Ron Paul has ended Mitt Romney's three-year run as conservatives' favorite for president, taking 31 percent of the vote in the Conservative Political Action Conference's annual straw poll.
Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas known for his libertarian views, ran for president in 2008 but was never a serious contender for the GOP nomination.
Romney, former Massachusetts governor and also a 2008 GOP candidate, has won the last three presidential straw polls at the annual conference. This year, he came in second, with 22 percent.
Sarah Palin, who didn't attend the conference, was a distant third in the straw poll, with 7 percent, followed by Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor, and Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana.
The straw poll is not binding -- and not necessarily a good forecaster, given that in 2008, John McCain went on to take the party's nomination over Romney
Here's some grumpy commentary from around the right blogosphere:
Awful: Ron Paul wins CPAC Straw Poll
Now, in terms of atmospherics, Paul is certainly hard to take. He is eccentric in many ways. He lacks glamor and charisma. He declaims in a whiny tone. But, he is righteous on issues of spending and debt. One of the most disquieting moments of the 2008 campaign was the last Republican debate between McCain, Romney, and Paul. On the economy, Romney and McCain may have had the glib answers and the reassuring message that America was "strong," but Paul was the only one complaining about government spending and the instability in the economy that would soon overwhelm us. I didn't like admitting it, but Paul was the only one of the three who was offering what could be described as a "conservative" message. Romney and McCain by contrast were talking about how they would reform the welfare state, rather than question its existence.
Robert Costa captures the scene at C-PAC and Paul's place there. Those turning up their noses at Paul (and Sarah Palin to a lesser extent) would do well to ponder why their preferred candidates don't have the appeal of Crazy Uncle Ron: Re: Feel the Ronmentum
Paul supporters were the most visible and vocal throughout CPAC — waving posters, signs, and passing out pamphlets. Unlike the 2012 wannabes, Paul doesn’t play coy: He has a manifesto and wants to broadcast it. Period. No worries about the media spin or whether the speech gets headlines (see Pawlenty, Tiger doctrine). And, instead of the usual anti-Obama talk, Paul framed a hefty chunk of his CPAC address upon a critique of Woodrow Wilson. And the crowd dug it.
Some older CPAC attendees don’t seem to care much for the Texas congressman, sure, but many young activists seem to regard him as a hero of sorts. When he talks about the debt, like he did on Friday, calling it a “monster” that will “eat up” our future, it was with a passion that you can’t fake in politics.
That last part is absolutely right. Paul may be a creepy isolationist on foreign policy. He may get caught up in rants when he's not careful. He may perpetually be one sentence away from declaring Abraham Lincoln to be a war-mongering dictator. But his rhetoric on the moral and political dimensions of the national debt is spot-on and sadly rare, even in supposedly conservative circles. It's a powerful message that people want to hear, but no politician wants to discuss. It's not hard to understand why. Paul is a one-man "Party of No." If you accept Paul's vision of the Constitution, then huge swaths of the federal government should be shut down and returned to the states.
Paul's message is resonating because he's the only one offering it. If he's a problematic messenger, it's because the supposed "respectable" leaders will not offer it.
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