Another good one is this one. You obviously don’t see him speak, but as I say in the post, his method is excellent.
Partly.
Honestly I don’t know. He did tie for second-highest vote percentage in the history of the Libertarian Party, if that counts for anything. Again, I’m not so sure the goal here was winning minds, so much as getting publicity…so even if the former is the “overall” goal, it’s very difficult to gauge just how effective an indirect move like putting the Libertarian Party on the lips of more people is.
Again, this was 1988…there was no YouTube. People barely had VCRs. It’s not like very many were going to catch this program in the first place, and it’s pretty much guaranteed virtually no one outside of the live broadcast viewers ever saw any of it (at least not until decades later, like we’re watching now.) And it’s not like the media was beating down his door for interviews. I really doubt anyone saw this thing on primetime TV (as great as it is…thank awesomeness for youtube, eh?).
But as for Downey, again, either Paul didn’t know what he was getting into, or he figured simply having the appearance on his resume would be useful. It would give reporters something to talk about, without anyone ever really seeing what went down. The worst you might get is a few seconds on an evening news report…but I can pretty much guarantee that didn’t happen. Again, did you ever see any Jerry Springer clips make the evening news?
More than likely what happened was people simply talked about it.
“Did you see the Morton Downey Show yesterday? They had these ‘libertarians’ on. It got pretty heated.”
“What’s a ‘libertarian’?”
“I think it’s some political party or something”
“hmmm…”
And then maybe a TV interview:
“We are now speaking with the Libertarian Party candidate for President, Congressman Ron Paul. So, Congressman Paul, you were on the Morton Downey Show, where things got pretty heated. Tell us about that”
It’s news. It’s something somewhat interesting to talk about. It gets him aire time. Aire time is important.
Yes, that’s a powerful lesson. It’s a large part of the point behind the phrase: “Those on the Left want their opponents to shut up. The opponents want the Left to keep talking.” You’re right in that if you can manage to stay calm and collected you are at an extreme advantage, if for no other reason than the Leftist is almost guaranteed to get emotional and lose his cool (as, the majority of their belief system is rooted in emotion…how they feel about things. It’s one of the only ways a person can hold conflicting beliefs simultaneously.)
They have a few nice moments regarding argumentation in the film Thank You For Smoking…
