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"FacebookPinterest\n\nOne might have expected dire conflict outside of last night's Republican Presidential Debate here in Florida. WUSF, Tampa Bay's NPR affiliate, reported protesters lining the roadside and slowing traffic on University of South Florida streets. Police worried about the line between safety and free speech on a public campus. And the Students for a Democratic Society protested the administration building. No, not SDS Classic. A new one, without the flavor.\n\nElectoral battles require antagonists. If just one side is in attendance, conflict only occurs when it's riven by self-examination\u2014Decision 2012, written by Woody Allen. While other candidates traveled all over Florida and marshaled followers for in-person appearances, Ron Paul is making his stand at these televised face-offs. And hours before debate time, his supporters outnumbered opponents by about twenty to one. So much for conflict.\n\nRoads were clear and parking plentiful. As one rounded the corner to the debate hall, a dozen Gingrich supporters came into view. Most were post-menopausal women in capri pants, and they cheered and waved their signs at every charter bus that passed by, even ones lit on the inside and empty. Earlier in the day, there had supposedly been a contingent of satirical middle-aged Ladies for Gingrich, who longed to be the women in his life he could abandon, but these were not those women. Their pants were made from the same material used for compact umbrellas you can cinch in a tiny bag and fit in your pocket.\n\nUp the road from them stood a contingent from the only openly pro-Obama group on hand, the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Seminole. Forty people held signs supporting the DREAM Act, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, sang the Star Spangled Banner and chanted in Spanish. The fringes of Paul's group and all twelve of Romney's stared at them in impotent disgust, as if the electoral process were a giant shared elevator that they'd just Hispanically farted in. But an hour before debate time, the Caucus were already packing it in, organizers handing each other their cards, congratulating each other on organizing, like turning to your spouse and child at the lunch table and saying, \"We should do this again soon\u2014let's email about dinner.\"\n\nPaul's supporters were impressive. They spanned both sides of the road for two blocks, with a civilian Humvee and a converted Army transport called the \"Budweiser Armed Services Truck for Ron Paul\" circling the block, waving placards, displaying a scrolling \"RON PAUL\" LED screen and honking horns. There were even two assholes in a banana-yellow Camaro.\n\nMost Paul groups are a mid bag, but they exhibit familiar characters. There are the conspiracists: \"Where's the media?\" yelled a few outraged supporters, as they walked past me and my photographer buddy Jon. \"Hey, I'm the media,\" I said. They gave me a glance and went back to castigating the barricades set 200 feet away from where the national press had taken up residence.\n\nOthers would not speak on the record: the media whose coverage they wanted was one they didn't trust. Such was the case with three non-white Muslim Paul supporters\u2014two black guys and one Pakistani\u2014who admired his anti-war stance. Paul's fans tend to be monochromatic, so they stood out. There were the dudes who looked like bikers and military-surplus shoppers, grumbling about entitlements and guns. Next to them stood the classic \"fuck you, got mine\" business major types; one guy wearing an enviably swank Polo shirt informed a nodding Romney supporter, \"They prefer welfare to work. Did you know you can sign up for welfare and get $100?\" Ah, poverty: what a great racket.\n\nEveryone went individually apeshit when Paul's motorcade rolled past. It was like a strict constructionist version of A Hard Day's Night. Paul fans raised arms at the roadside and shouted across to each other, \"RON!\" \"PAUL!\" in sharp and impressive cadence. Chants changed by the minute. I lit a cigarette, taking a break to watch. Two Paul backers approached me to ask me to redistribute smokes to them.\n\nA man wearing a VETERANS FOR RON PAUL shirt and carrying a bullhorn announced it was time to get on the move. We walked up a hillock where earlier I'd met the only person I'd seen wearing an Obama t-shirt. He'd stood in the shadows, the Obama symbol peeking through the gap in his unbuttoned blazer. Even at thirty paces, Romney's bro platoon had seen it, yelling \"idiot!\" and \"fuckhead!\" at him.\n\nThe lone Obaman on the grassy knoll was a lapsed Republican named Mike Greeson, and he wasn't bothered by the attention. \"I admit I'm a little disappointed with the man,\" he said, \"but I'm not embarrassed. I don't love the Democrats, but [the Republicans] scare me.\" Mostly, he was fascinated by the political energy. \"This is the most activity I've seen here in over 30 years. Not since the SDS.\" He meant the original one.\n\nBecause the NBC debate was being held in a small auditorium, filled only with Florida political swells, campaign stooges and TV suckups, all activity centered on a tented area where the debate would air via loudspeaker and TV. Walking there was like saying goodbye to a groom, only to stand around and wait on the world's worst wedding reception.