Ron Paul's end game

Rep. Ron Paul says he’s in it to win it and the campaign boasts that it has a comprehensive strategy in place to ensure that happens.
But behind the scenes Campaign Manager Jesse Benton admits to ABC News that the team is plotting a back up strategy in case the congressman doesn’t pull in enough delegates to become the nominee.
If the campaign comes up short at the convention, Benton says the plan is to use all the delegates awarded to Paul as a bargaining chip to force the Republican Party to stick to its limited government platform.
Benton says this could include auditing the Federal Reserve and winding back several parts of the Patriot Act, including roving wire taps which he says were originally written with the intent of expiring.
“I think it would be wise for the Republican Party to allow them to sun set next time they come up for authorization,” said Benton, adding a good portion of the American people are with that.


According to his campaign chairman, Jesse Benton, Paul has a coordinator in Puerto Rico. The campaign has a “Hispanic for Ron Paul” team that prominently features a Puerto Rican business-leader. A non-affiliated group, Puerto Rico for Ron Paul, has also been disseminating caucus-related information.


That the Texas Republican is investing any resources at all in Puerto Rico may strike some as wasteful. Few political observers take Paul seriously as a potential nominee, even after he scored a second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary. Primaries, after all, are won through momentum: a few early victories beget others, which, in turn, beget more donors, endorsements, excitement, and ultimately more victories.


The Paul campaign does not subscribe to that theory.


“Ours is a delegate strategy,” said Benton. “We want to win the 1,100 delegates. If [former Massachusetts Gov.]Mitt Romney has secured 1,150 delegates, then it is game over. But we are going to contest that until the very end, and again we have a goal. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t think we can win 1,150 delegates.”


Who is Paul looking to for inspiration? It might surprise you: President Obama’s primary run. Here’s Stein:


It’s the Money Ball of campaign strategies and it’s rooted in, of all places, Obama’s 2008 campaign.


“You try to look at what models have worked in the past and Obama’s model worked,” said Benton. “Now we have different ideas about where we would like to take the country, but he ran a brilliant campaign. He unleashed his grassroots to work hard, get involved in their communities, and really fight for some principles and that’s what we are trying to do too.”


“Let’s say they clean up in the caucus states,” the source said. “Let’s say they control 20 votes out of 100 in those committees, then they can force votes on those issues. They can make a motion on the floor to amend the agenda, to amend the platform … They could force certain issues to be voted on. They could force the convention to consider certain questions and force the human beings on the committees to address certain things. How about a more robust version of the ‘audit the Fed’ platform? All of a sudden you will get recorded votes on those issues.