Lessons Learned: The 2008 Missouri Republican Convention and What Happened 'Last Time'

Eric Vought 9 February 2012

It's 2012. The Missouri Republican Caucuses are almost here and promise to be as 'interesting' as they were before. This is my account of what happened in 2008 with that whole Ron Paul thing and why. Along the way, I get into a bit about who I am, what I actually support, and what 'side' I am on. It is very rare these days that I don't get asked these questions at public meetings. Hopefully this account may be useful to people interested in participating in 2012 and might just be plain interesting to others. As for my 'enemies', well, at least hate me for the right reasons.

1 Acknowledgements, Apologies, Legal Stu

This story could not have happened without the involvement of many extraordinary people. I am going through old notes, stored emails, and inked napkins to write this, but inevitably, I will get some things wrong, leave people out, or have to skip important things just to keep some ow to the story. I went through a good bit of these events in a haze of exhaustion, so I apologize in advance. Corrections or better information on some of the more murky details are welcome, whether they go into this story or another, and I would encourage people to write down their own accounts before the details are lost to time. download this work through Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/doc/81008633/ and make/print copies for personal use including on any of various infernal electronic devices you might own. No permission is given to republish this work or make derivitive works from it without permission. If you ask, permission might be arranged. This work is Copyright 2012 Eric Vought. Permission is granted to read or

Lessons-Learned-The-2008-Missouri-Republican-Convention-and-What-Happened-Last-Time)

2 Setting the stage...

As most people are aware, Ron Paul was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and is now running again in 2012. Ron Paul's cam

20120209.02 - incomplete draft

paign became a ash point for political discontent among people of all stripes but particularly a broad swath of libertarian-leaning conservatives and Republicans generally who felt locked out of the party process. This discontent impacted the Republican nomination process nationwide and ignited party politics in Missouri ranging from county caucuses to the state convention. Anger over things that happened in '08 is still simmering as we are on course for another charged election season. I was a member of the Greene County Republican Central Committee in 2008, was at the Greene County Caucus and a delegate to both the 7th District and State Conventions. I was also deeply involved with many of the Ron Paul-supporting organizations and became the 7th District Coordinator for the Campaign For Liberty of Missouri the non-partisan organization which largely grew out of the movement energized by Republican Ron Paul's small government platform. Because of my connections with both the Central Committee and a number of conservative organizations, I was often pulled into the mess as a peacemaker, to try to get people who were nominally all part of the same political party to actually sit down and talk things out. This may have left some people confused about where I stand and exactly what I believe despite the fact that I am quite outspoken and have written prolicly on the subject. As I said at the recent unveiling of the Interstate-44 Ron Paul sign at Sarcoxie, I had a professional interest in the rural patriot, constitutionalist, and 'back-to-the-land' movements long before I understood it or began to accept its basic tenets. One of my rst mental exercises was to decide whether these movements posed a threat to national security or to public order. That is something I answered in the negative for two reasons, one good and one bad. The rst reason is that people who fundamentally believe in limited government, in upholding the Constitution, and liberty-minded social values would be, generally speaking, the last people who would themselves support extra-constitutional regime change or violence as a means to social ends: it fundamentally conicts with their central motivations. The second reason is because the liberty movement is and has been almost entirely ineective: liberty-minded people are unsurprisingly very dicult to organize or direct in any useful way. They we I should now say tend to be stubborn, independent, and immediately suspicious of structure or hierarchy. This is particularly obvious from the fact that we

still

have not even gured out what to

call ourselves.

None of this means

that Hinckley or Loughner- type threats do not exist at the social fringes, but that there is no specic, organized threat presented by a liberty-minded ideology absent severe external provocation. Over time, I came to believe that adherence to those principles is in fact the best way to serve this country and ows directly from the oath of service that I once took . Enter Ron Paul. My wife and I became interested in Ron Paul's presidential aspirations in 2006-2007. Mr./Dr./Whatever Paul is also quite prolic about his views, particularly about the economy and I noticed that his writings matched

