A Study in Contrasts

Yesterday, The R-J's John L. Smith talked to Former Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury about what's happening at the RNC Convention... And specifically, what's going on with the Nevada delegation. He tried his best to show a brave face, but ultimately Woodbury admitted that there's virtually no chance of the "Ron Paul Revolutionaries" working alongside the rest of the party to secure a Mitt Romney victory.

Yet while Woodbury was sharing his woes with Smith, The Sun's Karoun Dermijian got an earful from another prominent Nevada Republican.

[Sharron] Angle “absolutely” sees the Ron Paul movement and the Tea Party movement that buoyed her 2010 Senate candidacy against Sen. Harry Reid as a natural political marriage — such a good match, in fact, that she thinks the Ron Paul movement’s recent successes validate her political legacy.

“In 2010, when I was running, everybody said ‘No, you’re too extreme,’” Angle said. “But now look, it’s where everybody is going.”

She mentioned specifically the push to audit the Fed, a rallying cry for the pro-Paul camp that they managed to get on the Republican platform last week. Angle had called for it in her 2010 campaign.

“She was ahead of her time,” Jeri Taylor-Swade said emphatically.

Oh yes — Taylor-Swade and Laurel Fee, publishers of Tea Party and Republicans Uniting Nevada Conservatives, or TRUNC, who double as Angle’s jubilant musketeers, were also present at this ladies’ room meeting. (I’m supposed to be catching up with them later so they can give me a copy of their latest issue of TRUNC.)

She's back! Oh yes, that's right. Sharron Angle caught Dermijian in the ladies' room, and she wanted The Sun reporter to remember that she can be just as extreme as Ron Paul! Surprisingly, she even spoke up in SUPPORT of what happened on Tuesday. Perhaps she sees the Paulistas as an essential component of her future political comeback?

Obviously, not all Nevada Republicans in Tampa agree with her.

“It’s very embarrassing,” rural county chairman Wes Rice told the Sun. “We just lied. We all promised to do what we were supposed to do and didn’t do it.”

Nevada wasn’t the only state whose delegates were itching to undo the new rules on representation the Republican National Convention’s rules committee adopted last week. And it wasn’t the only state whose delegates sought to ballot Ron Paul.

But it was the only state in which delegates broke their own rules, eschewing their obligation to vote 20-strong for Romney on the first ballot, instead throwing almost all the delegation’s weight to Paul.

“The spokesman last night really betrayed our state and our party,” said Bob List, former Nevada governor and current Republican national committeeman.

And this, again, is why Mitt Romney is worried about Nevada. With such a large portion of his own party still resisting his candidacy, how again is Romney supposed to "rally the conservative base" to win? It just goes to show how the Nevada GOP is still in seriously dire straits.