Ron Paul supporter hopes lightning will strike twice

Kenneth P. Vogel
Politico
Tuesday November 27, 2007

Ron Paul’s pioneering e-bundler is pushing an audacious plan to raise $2.5 million this week to help the dark-horse Republican presidential candidate get ads up pronto.

The plan, hatched just days ago by 37-year-old music promoter Trevor Lyman, is to get Paul’s campaign past its $12 million fourth-quarter goal a full month before the quarter ends.

The vehicle is a website intended to solicit pledged contributions to be delivered online to the Paul campaign on Friday. Lyman is also hoping to score a twofer.

The appeal used to attract the money is designed to bring more attention to Paul’s noninterventionist foreign policy philosophy, compared with that of his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination.

First, the cash.

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The $2.5 million one-day goal is extremely ambitious, given the nine-day window in which Lyman intends to solicit pledges. By Monday morning, Lyman’s site showed just a fraction of the 25,000 pledges of $100 needed to reach his goal.

“But it can happen overnight,” Lyman said, pointing out he only recently e-mailed his list urging pledged contributions.

It may not be advisable to bet against Lyman, given the online energy of Paul Nation and Lyman’s brief but spectacularly successful track record of harnessing it in ways not seen before in American politics.

Lyman — who had never before dipped his toes into politics, let alone fundraising — was the engineer behind Paul’s eye-popping $4.2 million fundraising haul on Nov. 5. That effort led to the coining of the term “money bomb” and it instantly made Paul, a Texas congressman whose ideas often tend more libertarian than Republican, a part of the calculation in the GOP field.

Originally, Lyman planned to stage the second Paul money bomb over the weekend of Dec. 15 and 16. Those are Bill of Rights Day and the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, respectively — dates meant to appeal to the libertarian instinct that has driven Paul’s cult-like following.

Full article here.

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