1 In connection to my work with Air Force Studies and Analyses at the Pentagon long story.

up with many of the conclusions we had been coming to about the nancial mess this country was nding itself in. I still remember my dad railing about the S&L scandals what seems like centuries ago, warning that the bail-out of corrupt rms back then was going to result in an even bigger mess down the road, both of which are happening just as my dad and Ron Paul predicted. Focusing on the fact that my dad was actually right was not an option; it was much less mental strain to become interested in Ron Paul. So, we began reading up on his views and his Congressional campaign and, after a while, began checking out the Meet-Ups in the Springeld/Greene County area. At about the same time, I became much more interested in the Republican Party as an organization and in the primary process. I quickly realized that one of the reasons we end up with a choice between Tweedle-Dumb and TweedleDumber in the general elections is because no plausibly good candidate could survive the primary process. was being voted on. I had always been a more or less conscientious I occassionally demonstrated. But I had citizen in the sense that I voted and I made an eort to learn about what I volunteered. not been directly involved in the deeper and mysterious mechanations of how candidates came to be candidates. I now realize that this was an error: if I am not participating in the Party organization, I don't have moral grounds to criticize its failures at producing good candidates. prior to the 2008 election, I determined to become active in the Republican Central Committee, which I accomplished by being appointed to ll a vacant seat in my Springeld ward and beginning to learn just what it is that a Ward Committeeman

actually does.

Jumping ahead in the story just a little bit, these two activities ended up in head-on collission when, prior to the 2008 Missouri Republican Convention, I found myself in front of a kangaroo-court being asked if I was a 'faithful' Republican or a communist-libertarian-sheep-breeding interloper bent on the destruction of all things capital-R Republican. Let me attempt to answer that here: yes, sorta. Initially, I was 'Republican' for the simple and obvious reason that my upstate-New York parents God forgive them are Democrats. But it was not mere rebellion against all things parental that led me to embrace little-r republican principles nor the general platform of the big-R Republican party. Nor was it clinical Michael-J-Foxesque yuppiness. up-by-my-bootstraps upbringing. I had a distinctly middle-class, ridiculed-going-through-school-in-Salvation-Army-cast-os, and pulling myselfI went to a small college which was a liberal hotbed, got a degree in Environmental Science, and (briey) canvassed for NYPIRG over a summer. I had tremendous sympathy with the liberal-let's-xthe-world viewpoint. I just fundamentally don't think the progressive approach actually works or can work. We cannot 'end' poverty or illness or hate or pollution, even if some magical, degreed and certicated, Blood Royale-type leader is put in power and even if people consent to go along with the plan. What can and must do is try to deal with the problems in front of us, defending the innocent, pursuing fairness, and healing wounds one person, one relationship, one plot of ground at a time. Government, while necessary to social order, gets in the way of the eort at least as long as it helps. My transformative experience

working at the Pentagon demonstrated that, while

wars

are evil,

warriors

are

often good, honorable, and necessary, that the defense-industrial complex, not the military iteself, is responsible for most of our global ills. In order, therefore, I am 1) Christian (again... after a long and tumultuous spiritual journey), 2) a husband/father, 3) an American... and Republican a distant fourth, my loyalty to the Republican party organization and platform being entirely dependent on my belief that it serves the rst three items (most of the time). My support for Ron Paul, incidentally, is subject to the exact same limitations. If anyone, whether Ron Paul supporter or Republican, takes issue with the rst three items on my list and thinks therefore that I am not suciently endowed with revolutionary zeal I frankly don't care: that's where my priorities lie and, honestly, if, for you, party loyalty or support of specic candidate for a specic oce comes rst, I have to question your sanity. If we can agree generally that we are awed creatures trying to determine and fulll our purpose while (hopefully) making things better for ourselves, our families, our communities, and our country but perhaps disagree on details then we have room to work together and perhaps learn from each other. So, getting back to our narrative, I am Republican because I am republican and the Republican party is, for better or worse, (politically) for two main reasons: those principles politically. I support Ron Paul (personally) and his candidacy 1) he is the only high-prole Republican even discussing issues I believe are fundamental conservative issues and 2) he has managed to energize and direct a movement which has thus far steadfastly refused to be energized and directed. Ron Paul is an eclectic, eccentric, quirky, and awed human being who nevertheless has managed to inspire nearly fanatical loyalty because of his simple, principled message and the integrity with which he has pursued it. This really does put him on par with people like Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jeerson, all of whom were likewise quirky, deeply awed, and yet clearly exceptional individuals.

the game in town for supporting

We need more of them.

