Campaign Trail  

Ron Paul in the Spotlight

by Bruce Ramsey

If it walks like a Republican and talks like a Republican, it must be Ron Paul, because it sure isn't one of the other guys.

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Three months ago, Liberty said of Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, "We like Dr. Paul, but about the best he could do is be noticed for one idea" — an exit from Iraq — and it was an idea also championed by another putative candidate for president, Sen. Chuck Hagel.

Since then, Sen. Hagel has sat on his hands and Paul has jumped in. Now it is Paul who shines and Hagel who fades out.

After the debate among ten Republican presidential contenders May 15, an Indianan called into C-SPAN and said, "Ron Paul is just head and shoulders above everybody else there." Exclaimed a caller from Louisiana, "The rest of them are just a bunch of puppets." Said a caller from Arkansas, "I feel sorry for the Republicans who have to sit there and actually take in Rudy Giuliani and McCain's insanity. Ron Paul was the only one that actually made sense."

Paul had been explaining the motives of the 9/11 terrorists: "Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. . . . Right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us."

The Fox News guy was taken aback. "Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?"

"I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it," Paul said, carefully not saying that America had "invited" it.

Giuliani burst in: "That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th."

Giuliani's supporters cheered, and the frontrunner (who must have heard Paul's thesis before) twisted the knife: "And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that."

Paul did not back down. "I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback," he said. "If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there."

Lew Rockwell, at the libertarian webpage LewRockwell.com, called this "one of the great moments in the history of modern American politics," and surely it was.

The war supporters were furious. When Paul went on Hannity & Colmes after the debate, Sean Hannity lit into him: "What have we done to cause the attack? What did America do to cause the attack on 9/11?"

Having his loyalty questioned on national television again, Paul was feeling pretty beat up, but he gave the same answer. Then came the online polls, which showed he had public support. Then the emails and viewer calls. Then the pundits.

From the Right, Patrick Buchanan noted that Paul was the only candidate among the ten who had voted against the war resolution in 2002. Said Pat: "Have not the last five years vindicated him?" From the Left, Alexander Cockburn credited Paul with "an intrusion of rational thought" in "a hotbed of stupidity."

Some of the comments were junk. Juan Williams of the Beltway Boys referred to "Ron Paul's conspiracy theory . . . on why we were attacked during 9/11," and Paul Krugman of the New York Times said that every candidate except John McCain had endorsed torture — which Paul had also condemned. Objectivist Robert Tracinski preposterously said on RealClearPolitics that Paul's embrace of "the basic antiwar argument of the Left" showed "why Ayn Rand was right to dismiss Libertarians as 'hippies of the Right.' "

Into the hullabaloo I added my voice as a regional newspaper columnist, opining on May 30 that Paul was right about the war and that Republicans should listen to him. This was posted in several places and I received more than 90 emails, 73% agreeing with Paul. Many of the Paul supporters were sore at me because I had also written, "There is no way this libertarian medical doctor from Texas is going to win the Republican nomination."

That statement won no points with Paul supporters. Wrote one reader to me: "How would you know? What are your credentials? Where's your objective data? As a journalist, you already know you taint an election and help to destroy democracy in America when you pretend to already know who is going to win."

Others had said it. In fact it was a recurring thing. Justin Webb of the BBC had said, "Paul will not win." Cathy Young of the Boston Globe had written on the Reason web page, "Paul has no chance." Columnist Bruce Bartlett had said Paul could not win.

Why do columnists say stuff like this? It is because they need to retain their credibility. If they don't say it, they will be branded as fantasists and shills — and rightly so. Paul was doing great in the unscientific internet polls, but in the scientific poll conducted June 1 for the Washington Post he was at 1%, tied for seventh place with Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, and Tommy Thompson. In the June 7 poll for Fox News, he was at 2%. At 2% you are not going to win.

Fans, of course, may believe. If we journalists would just say Paul might win, then other people might say it, and it might be so. But it is a fanciful vision, which blogger Timothy Virkkala labeled "a mass domino cascade of copycat preference falsification." I am not quite sure what that entails, but I am not going to do it.

Immediate victory is not the only sort. Eugene McCarthy did not win the Democratic Party's nomination in 1968, but he launched its antiwar faction, which took over the party four years later.

What Paul can hope for — and it would be a very big thing — is to lead a group willing to identify itself as Republican and opposed to a foreign policy of preemptive war. When a figure as mainstream as Peggy Noonan writes (in the Wall Street Journal, June 1) that Bush's foreign policy is too "utopian and aggressive" for her, you sense an opening.

But there is a problem. Paul is not merely a foreign-policy Eisenhower. He is a foreign-policy Robert Taft — an America Firster. Paul's noninterventionism goes beyond foreign-policy "realism." When asked about that by Charles Davis on behalf of LewRockwell.com, Paul said, "I'm talking about where we are and which way we move. The realists now all of a sudden look like reasonable people compared to the radical neoconservatives." The realists are often wrong, Paul said, but "at least half the time they may be right."

Paul's more radical stand against world management sounds foreign to most conservatives, and not a little bit leftist. And some of Paul's support is coming from the Left. I had a pro-Paul email from a reader describing himself as "a card-carrying, if completely unideological, lefty." In describing a "meetup" in Nebraska, Paul supporter Laura Ebke wrote that the organizer was a "pro-life green Catholic Democrat." Some of Paul's media admirers have been on the Left as well, including Rosie O'Donnell, who chatted him up on her show; Bill Maher, who called Paul his "new hero"; and political comedian Jon Stewart. Paul won applause from Stewart's audience for saying America shouldn't spread freedom "with guns," but when he started talking about free-market medicine the audience was silent. Paul has a position on the war that appeals to the Left, but he is not a leftist and most of his positions will never appeal to them. He will convert a few, and that is a net gain, but most of his admirers on the Left will not become Republicans.

Paul's base is on the Right. His politics are libertarian — at his May 19 fundraiser in Austin he said, "The sole purpose of political activity, as far as I'm concerned, should be protection of individual liberty." But his message comes with a strong conservative flavor — and he is running as a "real conservative," which keeps him in the Republican tent. And he does appeal to them. The envelope of a Paul fundraising letter sent in early June says, "Time for a real conservative!" The four-page letter inside uses "conservative" 13 times, all on the first page or the last, and "libertarian" not once. It uses the term "truly pro-American foreign policy" rather than "noninterventionist," and it does not mention that he is for withdrawal from Iraq. It does mention that he is for the Constitution, that he would withdraw from the United Nations and resist the push to a "New World Order" and a "North American Union." It also says he considers illegal immigration "an invasion." It all sounds as if it were aimed at the readers of The New American.

Paul offers a mix of conservative and libertarian positions, including many that overlap. He is opposed to abortion and for overturning Roe v. Wade; he is for local-option prayer in public schools. He favors Bill Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military. He voted no on the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act, and he voted yes on attacking Afghanistan and favors hunting down Osama bin Laden. He is against birthright citizenship and amnesty for illegals but says immigration would be okay "in a truly free economy." He is against a national ID card and for the right of habeas corpus. He is for currency backed by gold and silver. He is opposed to trade deals like NAFTA for reasons of national sovereignty. He would oppose military intervention to protect South Korea from North Korea or Taiwan from China, and he does not think Iran poses a threat to the United States. ("They talk belligerently," he said to Tucker Carlson.)

Some of these things have been mentioned in recent coverage, but most people are not interested in them (and they would be, if they thought he might be president). Paul has been in the spotlight for one reason only: because he intelligently challenges Republican orthodoxy on 9/11 and Iraq. And that is worth doing. Particularly it is worth doing from the dais of the Republican Party. Paul's grab for the spotlight would not work if he were the Libertarian Party's presidential nominee, as he was in 1988. The national media don't care about that party, because Americans won't vote for it. In the Republican race Paul is still "something of a long shot," as his campaign spokesman admits, but it allows him to harass the frontrunners and let everyone know that horse manure will not go undetected.

Look at the hay he made from the headbutting with Rudy. Shortly afterward, he called a press conference with Michael Scheuer, who once led the CIA's team on Osama bin Laden, and the two "assigned" Giuliani some books to read. They were Scheuer's "Imperial Hubris, Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror"; Chalmers Johnson's "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire"; Robert Pape's "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism"; and the federal government's own 9/11 Commission Report. The idea wasn't that Rudy would read them, but that the public would. And some might; some might also get interested in Paul's libertarian worldview. Wrote David Beito, professor of history at the University of Alabama, "Generally I have pooh-poohed the view that electoral politics can 'educate' the public in libertarian principles. The Paul campaign is changing my mind."

The Paul campaign has also assembled a cadre of political street fighters. His chairman, Kent Snyder, who talked him into the race, has been an associate since the LP run. For nine years he ran Paul's Liberty Committee, from which Paul recently had to divorce himself, on account of new House ethics rules. Campaign manager Lew Moore was chief of staff for former Rep. Jack Metcalf, R-Wash., a right-wing populist who famously opposed the Federal Reserve as a greenbacker. Paul spokesman Jesse Benton was press secretary for Grover Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform.

Paul's supporters have beaten all their rivals on the internet. After the third Republican debate June 5, when WorldNet Daily had logged 2,478 votes on who won, Paul was ahead with 43.5%, followed by Tom Tancredo at 22.8%. The poll was not scientific, but it was there. "We're more blogged about and more searched-for than all the other Republican candidates combined," says Jesse Benton.

What will come of it we do not know. But it exists. It grows. It makes a noise. Somebody needed to make that noise, and Dr. Ron Paul is doing it.

© Copyright 2009, Liberty Foundation

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