\n\nThis arrangement defined the night's sense of fragmentation. In many political events, protesters are hidden from cameras in \"free-speech\" areas, making a mockery of the term. Here, everyone could protest wherever they wanted\u2014sequestered from the debate and meaningful media figures, engaging only a simulacrum of the event. On some of the most democratizing grounds possible\u2014a public college\u2014we fleshbags of median-income subhumanity could stand in total equality with one another, because none of us could get tickets anyway.\n\nIt felt like being \"democracy trolled,\" which made the MVP of the pre-debate all the more fitting: pastor Terry Jones, noted Koran burner and mustache-style ruiner. Jones moved at all times within a phalanx of about 12 supporters\u2014three in front, back and each side\u2014all wearing matching white t-shirts and warding off interference.\n\nJones is a man fueled only by instant, dim and indignant HuffPo mentions. The narcotized vacancy in his eyes told you that his was a brain wholly disengaged from anything other than grim, easily accessible spectacle. He blundered past almost all interlocutors without any notice, before sinking into conversation with a person sporting enough Jesus merch to be The Christ's road manager. Minutes after that, he was back on the lurch, completing another circuit, dead to all but motion.\n\nFull credit to Paul supporters. Not only did most of them jeer at Jones' March of Damnation, a lot of them loudly corrected signs' spelling and usage of \"Moslem\" and Jones' absurd comments about Obama's religion. One diminutive woman waved a RON PAUL sign above her head, as if she wished to bludgeon Jones' acolytes with it, and yelled, \"WHO BRAINWASHED YOU?\"\n\nMeanwhile, members of Occupy Tampa followed on Jones' heels. A young man, who identified himself only as Felix and a person who \"has a very significant problem with racists, homophobes and religious intolerance,\" skipped after them, chanting, \"Racist Americans have got to go! Hey-hey! Ho-ho!\" While his Air Force fatigues made him seem like a classic heartland American type, the camouflage handkerchief over his face probably made him look unsettlingly like a terrorist to the harried Jones claque.\n\nOther Occupy Tampa members moved to flank Jones' group and stand, arms locked, singing, \"We Shall Overcome,\" forcing them either to press through violently or walk onto the grass. A thin Jones supporter, skin almost like wax paper, began wailing about FREE EXPRESSION and how he was being blocked on a FREE SIDEWALK, growing ever more plaintive until one of the Jones placards collided suddenly with the body of an Occupy Tampa member and a brief shoving match broke out.\n\nTensions dissipated as the 9:00 p.m. debate start time neared. A man whose tan-lines, fanny-pack and mustache fairly shrieked \"closeted and on vacation\" burst into the crowd, waving a \"JEWS FOR NEWT\" sign and told the Occupiers, \"I've GOT a job. You need to suck a DICK.\" There had been other people with \"JEWS FOR NEWT\" signs earlier, mostly walking briskly toward anyone who had a nametag and might be media, but only he had reemerged. He spat on a woman to my right and yelled, \"Burn the Koran!\" before wobbling away, Occupiers in pursuit, his fanny pack bouncing from hip to hip.\n\nPerhaps television takes us all back to communal and familial moments of quietly sharing; in any event, everyone quieted down for the start of the debate, wandering toward the gaps in the tent through which the screen was visible. A few stray Occupiers tediously beat drums but were collectively shushed. For the most part, it was a few hundred people watching NBC in a park.\n\nGingrich got laughs. Brian Williams elicited a smackdown-related \"oooooooh,\" when he countered Rick Santorum's self-celebration by noting he was a former senator who had lost by double-digits. The crowd erupted whenever Williams simply said, \"Ron Paul.\"\n\nOther crowd reactions are harder to read. Despite the large Paul contingent, Romney's \"I will not apologize for being successful\" and other sops to the glory of free enterprise elicited tepid reactions. This was a Paul crowd with a median age of probably 22; they were more engaged with foreign policy and the drug war than the virtues of Von Mises. Similarly, despite being a USF crowd, it wasn't a South Florida crowd, and Romney and Gingrich's Castro-baiting registered nothing, while Paul's encomium to diplomacy, trade and learning from decades of fruitless Cuba policy engendered a stunning wave of cheers.\n\nCollege is an unreal enough place even in the most enlightened of circumstances, which means it has almost zero bearing on a muddy and relentlessly stupid process like a presidential election. Ron Paul won the night on this Tampa campus, but it's impossible to discount the environment\u2014both where the debate was held, and the fact that all the candidates gave us a war to which almost nobody came.\n\nMobutu is the founder of Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, a political blogger for Vice and an occasional contributor to Deadspin and The Classical. He enjoys playing with his dogs and has refrained from murdering anyone for nearly two decades."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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