I would like nothing more than to go to a caucus or to the polls and have my choice of individuals like him not clones of him but of his quality covering a swath of the political spectrum. If we had a number of people of that calibre arguing over minor details of

how

how

we honor the legacy our Founders left us and

we wrestle with the deep moral problems of our age within the connes

of our respective oces, then this would be a much better age and we a better nation. The sad fact is, however, that Ron Paul is, for the moment, not merely exceptional but depressingly, devastatingly

singular

among his colleagues. If I I don't have to cannot fail to

do not support his candidacy then a superating wound will be left in national

agree with every aswer he comes up with and I cannot, but I support him because he at least asks the question s that matter.

debate which no one else seems to want to discuss candidly.

3 The curtain rises...

3.1 And how are candidates nominated anyway?
So we went to several meetings to see what we would see. What we saw was a bunch of folks very energized about making a dierence not about solving all of the world's problems but just about doing their part in their own communities to make something better.

We got hooked.

We found ourselves pitching in,

spreading the word, standing in the cold waving signs, and receiving occassional death-threats just like everybody else. Michael Richardson, his son Cory, and his daughter-in-law Veronica were the heart of the local meetup, Michael being an eccentric, quirky, awed, but dedicated and charismatic leader in a rather appropriate way. With a professed inability to lead or organize, he did both quite well in a group of people who are manifestly dicult to organize. Among this strange group of people of all ages and all walks, from suited marketing directors to alien-conspiracy-believers, from students to retirees, from neuvoRepublicans to descendents of Lincoln, I met people whom I hold in the highest regard, for whom I would willingly suer pain or death, whom I consider family. The Missouri primary came and went, laced in a toxic national atmosphere of vitriol threatening, in a t of us-versus-them fervor, to pit a Republican candidate against a well-funded Democratic Party machine without so much as a

cussion of what actually made us dierent.

dis-

The Party Establishment had made

the decision that John McCain was going to have the best chance of 'beating Obama' and proceeded to shove that decision down the throats of the states and counties, operating witch hunts and purges of anyone who disagreed or wanted to discuss issues not terribly favorable to the presumptive nominee. Ron Paul supporters certainly bore the brunt of this activity, but others were caught up in the dragnet as well, even 'suspicious' McCain supporters, paradoxically shoving more people into the circle of discontent which had coalesced around the Republican Congressman's campaign. In an era of Utube and ubiquitous digital recorders, we watched and listened in growing dismay as we watched the tactics being used in other states to crush party dissent and keep 'Libertarian' issues, such as common-sense belief in Constitutionally-limited government, out of the debate. The Ron Paul campaign focused on a controversial national strategy of obtaining enough delegates to the national convention to force multiple rounds of voting. This had several goals: 1) it would provide an opportunity to make up for bad primary results later in the process 2) it depended on solid grass-roots organization rather than overwhelming funding (although, in the event, Ron Paul's fundraising prowess broke records), and 3) in most states the primaries were just 'beauty pageants' which have no bearing on the actual candidateselection process.

3.2

The actual candidate-selection process?

Most people in the US have no idea how candidates are nominated by the parties. Both parties use an antiquated, opaque system which depends on dierent processes in dierent states all culminating with delegates to a national convention nally selecting the candidate. The system is messy, but not purposeless and not really intended to be 'democratic' nor within the attention span of the modern CNN-watching Twitter user. The idea was to start with local people who could congregate at local meetings (a 'caucus') within easy travel distance (by horse), to elect delegates they knew and trusted to progressively larger meetings at larger distances. The lag time in the process was partly a consequence of the slow travel and communication of the day and partly a deliberate attempt to build a gauntlet to eliminate candidates with insucent organization or will to keep up and allow supporters to shift their loyalties to come to a consensus on the nal nominee.

