Ron Paul After Mitt Romney Wins Maine Caucus: 'We Could Call It A Tie'

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, may not have won the presidential straw poll in the Maine 2012 Republican caucuses, but the libertarian candidate has good reason to believe that by the time Maine's delegates are up for grabs, his almost tie may become a win.

Paul’s campaign sent out a news release shortly after Saturday’s caucus results reading, “Ron Paul Victory in Maine!” And although that notice did admit Paul had been nudged out by “eventual winner [former Massachusetts] Gov. Mitt Romney,” it also stated that Paul's campaign team was “confident we will control the Maine delegation for the convention in August.”

Paul lost Maine's caucuses -- or, at least, that portion whose results were broadcast tonight -- by only a few hundred people, garnering about 36 percent of the vote, compared with Romney's 39 percent. But while Paul's campaign team was readying for the races to come, the candidate was giving a 12-minute speech to his supporters and volunteers.

Below, you can read the full text of Paul's speech immediately following the results of the Maine 2012 Republican caucuses and watch the GOP presidential hopeful in the video below.

Ron Paul's Speech after Maine GOP Caucuses [FULL TEXT]

RON PAUL: Thank you very much! Thank you. Just remember: the revolution is only beginning!

CROWD: [Cheering]

RON PAUL: We have a ways to go. But I do want to recognize the staff, and all of you and all the volunteers. The work that's been done has been fantastic. Thank you very much. It encourages me because it's a important issue. Thank you!

But, you know, I have one slightly discouraging announcement: I wish all the caucuses had met today.

CROWD: [Cheering]

RON PAUL: Because I was disappointed. There was one caucus that we were -- we would have done very, very well, but we won -- we lost by, I guess, almost 200 votes, 190 votes. It's almost like we could call it a tie. But anyway.

CROWD: [Laughter]

RON PAUL: The votes will be counted, all the caucuses will meet. But I do want to make a prediction. If I were a betting man -- and I don't have ten thousand dollars to bet ...

CROWD: [Laughter]

RON PAUL: If I were a betting man, I would bet that we will control the Maine caucus when we got to Tampa!

CROWD: [Cheers]

RON PAUL: It would have been great to win out right, the straw vote. But it'll even be greater to win the delegate vote.

CROWD: [Cheers]

RON PAUL: No, and that's gonna happen. The momentum is going to continue, we're not going away. We're going to be in all these places where we're going to pick up, we're going to continue to pick up, the delegates.

For one good reason: We have the message that America needs at this particular time.

CROWD: [Cheers]

MAN: Yeah! That's right! That's right!

RON PAUL: And the wonderful things is, the message is not complex! Everybody understands it. And the message is: Liberty! That is the message. That means we want our freedom. We want each and every individual to have their freedom. Not because they belong to a group, not because they belong to one state or another.

It's because we are individuals, that we are born with our freedom, and we have a natural right to our liberties. It's a God-given right. And it follows that if you have a right to your life, you have a right to your liberty.

Run your life as you choose, and in both a social and an economic means, and if that is the case, the goal that we have is for all of us to be able to keep the fruit of our labor.

CROWD: [Cheers]

RON PAUL: Now, this is not a brand-new concept. It's an American concept. We tried it, it was working very well, and unfortunately, many many decades ago we started slipping away and took it for granted.

We turned into a society that thought only if you redistributed wealth, both by forcing, coercion and lobbying, and ... we forget about what brought about prosperity and production. And it's only free people that can do that.

The understanding of property rights, the understanding of contract rights. And one important issue: for prosperity to thrive, you have to have an honest monetary system.

CROWD: End the Fed! End the Fed!

RON PAUL: And if we don't do it, they'll do it to themselves, because it's not viable. They cannot persist, because the funny money system, the FIAT system, the paper money system, makes no sense whatsoever, and is coming to an end!

CROWD: [Clapping]

RON PAUL: It always bothered me that we who believed in liberty never did a very good job in selling it, especially when we were free and we were prosperous and consuming our wealth.

But -- we shouldn't ever lose this, because it is now that we have to grab the moral high ground. For too long, those who wanted to take your wealth and give it to someone else, or get involved in any of your social, and tell you how to live, and also to get involved in other countries that we shouldn't be involved [in] ... that's coming to an end.

The country is bankrupt, and the most important thing the American people do right now is admit the truth. We cannot deny the truth, and the truth is that we cannot continue this way. We have to either go in a desperately wrong direction, as we have been, or we have to stop the nonsense, look to our traditions, and not go backwards and act as we did 200 years ago, but pick up on that!

