Ron Paul Wins… Back His Congressional Seat!
Now that it’s over the truth can be told: Ron Paul was never going to lose his House seat to Chris Peden. If a number of factors had broken against him it might have been possible. Say he had shut down his decades-old political operation in East Texas and focused all of his energy on the presidential rEVOLution.
Of course, some of the people who thought Peden would knock out Paul and carve his initials into a House of Representatives desk got that impression from…Ron Paul. On February 8, Paul announced that he was “scaling back” his presidential bid and warned that if he lost his House seat “all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas.” Four days later, Paul’s friend and fellow anti-war Republican Rep. Wayne Gilchrest lost his Maryland seat. On February 18, Paul e-mailed his supporters with an “urgent message” about the challenge “the DC neocons” were mounting in Texas.
Why did Paul win so easily when Wayne Gilchrest lost? It wasn’t because of the work Paul did this year, but because of the work he’s done since the 1970s—and especially since 1996—to build a political machine.