That

is why

the Republican Party has been cracking down in recent years on states who keep moving primaries and caucuses earlier and earlier: the time-lag from Iowa to nominee is a

critical part of the process

as designed. All

States are roughly divided into 'caucus states' and 'primary states'. National. The dierence lies in how the delegates are allocated or

states have some sort of caucus/convention system for electing delegates to

bound

to can-

didates. Delegates elected to the National Convention declare their support for a particular candidate. In a primary state, the vote determines whose delegates are sent: either proportional to primary results or winner-takes-all. In a caucus state, the National Delegates are elected at the District and State conventions. Bound delegates must vote for the candidate they declared on the rst round of voting at the national convention (assuming that candidate is still in the race at all). There are also a number of hybrid systems where a preference primary or straw poll has no real eect on the delegates elected, Iowa being a particular example. In Iowa, the caucus night straw pole is widely reported in the media, but it is the people who stay for the boring parts of the meeting that get to elect delegates they support and who often dier markedly from the straw poll proportions. By the time the delegate process is through, however, the media's short attention span has been exhausted. Ron Paul's strategy in these cases is to recruit people who stay through the boring process rather than who vote in poll and go home and, because his supporters are more energized, better informed, and better organized, he succeeds much more than would seem possible and much more than the establishment is comfortable with.

3.3

So, how does Missouri work?

Well, through most of its history, Missouri was a cacucus state. In 2004 and 2008, it was a primary state, and in 2012 it is back to a caucus state with a preference primary. Confused yet? There are plans to potentially go back to being a pure caucus state and eliminate the primary.

So, in 2008, there was an early February primary where people voted on who they wanted to be the nominee for their respective parties. in There is no by-party registration in Missouri, so the rule is that one person can participate

at most one

party process. You go to the poll, you tell them which party's

ballot you want, you mark it, you stick it in the machine which (allegedly) fairly and consistently counts your ballot and the numbers eventually show up on CNN. The county caucuses happen in March, electing delegates to Congressional District Conventions and the State Convention. Each Congressional District Convention elects National Delegates (and Presidential Electors) as does the State Convention (in Branson that year). Those National Delegates are bound to vote for the winner of the Missouri primary in the rst round of voting at the National Convention (in St. Paul Minnesota in 2008). OK, so what happens if the delegates so bound are not supporters of the winning candidate? What if J. Smith wins the primary but J. Doe's supporters are sent as delegates? Well, theoretically, they would still have to vote for J. Smith in a rst round of voting but if there is more than one round, could switch support thereafter. Perhaps more importantly, the delegates could keep J. Doe's

issues

alive in the party platform and other proceedings of the convention.

This is especially important in winner-takes-all situation where, as in 2008, no candidate had a majority of the primary vote but one candidate was allocated all of the delegates. The campaign strategy in Missouri therefore became two-fold: 1) get as many of Ron Paul's supporters to the caucuses as possible and elect as many of them as possible as national delegates and 2) explore any of the several procedural avenues for

unbinding those delegates, particularly from those districts where the

district winner and the state winner were not the same (as in the 7th District). At the same time, the national strategy was to win enough delegates so that no candidate would have a majority in the rst-round of voting in the National Convention.

3.4

First round of voting?

The national convention requires that a candidate win a majority (50% + 1) of delegates in order to become the nominee. If they already have the required number at the start of the convention, well and good. If not, there is a break and another round of voting, allowing factions of delegates to negotiate and switch their allegience in order for someone to end up with the right number. In what is essentially a run-o election, as many rounds of voting occur as are needed for someone to win. A single round is typical, but multiple rounds happen and, occassionally, a truly ridiculous amount of voting and debate spread out over days has been needed to reach the end of the process. The idea is not simply to select the most

popular

and who can command

the coalition

candidate but one whom most Republicans can accept needed to win the November election. It is

an anti-popular, consensus-based process.

