Have Ron Paul and Mitt Romney already made their "separate peace"?

This is the picture that Mitt Romney
positively has to have come out of
the Tampa GOP Convention.

The political world is abuzz right now with the question about what Congressman Ron Paul and his delegated (pledged and unpledged) are going to do at the Tampa GOP Convention this August.

NPR, for example, thinks it's all about handing the revolution over to Senator Rand Paul in 2016.

The Christian Science Monitor has a list of five things Ron Paul wants from the GOP Convention, including:

1. To change the soul of the GOP

2. An orderly show of force on the floor

3. To irritate Ben Bernanke

4. To prohibit indefinite detention

5. To keep the internet wild and free

Other sites have similar takes on the issue, and I'm sure that there is a good bit of truth in all of them.

I'm also fascinated by what's missing: any discussion of military interventions abroad.

It may just be that I am going to the wrong sites, but I sense a sudden toning down of the insistent rhetoric about military interventions abroad.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm sensing the outlines of a deal here.

Make no mistake about it, I don't think Dr. Paul would change his longheld views on foreign policy. But in working within the GOP he knows he will have to build coalitions and make deals, and he knows he will have to be realistic about what he can get from Governor Romney without "breaking the bank," so to speak.

Romney can give Paul "the soul of the GOP." If Romney gets elected, he is the leader of the party, and no matter what dreams the Campaign for Liberty might entertain, he's not going to worry about a primary challenge in four years.

Romney will give Paul his "show of force" on the convention floor. It is, after all, Romney's best chance to capture at least the tepid support of Dr Paul's followers.

Romney will give Paul his opportunity to discredit and prod Ben Bernanke. The Governor has already committed to letting Bernanke go if elected, and giving Paul room on economic issues (at least with lip service) is something he can afford.

Romney won't give Paul a prohibition on indefinite detention, but what he will promise is a full and thorough review of all terrorism and Patriot Act-related policies, and he will give the Paulites at least a strong minority voice in that review. If you thought W got blamed for a lot, wait til you see how the first year of a Romney presidency treats The Big O.

Romney will give in on the internet issues--at least on the surface, and for now. His corporate backers want concessions, but Romney will argue that they need to wait for a year or two until he is fully entrenched and not so dependent of the Paul movement to give it to them.

And at least one Paul supporter, I'd guess, will get into the cabinet, if not Dr. Paul himself. He won't give him Treasury, but he might give him Commerce.

What will Romney get in return? Paul will give Romney an indirect endorsement ("we support the party's nominee"), will not run as a third party candidate, and will not lift a finger for Libertarian Gary Johnson. Most especially that: Paul will keep his various Campaigns for Liberty at a distance from the Libertarians, because Johnson (with Paul support, even tacit support) would be able to fundraise and affect swing states--probably against Romney.

Romney will also get an armistice on foreign policy. In the General Election it is one thing for a Ron Paul or a Gary Johnson to run as "peace" candidates. Romney has to be able to make President Obama look soft on defense issues.

This is going to be tough against a President who has started four or five wars on his own, and raised the military budget to unprecedented heights, but Romney cannot win if he cannot make Obama look like he's bowing to Muslim potentates and secretly planning to hand over the keys to the Washington Cathedral (or the DC Mormon Temple) to mullahs from Iranistan.

So the deal will be that Romney gives Paul about as much as he could ask for on everything but defense and terrorism, and Paul agrees not to change his views but to shut up unless asked.

That's my prediction for the day. How well that would play with Paul's supporters, and how many would then defect to Gary Johnson--that's a question for another day.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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