Party member, one registered Democrat, one staunch Catholic, one staunch Protestant (me again), and a whole roomful of folks disillusioned with the two-party duopoly. We have political experience ranging from zero to extensive, including one fellow who got his start campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964. The one thing that unites us all is a desire to have a president who actually believes in liberty and has a record to match his rhetoric. No candidate outside of Ron Paul can make that claim.
I was encouraged to see that serious Paul supporters come from so many different backgrounds. That proves that he has a message that resonates with a good cross-section of America. I was also encouraged to see that there actually are people who have given up on Bush and his war. Listening to talk radio and watching Fox News would lead one to believe that most self-identified conservatives are still as rabidly pro-Bush and pro-war today as they were three or four years ago.
The most interesting remarks in this regard came from one member who said that he was ardently pro-Bush ("I thought Bush was the best thing to ever happen to this country") in both 2000 and 2004 and pro-war in 2004 but slowly began to come to the conclusion that it wasn't such a good idea after all. What clinched his shift to the Paul camp was Paul's question in the second debate, "How would we feel if China were doing this [making war on us or our neighbors and building a gigantic embassy in, say, Mexico City] to us?" I think this view is echoed in this letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review by another of our members, who was not in attendance last night.
Overall, I'm quite heartened by the variety of people involved in our group and their knowledgeability. I feel certain that supporters of, say, Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton are far more monolithic and far less informed.
Now can we translate our enthusiasm for Ron Paul into electoral victory next year? Why not? If our group membership indicates anything, it's that there's a wide swath of people out there just waiting for genuine leadership in the cause of freedom. We just need to find them and point them in the right direction.