Because freedom was never perfect. Freedom has been developed over many, many centuries. It's sad to me when I see some of the fundamentals that have been recognized at the time of the Magna Carta and 1512, um, 1215, and all of a sudden we're in this country now undermining some of those basic principles!

So we have a desperate struggle now to reassort -- reassert -- ourselves, to say liberty is what we want, we know what it's all about, we had it, and we've gotten careless and it's drifted away.

So now, the country is waking up. The country is waking up, for financial reasons -- everybody knows we're bankrupt. I mean, the social programs can't be financed. The world is involved in this! It's a dollar, FIAT standard that engulfs the world.

You think we're in this together -- by ourselves? No! Just look at Europe, the mess they have! They're rioting over in Greece because they say they have to cut a little bit.

So what is the plan? [Ben] Bernanke's over there planning to bail them out, with our dollars!

CROWD: [Booing]

RON PAUL: The debt, when it gets this big, should be liquidated. It shouldn't be dumped on the people. And that is what we have been doing for these last three or four years. It needs to stop!

CROWD: [Cheering]

RON PAUL: But we need to ask, really a very basic question: what should the role of government be? That's the question the founders of this country and those who led the Revolution asked: what should be the role of government? And they didn't like the role the king had.

Fortunate part about our revolution, it was one of the very, very rare times that a revolution, an overthrow of the government, actually delivered more freedom to the people then they had before the Revolution.

Look at the revolutions going on around the world today, that we're very much involved in, unfortunately ... they're ending up even with less! As bad as their governments were, just think of what's happening today.

So we had more liberty, not less liberty, and we need to build on that, understand how important it is.

But the role of government should be no more complicated than guaranteeing the right to your life and the right to your liberty.

What does that mean? It means the government should be out of the economy! Oh, they say, there's no regulations? Yes, you have the regulations of property rights, you have the regulations of contracts, the regulations of sound money, the regulations of bankruptcy, the regulations of don't bail out anybody, you know, that comes to the government for bailouts.

Those are regulations that are truly free market-oriented. But it also means that the government ought to be out of our social lives and the way that we run our lives.

Too, for too long, we've taken liberty and chopped it into pieces. Oh, social liberty, and personal liberty, and religious liberty, some people defend that. And others have economic liberty. It's one and the same, because it's individual liberty. We have a right to our life and we have the right to our con --

CROWD: [Cheering]

RON PAUL: But if our -- if our goal is peace and prosperity, of course we have to have the property rights, we have to have the sound money, we have to have limited government and restraints.

But we also have to have a different foreign policy. We have a foreign policy that is deeply flawed, and it's the foreign policy that always brings great nations down. And nations that overextend themselves.

Even in our history, our recent history ... what brought the Soviets down? When the Soviets came -- you know, I was drafted in the '60s. They had 30,000 nuclear missiles. And we didn't have to fight 'em, thank goodness.

But they collapsed because of their deeply flawed economic policy and their foreign policy of overextending themselves. And we're doing the very same thing.

People would like us to think -- so often in debates, they say, Tonight we're going to talk about foreign policy. The other night, We're going to be talking about economic policy. How can you talk about economic policy without dealing with all the spending overseas? That is why we need our troops to come home!

CROWD: [Cheering]

We need a policy which is constitutional. The founders gave us good guidelines. They said, shouldn't go to war unless you declare it. We have a responsibility for a strong national defense.

But today, our presidents don't come to the Congress or to the people and say, declare a war or not declare the war. They just go to war. Sometimes they consult -- sometimes they don't even consult with the Congress! But they're always overly willing to consult with NATO and take their marching orders from the UN! That's wrong!

CROWD: [Booing]

RON PAUL: So therefore, a foreign of nonintervention, minding our own business ... stay out of policing our world, and stay out of nation-building. That is the road to peace and prosperity. That is what we have to go for.

Under the circumstances that we live today, where we allow our government to grow so big ... governments cannot grow unless they undermine personal liberty. Every time the government writes another rule or regulations, nor matter how it comes about, it undermines our personal liberty.

But it does it in an even more sinister way, because people get frightened, either about foreign policy issues, or they get frightened about economic issues. They think, I'm frightened. The government is supposed to take care of me. And I'm entitled to it, so I have a right to this.

And there are so many willing to give up their freedoms. And we were warned so clearly that you can't be safer by giving up your liberties. We never should have to give up our liberties in order to pretend that we might be a little safer!

CROWD: Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul!

Ron Paul Speech after Maine 2012 Republican Caucuses [VIDEO]: