GOP presidential aspirant Ron Paul will unveil his budget and government reform proposal today, the Wall Street Journal reports.  Paul's plan is a serious alternative to the generally cautious Romney proposal.  Paul's plan will either be met with stony silence by the fossil media and DC's RINOs or derided as politically unrealistic.  Libertarians will cheer, but so should grassroots conservatives. 

If elected president, Paul proposes cutting a trillion dollars in spending during his first year in office.  Mitt Romney is aiming for a paltry $20 billion (possibly less than Cardinals' slugger Albert Pujos will be paid annually when he signs a new contract). 

Paul wants to eliminate five cabinet-level departments, they being the Departments of Energy, Education, Interior, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development (isn't HUD a delicious oxymoron?  Let's think Detroit or Newark.).

But that's not all.  Danny Yardon in the Wall Street Journal writes:

Mr. Paul would also push for the repeal of the new health-care law, last year's Wall Street regulations law and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the 2002 corporate governance law passed in response to a number of corporate scandals, including Enron.   

 Mr. Paul, who wrote the book "End the Fed," calls for an audit of the Federal Reserve and "competing currency legislation to strengthen the dollar and stabilize inflation." The excerpts did not provide more details on how such legislation would work.

When it comes to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, Mr. Paul wants a system that "honors our promise to our seniors and veterans, while allowing young workers to opt out."  He also wants to run Medicaid, the state-federal health care program for the poor, and "other welfare programs" through block grants to states.

And as a nice jab at the political class, Paul proposes cutting the president's annual salary from four hundred grand annually to just $39K.  Public service should be a sacrifice, not an alternative career path.   

Paul's proposal is the core of a real reform agenda, not the milquetoast stuff coming from Romney, who's more about trying to restore America, pre-Obama.  Paul's plan addresses the problem of government boldly (who could see Ron Paul waving a pale pastel flag, anyway?).

Does Paul's budget and government reform proposal increase his chances of securing the GOP presidential nomination?  Nope (let the brickbats fly, Paul supporters!).  But Paul's willingness to go big and bold in addressing the problem of government should be well noted by Perry, Cain, and Bachmann. 

A key to outflanking Mitt Romney is to find ways of neutralizing Romney's money advantage and organizational strength in frontloaded primary and caucus states.  Articulating budget and reform ideas and agendas that move in Paul's direction are ways of firing up conservative voters who are eager to be passionate about one of the leading alternative candidates to Romney. 

Romney's Achilles Heel is that he's trying to run a General Election strategy through the primaries and caucuses.  Party nominating processes are about rallying and motivating base voters, building enthusiasms that carryover into general elections.  Mitt the Vanilla has demonstrated time and again that he can't accomplish this feat. 

Romney is counting on the conservative vote remaining fragmented going into the early primary and caucus states, where his dollars and organization can outmaneuver the divided conservative field.  Here, Romney could well succeed, since he's firmly anchored to a plurality of voters who make up the GOP's establishment wing.

Clearly, Perry, Cain, and Bachmann need to be thinking of ways to coalesce conservative voters.  These candidates and their strategists are no doubt working through approaches for breakthroughs.   

The Paul approach - big and bold - is the prescription that the more viable conservative contenders for the GOP nomination should examine and adopt.  Romney's money and organization can be defeated if conservative voters are coalesced behind one conservative candidate with the guts to proclaim that the federal government needs more than handyman work; it needs an overhaul that unleashes Americans' energy, know-how, and creativity - all of which will create a new American prosperity and better safeguard liberty moving forward.