Mitt Romney did not flirt with an “ideas” campaign. At least 18 minutes of my campaign-trail recordings consist of Romney reciting or singing “America the Beautiful.” His strategy: Win just about enough Republicans to grind out a nomination in a year that the incumbent might lose. It will almost surely work, so Romney doesn’t need any more help.

You need to understand that I like “ideas” campaigns, and I didn’t want to vote for the obvious winner. Why didn’t I just submit to Ron Paul? Two reasons, and one of them probably makes sense. First, the stupid reason: Paul has run for president three times. You can see a Ron Paul banner in the background of a scene in Slacker, filmed in Austin in the late 1980s (one of the best movies ever made). You can still find pro-Paul outsider art on assorted D.C. lampposts, promoting his 2008 campaign. I registered Republican so I could pick Paul that year. His 2012 campaign is the last chapter of a long, fitfully successful libertarian crusade. It already got my vote.

The other, more sensible reason I stiffed Paul: the newsletter story. When the worst paragraphs of the old Ron Paul Survival Report first surfaced, in 1996, Paul apologized. When they came up again in 2008, he said he didn’t know who wrote them. The media re-re-rediscovered them in December 2011, and Paul denounced them while not denying that he knew the authors. Fine, then. It’s a mystery. Somebody else can endorse it.