As you saw
below here on Hit and Run, despite some pretty widespread
hope and anticipation from both the media (a
week ago and earlier tonight) and a lot of his eager fans and
grassroots volunteers (until late tonight), Ron Paul failed to win,
or even come in second. This was not, it seems (at least the
failure to win part) a huge surprise to more higher-level campaign
staff.

As a Ron Paul admirer since 1988, having the sweet hope of
victory held over my head for a moment led to a frustrating and
dispiriting night. But–while all discussions of “moods of the
room” are suspect, based, as they must be, on long talks with what
by necessity will be a narrow unscientific sampling of the room–I
seemed to be perhaps the most bummed person at the Paul “victory
party.” Even the many Iowans who started today expecting a win are
still satisfied and eager footsoldiers in an ongoing Ron Paul
Revolution.

Before the results poured in, I sat in on the caucus process in
Precinct 5 in Ankeny, held in a high school gym about a mile from
Paul’s state HQ. More than 200 people showed up. I didn’t stay long
enough to see the official count. But the GOP precinct
organizer–Ron Paul supporter Ross Witt–had the various
candidates’ fans bunch up in separate parts of the gym to pick
their spokespeople, vote watchers, and potential delegate
candidates. When that happened, Paul’s crowd was the largest (and
contained the only African-American in the room).

Talking to caucusgoers before the business began, I met an
actual example of a type I was always told existed in abundance: a
would-be Ron Paul fan turned off by his foreign policy. He was a
young Ankeny-area attorney who used to consider himself a Paul man
but decided Paul’s fervent dedication to not starting pre-emptive
wars was too punctilious in the face of the perceived threat of
Iran. His buddy with him was undecided when he came in, though
leaning Bachmann. (Coming from the libertarian tradition of highly
rationalistic politics derived from first principles, I find the
meandering and seemingly senseless approach to these decisions of
the average undecided voter somewhat confusing and maddening–this
guy was able to see a lot he liked in everyone from Romney to
Santorum to Paul.) I met a heavily bearded working man in dirty
clothes who expressed his love for Paul as deriving entirely from
“I just want less government.” He wasn’t sure he could wait an hour
to vote, but did. (The majority profession I heard from Paul men I
spoke to tonight, between the caucus and the campaign’s
results-watching party, was some sort of laborer/manual worker.
Paul is not just pulling pencil-necked geeks and weirdo
intellectuals.)

I talked a while at the caucus with Paul precinct co-captain
Scott Hanson, a successful salesman for Homemakers Furniture
(million-dollar club multiple years). Hanson is a longtime fan of
the world of electoral politics for the glamor; he has tales of
having met nearly every major figure in the GOP of the past few
decades and has known Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad since he was a boy.
He tells me he has always enjoyed just palling around with pols,
but finds Paul is the only one who inspired a serious devotion in
him since Reagan–because he sees Paul as the only politician with
solutions to the serious problems that he sees presenting America
with a “do or die” crisis. His love for Paul has even made him
realize Sean Hannity, who he used to love, isn’t as stalwart as he
believed.

I met a couple of ladies who were part of the huge wave of
freshly-minted Santorum fans, having turned from Bachmann. Like all
Iowans, they’ve been getting double-digit calls from candidates
every day for the past few weeks; one of them had gotten
Paul-sponsored anti-Santorum calls in the past couple of days
(which led Santorum to
call Paul “disgusting”). She was disappointed, and was aware of
Paul’s previous reputation for not indulging in that sort of attack
politics. Paul’s campaign has decided to eschew such
high-mindedness this time around, though rarely will you hear
direct attacks on specific competitors from Paul’s own mouth.

Despite Paul fans’ reputation for endless willingness to go
anywhere anytime and tell people about Ron Paul, no one was at the
caucus handing out Paul literature. Both Santorum and Perry had a
couple of canvassers doing so for them. (Pair of young ladies for
Perry, less-young men for Santorum.) This lack of Paul
muscle-on-the-ground at the caucuses was also noted by Paulites at
at least three other precincts, and all of them were surprised no
volunteers were there trying to sway last-minute undecideds. While
I have no macrostats on this, Paul fans from two different
precincts reported 10-15 percent of the Paul votes at their
precinct coming from non-Republicans who re-registered Republican
that evening at the caucus.

As I left the caucus to drive to the Paul results-watching
party, CNN was reporting Paul in the lead based on early entry
polls, though that disappeared quickly. Hundreds of Paul fans and
media–in nearly equal numbers, it seemed–filled a ballroom at the
Courtyard Inn in Ankeny.

