Update 3 July 17:
OK. Apparently Ron Paul’s staff/campaign people are making statements at odds (deliberately? accidentally?) with what Ron Paul’s saying. Not the first time, either. Weird.
Here’s a link confirming that Romney did deny Paul a place to speak at Tampa.
Update 1: I noticed a link at LRC saying that Ron Paul would not be allowed to speak at Tampa, because Romney is terrified of him..but clicking it on it send me to an article at Jeff Berwick’s Dollar Vigilante (Berwick seems to be a Casey friend) talking about an anarcho-capitalist meet with Murphy, Woods, Casey and others. I couldn’t find anything about it at all about Romney preventing Paul from speaking, or anything about Paul on it at all. Maybe it’s a wrong link?
Update 2 (July 15) OK. I just noticed this, where it’s Ron Paul who’s claiming that Romney is too terrified to let him speak. Maybe, but then why was he so soft on Romney for the last six months?
Sorry. All of this sounds like good marketing to me….including the Berwick stuff…directed at college age kids.
ORIGINAL POST
A report at Business Insider says the Rand endorsement shows he wants star status in the GOP and a serious shot at the Presidency in 2016:
“For more pragmatic Paulites, however, the surprise endorsement was a shrewd political ploy that puts the younger Paul front and center in the national spotlight, and positions him as a leading figure in the Republican Party, with his eyes set on 2016.
James Milliman, Sen. Paul’s state director, explained the logic to a group of Young Republicans in Louisville, Ky., last week:
“As a practical matter, you have to endorse a candidate before the convention — Romney is going to get the nomination, no doubt about that at all, so it behooves everyone to have Sen. Paul to endorse him before the convention,” Milliman said. “It could enable Sen. Paul to have a prime speaking role at the convention, and his dad to have a prime speaking role at the convention. I think those things factored in.”
The remarks — the Paul team’s most candid comments yet regarding the endorsement — appear to suggest that the younger Paul is more concerned with attaining star status within the GOP than with retaining his father’s army of diehard fans.