Uploading a Revolution

Presidential candidate Ron Paul’s Web army is building a new virtual reality. But will they vote in the real world?
 
By Rebecca Wakefield

Boris Morales and Skip Sanders campaign on Southwest Eighth Street for Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.

You know it’s presidential election season when you find a Colombian-American waving a Cuban flag outside Versailles, while also hoisting a sign supporting an anti-embargo and anti-illegal immigration candidate from Texas.

Ron Paul, this cycle’s standard-bearer of the Texas maverick, blew through Miami this past week. Technically, he’s a Republican. He stood on stage with the rest of the Republican presidential candidates at Sunday’s Univision debate in Miami. But he’s not like the others, a fact that, so far, is working for him in the newest political battleground.
Boris Morales stood a few inches into Southwest Eighth Street waving a Cuban flag, an American flag and a Ron Paul sign. The 36-year-old wore a Ronald Reagan T-shirt, which Paul had signed in black marker.
Why the Cuban flag?

“We’re in Little Havana!” exclaimed Morales, adding, “My Cuban friends are all over him. The only way Cuban people are going to get out from under their communist regime is if they open up trade and they get enough money that they can actually protest in the streets. When the Cuban government is the only one with the money and the food, they don’t have enough energy to go out there and get a Cuba libre.”

That sentiment didn’t play well with the hometown audience at the debate, but in cyberlandia, where Ron Paul’s virtual kingdom is being built, the candidate’s appeal springs from American myths of self-reliance, individuality and disdain for government in nearly all its forms.
Paul is a fringe candidate, but in this race, which so far has produced no clear winner out of a conflicted group of has-beens and wannabes, the fringe is moving front and center, no more famously than with the Arkansan dark horse, Mike Huckabee.

What’s interesting about Paul as a candidate actually has less to do with his message and more to do with the emerging class of independent voters, who don’t identify with either of the two major parties. Some of these voters are attempting to create their own political reality online.
To date, the major success of the Paulites is the record-breaking “money bomb” drive of last month, in which some 37,000 people contributed $4.2 million to his campaign in just 24 hours. They are going to make the attempt again on Dec. 16, using a Boston Tea Party theme. The Paulites claim they’ve held more than 18,000 web-organized Meetups across the country, compared to a few hundred for the nearest competitor, Huckabee.

I asked Paul why he, a 72-year-old ob/gyn from rural Texas, has gotten so much traction from the Internet. “People come around and try to copy what we’re doing, but the answer is we don’t do it, they do it,” he replied. “How could a campaign go out and hire enough people to go out and say, ‘This week we’re going to organize six Meetup groups in the Miami area?’ You’d spend millions [to do that all over the country]. These Meetup groups, I think there’s 1,350 now.”

As to his specific appeal, Paul said his message has been the same for a long time, but it’s caught on with the “disenchanted” who feel neither the mainstream Republican nor Democratic parties have served their interests. This is potentially a large group, including people who’ve never voted and those who’ve given up.

But, here’s the thing. These people have to actually go out and vote in the primaries for any of this to matter. Paul made a tiny shrugging motion when I asked him how he’d do in the primaries.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “When you meet these people, the rallies are all big. It makes you think, ‘Wow, we’re on the verge of victory.’ But I’m not naive either. The polls don’t show us doing that well. Maybe none of these people are even on the Republican rolls, nor did they vote ever, or they’re young. Are they going to register? Are they going to vote? Too many unknowns for me to predict. All I know is there’s a lot of enthusiasm for what we’re doing.”

Boris Morales is proof of that. “My friends don’t vote,” he asserted. “They hang out at the Ale House and talk about women and beer. But I have all my friends voting for Ron Paul — my mother as a first-time voter, my sister. Everybody is going to come out from the woodwork. It’s an American revolution.”

Paul’s supporters have already seized the Web, even locally. In a Monday story about the Republican debate on Univision, the Miami Herald posted a poll asking readers which candidate performed the best. As of late Monday night, the second highest vote-getter was Mike Huckabee, with 103 votes. Paul had 1,082 votes, clearly the result of a concerted campaign by supporters.

It seems the revolution, if it comes, will be uploaded.

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In other Internet campaign news, the local Democrats seem to be winning the Web battle. They’ve organized a Facebook campaign to draft Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chair Joe Garcia to run for Lincoln Diaz-Balart’s congressional seat. Most of the same people have a similar Facebook campaign to draft Hialeah’s Raul Martinez for the same seat. Either one would be great fun to watch.

Of course, Diaz-Balart also has a Facebook profile, which currently has about 166 friends. That’s about 20 fewer than Frank Gonzalez, the Libertarian turned Democrat who ran against him last time and who lists “women” as a main interest of social networking. There’s also a small group called Young People for the Diaz-Balart Brothers, which almost seems like an oxymoron considering the main thrust of their voting base. This is a counter to the 171-member-strong South Floridians for New Leadership, which focuses on all the ways in which the Diaz-Balart brothers suck as congressmen.

I don’t know where any of this is going, but I look forward to the battle.