Don't care as long as it isn't Barract "disaster" Obama or other democrat.

I don't get how all the Republican nominees can be so incompetent (xcept for Ron Paul but he can't win).

How can guys like Mitt Romney and Rick Perry go so far with average intelligence (no Bush or Bachman jokes now please)?

As Kasz has pointed out, money tends to follow popularity, and not the other way around. I mean, Barack Obama more or less came out of nowhere (Illinois State Senator, Illinois US Senator for less than one whole term) against McCain, who was fairly well-entrenched and nominally should have been far better connected with campaign money than Obama was.

Ron Paul is actually less popular than he is made out to be. The issue is that he has a very well-mobilized group of supporters (which is why you see disproportiante support for him on a lot of websites on the internet), but in the end he cannot command real mainstream appeal, which is why his chances never really get up there

To  a Rick Perry comment I read when I stopped to write this post XD

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-sad-facts-behind-rick-perrys-texas-miracle/2011/08/16/gIQAxc3zJJ_story.html

I do NOT want the entire US to be run like Texas.

Anyway, Barack Obama. He did in his first three years more then Bush did in his entire 8. Passed Health Care Reform, Lily Ledbetter, ended Don't Ask Don't Tell, passed Financial Reform and created the Consumer Protection Bureau, the Credit Card Acountability Act (ended retroactive rate increases, mandated 45 day notice before rate increases, and more), ended the federal ban on stem cell research, passed the Stimulus package which according to the non partisan CBO saved and created millions of jobs and kept the recession from getting much worse, he got Osama Bin Laden and ended the war in Iraq.

Now, obviously, Obama didn't do most of this single handidly. Congress had to debate and pass these bills, Navy SEALs were the ones who physically went in and shot Osama in the face. But the fact of the matter is most of this wouldn't (or didn't in the case of Osama), have happened under a Republican administration, especially any of these current candidates. Obama got handed a sack of crap when he came into office, and all things considered he aint doing half bad. Heck, Health Care reform alone is something every president of the past 50 years has been trying to do.

I respect Ron Paul. While he doesn't perfectly follow his own principles himself (really, NO politician does), he's still the polar opposite of Mitt Romney. Says what he thinks, not what people want to hear. That said, his beliefs include dismantling some needed government programs like FEMA, which showed how useful it could be this year when being headed by the right people.

Outside of the peverse satisfaction thing, that's where i'd go to.

can ron paul really end the federal reserve? i don't think so since the federal reserve is THE MOST POWERFUL ENTITY THAT EXISTS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Yeah, libretarians tend to skew into the Tech Savy/educated, Money making... and although you couldn't tell it on these forums.  Atheists.

Any clear proof for that? Because I really don't believe this is true when huge corporations with big wallets can donate as well.

I might believe that the number of donators somehow follows popularity, but not the sum of donations.

Comparing the campaign funding of Mitt Romney and Ron Paul for example shows huge differences:

Ron Paul

48 percent from small individual contributions

Ron Paul for Congress Cmte, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, Mason Capital Management, Microsoft, Boeing, Google, Overland Sheep, IBM*

Mitt Romney

10 percent from small individual contributions

Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse Group, Morgan Stanley, HIG Capital, Barclays, Kirkland & Ellis, Bank of America, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, EMC Corp, JPMorgan Chase*

So are you blaming Jews or corporations/banks? Or both? Is your argument wholly anti-semitic or just partially?

Ultimately, I don't know ...

About all I can say for sure is that Barack Obama will continue to be a disaster for Americans and their closest allies being that he will continue to act against their best interests to appeal to well connected special interest groups or to appease countries that are certainly not allies to the United States. Unless the United States gets a congress and a president that are both dedicated to cutting the budget deficit, the United States will continue to run unsustainable deficits and will (eventually) hit a point where they have a sovergn debt crisis of their own or will encounter hyper-inflation.

Of the republican candidates there seems to be only a few which could realistically be elected, and of those it is difficult to believe that any of them are any more motivated to fix the underlying problems in the United States; and they seem like the typical corrupt politicians who say whatever it takes to get elected.