C Paul AC

Tom Schaller at Five-Thirty-Seven:

But the most revealing result from CPAC 2010, one that didn't surprise me but ought to wake up national political reporters, is this one: Ron Paul won this year's CPAC straw poll with 31 percent. Next best was Mitt Romney with 22 percent. Amazingly, Paul's support was more than that for Sarah Palin (7 percent), Tim Pawlenty (6), Mike Pence (5), Newt Gingrich (4), Mike Huckabee (4), Mitch Daniels (2), and Rick Santorum (2) combined. Yes, that's right--combined. By compare, just a year ago, Paul tied with Palin for third at 13 percent, with Romney winning and Bobby Jindal (who dat?) second at 14 percent.

Five months ago in this space, I speculated that this new conservative movement is fueled to a significant degree by a lot of ginned up former Ron Paul supporters. I mentioned and quoted at length from Dana Goldstein's fanstastic reporting that connected the Tea Party movement to residual Ron Paulites. When is the national media going to finally make these connections?

Instead, the kooky, historically revisionist, apocalyptic ideas of Glenn Beck and Ron Paul are treated with equivalency to those of the majority Democratic Party in Washington and--here's the key point--these movement activists and their ideas are often discussed without much mention of their connections to Beck or Paul. Beck earns his share of attention, granted. But there is almost no recognition whatsoever of the true origins of this conservative backlash. The movement is instead covered as if it is the somehow the byproduct and wind in the sails of national Republicans like Michael Steele, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, when in fact it is operating wholly independently of any or all of them. And remember that these are people who, as Nate pointed out earlier this month, believe that the president is a socialist Muslim interloper born in Africa; who, as I suspect, somehow think that earmark and tort reform will solve our deficit problems; and who, as we saw today, cheer without any sense of internal contradiction as Beck boasts about educating himself for "free" at a public library system paid for by the very taxes he complains about.

Point being that you can't trust the media - not because they are biased towards one side or the other, but because they're biased toward drama. Politics is simply not as entertaining as CNN makes it out to be, let alone Fox.

Them last three words is, of course, very good advice.

But ultimately the reason why the Republicans are so hard-pressed to provide alternate solutions to the problems they're trying to run on is because their leaders are either entertainers or people crazy theorists like Paul. If they really SAY that we should legalize drugs or 9/11 or Medicare must be stopped, it's all over for them. The whole Republican revolution depends on keeping their ideas under wraps, which means they appear to be running solely to regain power. And that's why I can't see how they'll win.