Steve Kornacki pushes back against the Dish's media critique:
[Ron Paul] grabbed 10 percent in Iowa, good for fifth place, and 8 percent in New Hampshire, another fifth-place showing, and that was pretty much it. The media filed this under lesson learned: Paul's supporters could make a lot of noise — but it was misleading noise. This is why his string of straw poll successes in the past few years — including last weekend's — hasn't gotten much notice. And this is probably the way it should be, until and unless Paul can demonstrate that these performances are anything but the product of his army mobilizing for relatively low-turnout events and producing deceptively impressive results. So far, there's not much evidence for this.
A reader has similar thoughts:
You wonder why the media doesn't give more coverage to Ron Paul's candidacy. Best way to explain it is because Paul's support is a mile deep and an inch wide.
Paul finished strong in the 2007 Iowa Straw Poll, pulled in nearly $20 million in the last quarter of 2007 and was the leading fundraiser in the GOP field that quarter. But his 2008 campaign was notoriously disorganized and probably as much a reason for his inability to get media coverage as any alleged bias reporters had against him. He spread his ad buys thinly over several states prior to Super Tuesday and failed to make a significant dent in any, then told his supporters he would split time between his presidential and congressional re-election campaigns. This, even though there was a month to go before McCain secured the nomination.
Paul has two problems. One is that he's made several statements that he's less interested in winning than spreading his ideas. That's fine for him, but a political party wants its standard bearer to be a conqueror, not a philosopher. More importantly, most Republicans aren't libertarians. They're strong religious conservatives who don't see Paul speaking to them the way Bachmann and Perry do; or they're business people who might like his anti-tax message but know his demands to end the Fed would plunge us back into a 19th century cycle of boom and bust. Paul can't make either group believe in him enough to support him in a general election. To see a serious Paul candidacy, they'll have to move or he will.
Another reader focuses on policy:
I wonder if Paul's difficulty isn't that he takes many positions that are anathema to today's mainstream Republicans and conservatives. I wonder if it is that he's so adamant about cringe-worthy positions such as the return to the gold standard. It makes him, frankly, come off as a doddering, wild-eyed loon (see his questioning of Bernanke earlier this summer), immune to reason regarding certain positions he's come to see as sacrosanct. Few economists that I've read think the return to the gold standard would be anything less than a disaster, yet Paul continues to stubbornly bash on about it.
He certainly makes good points about the waste of blood and treasure we've seen in the last decade, but those good points get drowned out by his almost ludicrous adherence to select claptrap.
The Dish 