Over the past week or two, I have noticed that there has been increased discussion about the effectiveness of the Super Brochure campaign. Advocates of them argue that there is no more comprehensive explanation of Ron Paul’s platform, while opponents content that the lack of issue targeting involved in the strategy of mailing them out to all voters allows them to find the issues they disagree with and turns them off to Paul’s libertarian platform. There has been discussions in multiple threads on the Daily Paul along with Ron Paul Forums and other grassroots websites.

The argument over the Super Brochures tugs at what is an unanswered question of the purpose of the 2012 Ron Paul campaign. The 2008 campaign had a pretty clear purpose. It was about educating people about libertarianism, what Murray Rothbard has called “cadre-building”, connecting libertarians together in social networks and on sites like the Daily Paul and Ron Paul Forums, starting the Campaign for Liberty and about the future. The goal was to do well in the actual elections, but more to gain media coverage and spread the message to a wider audience than in hopes of actually winning.

The 2012 has sort of straddled to the two goals. On one hand, the campaign’s strategy from the beginning has been focused around winning rather than maximizing the odds of winning a state to gain media coverage and extending out the campaign to allow Paul’s message to be seriously discussed in more states. Those decisions point towards a campaign focused on winning right now rather than long term goals like education. On the other hand, Ron Paul has continued to talk about foreign policy in the debates and his stump speeches from a perspective and with a rhetoric that screams education rather than actually trying to win. From my observations, discussion on the purpose of the campaign has been equally mixed.

It’s fairly clear that some of Ron Paul’s supporters are entirely in the education camp. For example Dave Weigel’s profile of billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s support of a pro-Ron Paul Super PAC explains it’s all about the future:

It’s what makes Thiel’s support so important to Paul. The Endorse Liberty PAC, the one that Thiel supports, is as idiosyncratic as everything else in the Paul sphere. While Adelson and company have plowed their cash into TV ads, Endorse Liberty has focused on long YouTubedocumentaries about Paul—the latest runs more than 13 minutes—that explain his entire philosophy. In Nevada this month, when I asked Paul about his support from Thiel, he says he’d never actually met the guy. For someone he had never met, Thiel is incredibly generous. In January, the billionaire forked over $1.7 million to Paul’s PAC; this was on top of $900,000 he gave a month earlier. All of this is oddly believable. Thiel doesn’t even say that he’s trying to elect Ron Paul.

“The campaign really is for 2016,” says Thiel, chatting for a little while before his speech. “I think we’re just trying to build a libertarian base for the next cycle.”

But the off the record comments from campaign staff have been finding their way out into discussions and it’s clear they oppose the brochures because they value winning over education, hence the campaigns preference for single issue slim jims over a comprehensive trifold like the super brochure. This video does a good job of explaining the position of the campaign:

Fundamentally, whether or not the Super Brochures are a good idea depends significantly on what the goal of the 2012 Ron Paul campaign is supposed to be. Long term education tends to support the idea of Super Brochures while winning here and now discourages their use. I think there is a compromise goal somewhere in the middle that can capture some of the best of both worlds that I will detail in an upcoming post.