Ron Paul Revolution

Ron Paul Revolution (also known as the Ron Paul: Rution, R-love-ution, and R-evol-ution) is a neologism used to describe as the grass roots efforts of Ron Paul supporters in the 2008 Presidential Election. The term is used both as a campaign slogan by the official campaign and to denote citizen efforts independent of itself. The media uses the term to describe Ron Paul's base of support.

Grass roots networking

In addition to his search popularity, Ron Paul has become popular on a variety of social networking websites. Paul has over 100,000 "friends" on MySpace. He also has strong support on Facebook, with over 54,400 supporters as of December 15, 2007. He is currently getting 9% of the votes in Facebook's Elections 2008 presidential poll, placing him first among Republicans and second among all candidates, behind Barack Obama, but ahead of Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

Paul claims the most YouTube views of all Republican candidates, over 6.8 million, and the most subscriptions of all candidates, having surpassed Barack Obama on May 20 2007. Paul's YouTube channel is among the Top 40 most subscribed of all time, achieving 40,000 subscribers in December 2007. The Ron Paul Girl is an internet video not originally generated from the campaign, but which has amounted to hundreds of thousands of viewings and is thought to have contributed materially to internet fundraising. "Paulites tend to be tech-savvy, tired of traditional politics and suspicious of their government and the mainstream media. Consisting of Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Constitution Party followers uniting behind some or all of the Paul libertarian agenda -- ending the war in Iraq, abolishing gun control laws, legalizing marijuana and dismantling big hunks of the U.S. government, especially the IRS and Federal Reserve system."

As of November 4, 2007, Ron Paul has the largest distributed grassroots organization on Meetup.com of all candidates, with over 61,000 members in 1,116 Meetup groups. In comparison, Barack Obama-who has the second largest Meetup organization among active candidates-has just over 4,000 members among 70 Meetup groups. Ron Paul has also earned the attention of sympathizers outside of the United States.

Supporters "guard image against what they see as a purposeful marginalization by the media", and cite his victories in 2008 GOP debate sponsors' online and phone text polls to argue he deserves more mainstream recognition. Jack Cafferty has observed that Ron Paul's grassroots network is one "politicians dream about" and that no other candidate running has a base as dedicated or as vocal as Paul's. "His supporters are the equivalent of crabgrass," says G.O.P. consultant Frank Luntz.

Independent campaign efforts

The two largest independent fund raising efforts for Ron Paul were the November 5, 2007 Guy Fawkes' Day moneybomb and the December 16, 2007 Boston Tea Party bomb, which combined raised over $10 million.

One 45-year-old artist and adventurer is bicycling from Santa Monica to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington to raise awareness about Paul. A Nevada brothel owner recently promised to take up a collection from her customers. One Colorado backer quickly raised more than $350,000 online, which launched the Ron Paul blimp. Planned for these supporters are a "Rock for Ron Paul" concert Jan. 17 in Hollywood and a "Hotties for Ron Paul" 2008 wall calendar.

Paul supporters have said in interviews they didn't condone harsh tactics or violence, but some in their camp had become bitter because of the lack of publicity the mainstream media had given their candidate. Willie Geist stated on the marginal coverage of Paul's fundraising: "You raised 6 million dollars on one day and there it is buried on page 50 of The Washington Post."

Slogan
When Dr. Paul delivers speeches, the audience members will often be see wearing "Ron Paul Revolution" T-shirts.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu