Marokai is right. Paul is a coward.
If Ron Paul had attacked Mitt Romney during the primaries, he would not have been the nominee. He was the only one in the field of Anti-Romneys with both the money and organization to do it and he was dead silent. And it wasn't out of nobility of not attacking other candidates, because he used these powers to help destroy Rick Perry in debates and advertisements in the Fall of 2011.
To play devil's advocate, it's not like Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich would have been more desirable choices for Ron Paul than Mitt Romney. Unless you think Ron Paul could have been the nominee by attacking Romney's record and simply chose not to.
Paul wouldn't have been marginalized in a Santorum or Gingrich nominating convention. He would have been able to build solid voice over the GOP platform and he would have had a great shot to be a meaningful third party candidate with a divisive major party nominee as opposed to a boring one.
You kidding? Gingrich personally detested Paul, and they had a long history to boot. The last time Gingrich interacted in a big way with Paul was when he (and the rest of the Republican establishment of the time) tried to support a Democrat who switched parties against him. Gingrich wouldn't just marginalize Paul, he'd mock him openly at the convention and find a way to have his delegates tossed out.
Santorum might personally let Paul delegates be present, but his platform is quite a bit worse than even Romney's to Paul supporters. Also, if circumstances came together to let Santorum take the nomination because of Paul, the people from the RNC would still almost certainly be pulling moves to silence the Paul delegates as division is not something you want your convention to showcase.
I do think Paul really dropped the ball the last two weeks before Iowa, but it was because of his rather inexplicable unwillingness to attack Santorum or Romney once he was cruising to victory that things went bad, not a desire to protect Rand. He would have probably won first by a decent margin had he tried running some attack ads against Romney and Santorum, and that would have probably left him with far more strength than now, but instead he sat back and let them ride in off the coattails of the "Anyone But Paul" media.
Also, you need to keep in mind that Paul would certainly like to be president, but his top priority has always been to create a movement that can last past his death. Running third party, or strongly endorsing a third party candidate, would be a helluva way to go out, but that would make him a Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot; incredibly important/influential for a year or two, then promptly forgotten about/detested by the people they sought to gain the support of.
At the very least, he's done a decent job of that. In 2008, there was only one person with Ron Paul-esque views (Ron himself) and he only had two very loose allies in the form of Jim DeMint and Walter Williams. In 2010-2011, this group expanded to two senators with fairly close views and a congressman with virtually identical views, not to mention a deluge of state congressmen (such as in New Hampshire, where somewhere between a quarter and a third of the state congressmen are liberty supporting types). Right now, its looking likely that he'll have several new congressmen to replace him by the time he's retired. By 2016 that number will be vastly increased and by 2020 it could very well form a plurality or even majority of the Republican party.