4 In which we rapidly nd ourselves up to our elbows in alligators...

4.1 Caucus Preparation
So, in the runup to the looming caucus, the Ron Paul grassroots groups were in high gear. For the most part, it was the grass-roots organizations doing everything with a minimal amount of suggestion and advice from the national campaign structure which, frankly, demonstrated an inability to be eective. The national campaign took forever to get donations by activists back into the communities to win supporters. The grass-roots groups just went out and did what needed to be done, pooling resources, expertise, and labor. We studied what was happening in other states, took note of what worked and what did not, kept track of the things being done by the establishment in trying to shut out the grass roots activists. We read and spread party documents so that we would understand the rules. We trained people in Robert's Rules of Order and operated our own mock-caucuses to give people new to the process critical experience and also as a decision-making process in its own right to select delegates and leadership, to debate amendments we would push to the Republican platform. As other candidates gave up the ght, we gained last minute support from their Missouri adherents, particularly from some Mike Huckabee supporters who saw us as a method to get back in the game and gain a voice. One of the things which consistently happened in many states was that the Republican Party documents started to disappear: rules and bylaws, caucus and convention documents from 2004, draft documents from 2008 and so forth. We therefore stored those documents early on. I highlighted and annotated many of them, sharing my research to help others come up to speed. I was and am disabled, but my strength has always been to research a problem, come up with solutions, and teach those solutions to others. I threw myself into this with gusto but with poor planning, riding a physical and emotional roller coaster as I worked myself sick, went down for days or a week at a time, and got back up. I know I scared my wife more than once with how sick I made myself and am trying to do things more intelligently in 2012. We made heavy use of the Meetup(tm) service (http://www.meetup.com) These meetup documents were open to the public: anyone, including

to share les, plan events, and discuss strategy as well as some use of Google Docs. supporters of other candidates and members of the Central Committee could and did go through them, but I did not and do not think that was a problem (and if others got use out of our work, so much the better). A few local politicians who saw our activity, were curious about us, came by now and then to watch and listen. Among them were State Representative Shane Schoeller and County Clerk Steve Helms, usually as a pair. They made no bones about the fact that did not support Ron Paul, but they saw `new blood' being brought into the Republican Party as a good thing and wanted to know how to harness that energy. These two and the handful of others helped

the ghting factions to nd common ground and avoid what might have been an even worse disaster. Local Pastor Mark Cohn and I also reached out to the 7th District Executive Director, Mavis Busiek, so that there would be an open dialog before the caucus and to learn more about the point-of-view of many of the long-time committee members and of the hostile members of the state committee. I will try to get into some detail of those conversations later on. Some of the leaders of local Republican organizations rebued any approach and spewed vitriol about, I kid-you-not, Libertarian Socialiast inltrators who needed to be dealt with. The worst of these was Dr. Scott Magill, Chairman of the Springeld Chapter of the Missouri Republican Assembly, who will come into this story later .

4.2

We are looking for a few good men (and women)...

One of the Greene County Central Committee members, and again I won't mention his name because he was accused of either wrongdoing or incompetence over this and he is guilty of neither, is a good Republican and a good man was involved in compiling a slate of potential delegates to be elected at the Greene County Caucus to go to 7th District and National. As was very common across the state, he had nowhere near enough people from the Committee itself willing to commit multiple Saturday afternoons to deal with a routine and extremely boring matter. Many of the Committee seats themselves were empty from lack of energy and interest. As a result, he asked me for help coming up with new people to ll the slate and I of course did so, getting help from Glenn Gohr (another recent Ward Committeeman) and Jeremy Young of the Springeld Metro Republicans (both of whom were favorable to Ron Paul). We discussed at the time that I did not feel comfortable taking advantage of my position to simply ll the slate with Ron Paul people, so we sent the call out to a wide range of local Republican groups and people we knew. Here's the thing, and it is the same thing which made people like Shane Schoeller interested in us: it was almost exclusively Ron Paul people who answered the call. Aside from one or two people, no one else was even I actually went door-to-door as the Committeeman is interested. In my general Republican Party canvassing as Committeeman (yes,

remotely

supposed

to do), the most

common people I encountered were former Republicans who were disgusted with the Party and not participating or actively supporting Obama. So, the majority of excess space in the slate was lled by Ron Paul people anyway and the remaining Ron Paul supporters went into a slate assembled by Charity Davis

2 I was, initially, going to leave his name out of this, but it becomes important to the narrative later on. I bear him no ill will, but his unreasoned hate of Ron Paul supporters (and those he suspects might be supporters) has damaged the Party and is still doing so. 3 Now Charity Angel White and living in Utah. 4 We were focused on Greene County but also heavily involved in helping the organizers across the 7th District. The Phonevite system, a robocaller service which (I believe) Charity set up for us did much of the heavy lifting of contacting potential delegates and polling them on crucial issues, conrming attendance, and getting out the word for short-notice special

3 to be used if the Ron Paul people commanded a majority at the caucus4 .