I met a lot of non-Iowans there on basic Ron Paul fan roadtrips,
including a solo sojourner from north of Minneapolis, a pair from
Chicago, and a team from Texas. (The first four people I randomly
approached to chat were all out-of-staters.) I learned, again, that
Ron Paul fans think hard and act hard on how to promote their man,
with nearly everyone I met having their own particular plan for
Paul promotion, and nearly all saying that everyone in their lives
knows all-too-well that they are Ron Paul People.

I found Iowans are mighty confused by Santorum’s unexpected rise
to the top, and mostly blame it on his rising too fast to be vetted
properly and thoroughly by the voters. I ran into two sitting state
legislators who are Paul fans (Kim Pearson and Glen Massie) and two
who will be running on a Paulite platform this year for state
legislative seats (David Edwards and Matt Devries). Most of the
people who actually work for the campaign didn’t want to say much
for the record tonight or were not readily available for
comment. 

I ran into a few people who were surprised, given how roundly
Paul won their precinct, surprised enough to want to see the
specific per-precinct figure breakdown before they were sure the
results were legit. But that seemed more frustration than
conspiracy theory. One Paul dude made the case–which I concur
with–that the past 24 hours of Fox News amounted to a free
half-million attack ad buy against Paul from his enemies.

I met a team of RevolutionPAC (a Paulite
superpac) supporters, including Dan Johnson and John Moore. Moore
is a Veteran for Ron Paul with two Iraq stints behind him. He tells
me that “as bullets were whizzing by my head in Iraq Irealized I
wasn’t making this country safer,” especially when he came home to
the Patriot Act and crippling partially war-caused crushing debt.
Johnson and Moore are on the road riling up the grassroots
independently of the campaign, and working with iRoots.org to produce Paul-promoting Net
video content. Johnson tells me RevPAC is raising money to
further spread their “Compassion
of Ron Paul” ad, featuring a black man with a white wife who
Paul helped for free as a doctor. 

I talked to Paul volunteer Allen Huffman, who works for Wells
Fargo. Like every other volunteer I spoke to, his stories of Paul
activism were largely based in working the phones–finding Paul
supporters, finding what their issues were and selling them on
those issues, and making sure the Paul-committed were energized,
motivated, and helped in getting out to the caucuses today. He told
me months ago a Paul campaign staffer gave a talk to a squad of
volunteers in which she laid out almost precisely what happened
with Paul’s slow, steady rise–with the caveat that she said the
goal was to get Paul to number one on caucus day and not a day
earlier. Having risen to the top in some polls before Christmas may
well have been one of Paul’s problems.

As a
piece from Business Insider being sent around by
the Paulfolk on Facebook all day and night indicates, when it comes
to actually winning the delegates of the state of Iowa, tonight’s
non-binding caucus results mean nothing at all. Actual delegate
votes happen later, and the caucus results don’t bind the
delegates. Tonight, after the presidential vote and after lots and
lots of people leave (I’d say at least half walked out after the
vote at the caucus I attended), they vote on delegates to the
county convention, which in March will pick delegates to the state
convention, which will later pick delegates to the Republican
National Convention in Tampa.

I have some anecdotal evidence from tonight that Paul people
were disciplined enough to actually stay long enough to win
delegate seats, often by being the only people there even willing
to be one by the time the selection process came around. One young
Paulite bragged to me about how he was quite sure the Paul team had
the delegate issue in the bag after tonight; when I asked him to
elaborate on how he knew, he noticed the notepad in my hand, asked
if I was a reporter, and pretty much ran away from me when I said I
was. (The Paul campaign imposes a very tight message discipline,
that is, it orders most of its employees and volunteers not to talk
to reporters. Most of them obey.)

That said, there is more to “winning Iowa” than winning Iowa’s
delegates. Winning the caucus vote adds to the whole momentum
thing, the whole designated frontrunner thing, the whole media
attention and respect thing.

There is also, on the other hand, the whole “painting a target
on your back” thing, which Santorum most definitely did tonight.
The happy spin from Paul higher-ups has them still chugging ahead
with their money, their fundraising prowess, their devoted fans,
their great ideas that no other candidate can steal, and without
the tsuris that a frontrunner Paul would surely draw on himself.
Paul insisted tonight only he and Romney have the money and
momentum to actually fight it out nationally through primary and
caucus season.

And that is a happy spin indeed. The happiest spin, though, came
from Paul’s chin-up presentation to his fans after he was clearly
third place. Paul said that his campaign and fans have reintroduced
an idea into the Republican Party and American politics that is
vitally needed: that “freedom is popular.”

Paul’s speech to his people tonight:

Reason‘s Paul coverage. My upcoming
book,
Ron Paul’s Revolution.