by James BuchananRon Paul just added 1.2 million dollars to his campaign chest in an incredible one week fund-raiser. The organizers of the fund-raiser cleverly set up their web page so that it would flash up the names of the latest donors and their home towns. People from all over the nation and US soldiers based all over the world were logging on and sending money to Ron Paul’s campaign. Some people were sending multiple donations just so their name would flash up on the screen additional times so their family and friends could see them donating.Simultaneous with the highly successful fund-raiser was a straw poll in New Jersey, in which Ron Paul scored 72 percent, giving him 11 first place finishes in straw polls. In an extremely quiet acknowledgment of Ron Paul’s popularity and fund-raising ability, one source reports that the RNC has invited Ron Paul and four other presidential candidates to “a special dinner (on Oct. 16th) to benefit the RNC Presidential Trust, featuring our 2008 Presidential candidates.” This is the first time that anyone in a position of power has admitted that Ron Paul is a top tier presidential candidate. Over the last two months, Ron Paul was repeatedly excluded from events for his anti-war position, which the neocons fear like a vampire fears a crucifix.Ron Paul is still suffering from a mainstream media news black out and he needs to do something about this immediately. Ron Paul needs to start running commercials to introduce himself to the American public. He could start with some relatively inexpensive late night commercials on Cable TV as an experiment. If the commercials brought in a lot of new people and enough additional donations to pay for themselves, then Paul should expand the commercial campaign and take it to prime time.Ron Paul is being too thrifty right now. He can’t rely on Republican debates to make himself famous. Not enough Americans tune into those things. He needs to reach millions of new people and he needs to do it now. If Ron Paul could raise 1.2 million dollars in one week from just “one percent” of the American population (which is the number the dubious Gallup and Rasmussen pollsters keep giving him), imagine how much money he could raise if he had five percent of the population behind him or ten percent?The Ron Paul campaign is NOT like the Romney campaign or the Giuliani campaign. Those neocon clowns have gotten tons of free publicity and have been openly called “front-runners” for months now. If Romney spent one million dollars on nation-wide advertising, he would be lucky to add a few thousand luke-warm supporters to his organization. If Ron Paul spent one million dollars on nation-wide advertising, he would almost certainly add MILLIONS of new supporters, who would quickly donate more money than was spent on advertising. I know that the conventional wisdom is to horde up all the campaign donations until the last minute and to spend it all on advertising at the time of the primaries. This would be a HUGE and probably fatal mistake for the Ron Paul campaign. Ron Paul needs to reach out to the American public without the neocon filter of the mass media censoring his message.An advertising campaign could focus on the two biggest issues of the 2008 race: immigration and the Iraq War. It would only take a ten second commercial for Ron Paul to say he wants to enforce immigration laws and he wants to end the Iraq War and bring our troops home as soon as possible. Ron Paul could also mention the fact that he has won 11 straw polls (and typically placed in the top 3 when he didn’t win) giving him a better straw poll success rate than any other candidate, and he could point out that the other top tier candidates are really “Open Borders” advocates, who can’t be trusted on immigration.Ron Paul is such a great candidate that it actually takes time for people to realize that he is the “real deal.” Most Americans are used to horrible Republican candidates like Bob Dole and the two Bushes. It is hard to believe that someone like Thomas Jefferson is running for president and that we actually have a choice. By running nation-wide commercials starting now, the Ron Paul campaign would enable these facts to sink in. Mitt Romney would be wasting his money if he ran commercials now, since people would forget him by the time of the primaries. Ron Paul is NOT forgettable. Any commercials Paul ran now would stick in people’s minds all the way through the primaries. The mainstream media is blacking out almost all news of Ron Paul so he NEEDS to make his own news and go directly to the people.