Monday, July 30, 2012
Louisiana GOP certifies convention delegation, sans Ron Paul supporters
On the eve of Saturday’s deadline, the Louisiana Republican Party Friday afternoon certified with the Republican National Committee its slate of delegates to the party’s national convention in Tampa, filling slots that backers of Ron Paul won in the caucuses with supporters of Mitt Romney. Ron Paul’s Louisiana campaign filed their own delegate slate with the RNC after the party’s state convention in Shreveport devolved into two separate conventions, with the Paul forces electing a delegation with a Paul majority, and the state party choosing a slate that left vacant 13 spaces for Paul delegates chosen in the caucus if an agreement could be worked out with supporters of the Texas congressman.
It is up to the Republican National Committee - and if its decision is appealed to the convention’s credentials committee - to decide which slate to seat, and there seems little doubt that they would side with the state party. Neither the RNC nor the Romney campaign has much interest in seating a delegation controlled by Paul forces.
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“We have a very conservative and enthusiastic delegation,” said Chairman Roger Villere, Jr. “The Louisiana delegation is composed of Republican leaders, supporters and activists who are committed to uniting the party and defeating Barack Obama in November.”
The 46-member delegation will have one Ron Paul supporter in Lucas Wallace, a member of the state party’s central committee, who agreed to play by the rules established by the state party in advance of the convention, rules the leadership of Paul’s campaign in the state felt were illegitimate and intended to thwart them.
Doug Wead, a top adviser to Paul, said the party obviously has the power to have its will, but that, if this turns out to be a close election in November, the party and the Romney campaign may rue the day they gave any Ron Paul supporters, a very independent lot, reason to be less likely to vote for Romney. Better, he said, they should have brought them into the convention than find reasons to keep them out.
“Our state party leadership should be uniting the party right now to defeat Barack Obama, not manipulating the election process to punish their most active supporters,” said state Rep. Joel Robideaux, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who endorsed Paul. “These are the swing voters we need to win in November”
Party officials contended that the Paul forces fomented chaos at the Shreveport convention as part of a strategy to grab more than their fair share of delegates by choosing their own designees to fill the delegate slots won by Rick Santorum and Romney in the primary.
But Charlie Davis, who ran the Paul campaign, contended that it is the party hierarchy that acted in a high-handed manner.
“I’ve been intimately involved with the Republican Party since I served as Louisiana College Republican Chairman in 1995, and both I and my wife are former executive directors of the LAGOP,” said Davis. “It’s disheartening and infuriating to watch such blatant fraud be perpetuated by an organization that I’ve worked so closely with for so many years. I hope that the current LAGOP leadership isn’t trying to purposely sink the Romney campaign, because it’s hard to imagine a better strategy than this one.”
Full article: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/07/louisiana_gop_certifies_conven.html
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