by Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Congressman Ron Paul has topped a Tea Party presidential straw poll, beating Sarah Palin as the favourite to run against Barack Obama in 2012.
The former Alaska governor was placed a distant third, behind Paul and Georgia businessman Herman Cain in the poll of close to 1,600 members of the Tea Party Patriots grassroots activist group.
The Congressmanromped home with 581 votes, while Cain received 256 votes.
Palin scored just 149 votes, almost four times less than Ron Paul, and was almost beaten into fourth place by Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who was shy of Palin by just 6 votes. “Mr. Cain and Rep. Paul’s positions resonated with Tea Party Patriots this weekend,” said Mark Meckler, the Tea Party Patriots’ national coordinator.
The poll was conducted jointly online and in house at the groups’ convention in Phoenix this past weekend. The result echoes that of other recent surveys, including the CPAC straw poll, which have shown that Ron Paul has a greater chance of beating Obama than Sarah Palin does.
A string of victories in the polls, as well as a huge injection of $700,000 of support in the form of a recent “moneybomb” on behalf of supporters, is sure to influence Paul’s impending decision of whether to embark on a third presidential campaign.
The former Governor of Alaska trails Obama by 11 per cent in current approval ratings, whereas Paul only trails the President by 9 per cent. Once Paul is able to mobilize his hugely effective grass roots base, which outstrips anything the likes of Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or Mike Huckabee can call upon, a 9 point deficit is far from insurmountable.
Indeed, an April 2010 Rasmussen poll showed that Paul was almost level with Obama if the two were to go head to head for the presidency. Following a 15 point bounce in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, Obama has pulled away from all potential Republican candidates, but given the momentum Paul could build with his energetic grass roots base, beating Obama would be a distinct possibility.
When Obama was at one of the lowest ebbs of his popular approval, a YouGov/Polimetrix study found that establishment Republican candidates like Palin, Gingrich and Romney were all losing popularity at a similar pace to the president. Only Ron Paul has bucked this trend.
On the other hand, if the Republicans go with Palin, Obama’s second term is virtually guaranteed. In addition to the fact that she is an archetype neocon, numerous interviews have highlighted the fact that Palin has little grasp of any policy issues and is a poor public speaker in a debate context. It was only a few months ago that she made another faux pas in claiming that North Korea was a U.S. ally.
Congressman Paul delivered a 20 minute speech at the event, with the opening gambit “every once in a while they ask about who started the Tea Party. I want to put that straight, I have never claimed to be the father of the Tea Party movement, but I do claim I am the father of the junior Senator in Kentucky!”
The Congressman is modest, however, as we have consistently highlighted, Ron Paul was the figurehead at the inception of the Tea Party movement, which consisted of a small but dedicated team of people who organized Boston Tea Party re-enactment protests in 50 different cities in late 2007, in support of Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign.
The libertarian themed protests became extremely popular, and continued throughout 2008 and into 2009, prompting thousands of people to engage in peaceful political protest.
Since that time the movement has been somewhat co-opted by the establishment GOP and figures such as Palin, who is as much a pro-war hawk as the neocons responsible for miring the US in two endless, devastating and extremely costly wars.
During his speech, Paul went on to speak of the unfolding crisis stemming from the Federal Reserve system’s manipulation of monetary policy and big government mismanagement.
“We allowed the wrong kind of people to take over our government, and we allowed too many people to go to Washington that did not ever take their oath of office seriously.” Paul commented.