During the run up to the caucus, we began coordinating more with the wider state movement. This involved endless conference calls which were often not very useful. Sometimes this was because the agenda was not well organized, but more often it was a limitation of conference calls itself. Unlike a face-to-face meeting, there is no way to stand and be recognized in an organized fashion. People talk over each other, back up, yield to each other confusedly and try to stumble forward again. When you have more than ten people on the call (and we often had many times that), resolving anything is like kicking dead whales down the beach. I believe Candace Turner, Laura Hausladen, and Deb Wells organized a number of the calls I participated in. They resolved crucial details but steadily ate up time and energy. This was only to get worse between the caucuses and the later conventions. Curtis Abott, Charity Davis, Glenn Gohr, Jeremy Young, and I began to swap o local responsibility for some of the calls so that we could get some rest and my wife occassionally threatened to pull the phone cord from the wall (this was back when people still had phone cords). Curtis took a signicant chunk of the load researching the rules of order for caucuses and conventions and became known as Mr. Point-of-Order among the GOP. Both of our copies of Robert's Rules were plastered with colored tape ags and stickies so that we could nd what we needed quickly.

4.3

The Caucus Morning and the Spirit of '76

Finally the morning of the caucus itself arrived. I was exhausted from a latenight conference call and was not part of the hasty strategy session just prior (which involved at least Charity Davis, Greg [blast, need to look up last name], and Veronica Richardson), but as people led through registration, Curtis and I took an informal count of people we knew were Ron Paul supporters (many of whom wore identifying stickers) that we had the numbers to control the meeting. We reported this fact and things began to roll. Based on the witch hunts which had taken place in other states, the local group had decided to hide their aliation at least at rst from the GOP at the meeting. I was uneasy about this because I knew that if we succeeded in electing delegates to higher levels and in future activities, it would make enemies within the party among people who did not necessarily oppose us from the start. On the other hand, because the group was ultimately about more than Ron Paul and would need to form its own identity growing forward, we chose to coalesce around the Spirit of '76 moniker for the caucus. Although I initially opposed hiding our support and chose not to hide my own aliation from the Central Committee (I was trying to convert people after all...), I went along with the group decision and share responsibility for it. In hindsight, perhaps this was a mistake, and it did anger people, but the caucus could also have gone very dierently and events at other caucuses in the state bore out the need for caution. This is a crucial issue for activist groups to discuss when approaching

meetings. Like Meetup, Phonevite became a crucial tool without which we could not have accomplished what we did.
10

the caucus system. I don't know if there is a right answer, but at least enemies should not be made by accident. So what happened next is that Charity, Greg, and Veronica approached the local Committee leadership, including Danette Proctor (the Chair of the Greene County Republican Central Committee) and Mavis Busiek. An ultimatum was presented: we had the votes to elect our own caucus ocers and move business forward.

But,

neither side had quite enough people by itself to ll the slate of

delegates and alternates. Would they agree to electing Mavis Busiek to chair the caucus (who did not support us but was known to be fair, respected by both groups, and a stickler for the rules), Veronica to be Secretary, and to work to assemble a combined slate based on proportion of attendance? The Central Committee people were taken aback by having the caucus suddenly taken over by what amounted to an unknown, outside group (though I am sure they had their suspicions). They knew the caucus attendance was much higher than normal, saw a sea of unfamiliar faces sporting identical stickers. They saw that many names were on both slates already. Both sides would sacrice some delegates to make it work and some people would not be happy, but the deal was struck. Now both sides had to make their people stick to it. That turned out to not be so easy. The word spread through both sides to support the nomination of Mrs. Busiek and Mrs. Richardson. This was not dicult among the Ron Paul supporters as we had already made arrangements for people to sit near section leaders who would coordinate the action, partly using text messages so that people didn't need to move around. So, we/they did not sit in a block, but were reasonably well coordinated. A general announcement of the agreed arrangement was made and pandemonium ensued. [To be continued...]

11