So Rick Santorum said this today:
“I like the platform that we have now,” Santorum told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.” “I’m concerned that Ron Paul and some of his supporters out there are looking for a platform fight, and I want to make sure we have strong, principled conservatives there who stood with me in our primary fight to go there and counterbalance the effect of the Paul folks.”
I think that calls for a round of applause for Adele Stan at Alternet, who saw this coming a while back when everyone else was still assuming that Ron was just angling for a Rand VP nom. She sketched out how the Paul delegates could force the choice on Romney at the convention, but then offered this up as a serious possibility:
So, falling short of some sort of Rand-a-palooza at the convention, what else might Paul win through his delegate-stacking exploits?
In 1996, Patrick J. Buchanan shocked the political world by winning the New Hampshire primary. Though he didn’t get very far in subsequent contests, he did accumulate enough delegates devoted to his far-right ideals to cause Republican nominee Sen. Bob Dole a major headache. It wasn’t until the eve of the convention that Buchanan announced he would not run a third-party challenge to Dole. In exchange, he won control of the party platform, which was largely written by Phyllis Schlafly, a Buchanan campaign co-chair, and Buchanan’s sister, Bay, who managed his campaign.
That may not sound like a lot, but it forced Dole to run in the general election on a platform that not only trumpeted an anti-abortion policy with no exceptions for rape or incest, but also called for U.S. withdrawal from U.N. forces and all sorts of other paranoid proclamations. (The seating of the Buchanan delegation also led to the booing from the convention floor of Gen. Colin Powell, then just retired from the armed forces.)
She went on to speculate about the possibility that they could take over the platform as Buchanan did and force Mitt to run in the fall explaining an isolationist or drug legalization Party platform.
That would be something.
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