“Crashing” the Party?

Today, the New York Times has a story about Ron Paul, his movement and the progress Paul supporters have made in reshaping the Republican Party. Typical of what you might expect from the NYT, it says Paul supporters are “crashing” the party. Reason’s Brian Doherty sets them straight:

NYT:

In Minnesota, Paulites stormed the Republican gathering in St. Cloud last weekend, bumping aside two conventional Republican candidates to choose one of their own, Kurt P. Bills, a high school economics teacher, to challenge Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, this fall.

Backers of Mr. Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, crashed Republican conventions in Iowa, Maine, Minnesota and Nevada in recent weeks, snatching up the lion’s share of delegate slots for the Republican National Convention in Tampa this August, a potential headache for the national party and its presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney.

Reason/Doherty:

It’s not “crashing,” New York Times. These conventions are open to Republicans of all sorts to follow the rules and vote as they wish. Winning elections on any level is not “crashing.” It’s succeeding at politics, which the Ron Paul people are proving unexpectedly good at. Ahem, OK, back to the Times‘s wisdom:

NYT:

And Paulite candidates for Congress are sprouting up from Florida to Virginia to Colorado, challenging sitting Republicans and preaching the gospel of radically smaller government, an end to the Federal Reserve, restraints on Bush-era antiterrorism laws and a pullback from foreign military adventures.

“I’d call it a strict constitutional approach,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and Ron Paul’s son. “And I think it’s spreading.”