Last weekend, the movie "For Liberty," received two proper premieres at the Campaign For Liberty Northeast Regional Conference and in Manhattan, sponsored by the New York City Campaign For Liberty. 

Without a doubt filmmakers Chris Rye and Corey Kealiher should be commended for their hard work (1 year in the making) on an inspiring documentary of the grassroots movement that fueled the Ron Paul 2008 presidential campaign. Sitting in on both premieres I found myself a bit misty-eyed which would then shift to laughter and at times anger. Whatever it was, I felt that charge I had experienced in winter 2007 when money bombs (the $6 million kind) were falling from the sky. The film portrays the grassroots as a true force to be reckoned with.

However, the Campaign For Liberty Michigan State Coordinator, Adam de Angeli, provides important critiques of the film's subject and stresses that the excessive praise of the grassroots may have indirectly placed a stamp of disapproval to the official campaign staff when the film omits any diagnoses of what went wrong and why we weren't able to see the political results we were all hoping for.

It sounds as if de Angeli would like to see more delegates and other conventional political initiatives to be the focus for the grassroots moving forward. I believe his comments to be important for YAL chapter leaders to read. If we're to make an impact in the political world we must not only educate ourselves about the philosophy of limited government and sound money but the political process as well.  

...there's little explanation given for why, after so many triumphs, Dr. Paul still places poorly in the Iowa Straw Poll, in New Hampshire, and on Super Tuesday. We see so many great grassroots successes, but then, why did we fail? Surely, since the grassroots movement was so wonderful, it must have been the campaign that let everyone down. Right?

And there's the real problem here: part of the reason we lost was that we all jumped in not having a clue what we were doing. We made great signs, we filled rallies, we dropped banners, we handed out literature. But we didn't do enough of the things that win elections: identify voters, build lists, canvass our precincts, work the polls. When we began, most of us had no idea what a precinct delegate was!

This movie documents the campaign beautifully, but it avoids examining the mistakes; it gives us little to teach with. It noted the great walk to Minneapolis, but omitted the fight in St. Paul for us to bring as many Ron Paul delegates to the Republican National Convention. And we had brought hundreds!

Each of those delegates was only there because of the many battles we fought at county and state conventions around the country. At these battlegrounds, the Republican Party establishment fought us at every turn, often resorting to dirty tricks and flat-out rule-breaking to block Ron Paul supporters from becoming RNC delegates. Why the heck was this critical aspect of the conclusion of the Ron Paul campaign neglected?

I think this last omission really illustrates the core problem with this film. The grassroots set out to make as much noise as possible, and at that they were enormously successful. But in doing so, they played into the false belief that elections are all about the media. Had they spent that much energy doing the scarier, less intuitive kinds of activities like precinct canvassing, recruiting delegates, and building lists of voters to mobilize on Election Day, the results may have been much more representative of the real size of the movement.