Ron Paul – A Lightening Rod
A excellent write up from blog.nj.com:
The talking heads of America are outraged at Ron Paul once again. They dismissed him in 2007, dissed him in 2008 and ignored him in 2009. And now he’s got the nerve to win the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference held in Washington last weekend.
The winner of that poll is often considered the consensus leader in the race for the next GOP presidential nomination. When Mitt Romney won it last time around, he was seen as something of a sure thing in an otherwise weak field.
Well the 2012 field is even weaker than last time around. But across the spectrum, the pundits agree that the Texas congressman has no business being in it. Newsweek proclaimed Paul “probably won’t run again for president in 2012 and almost certainly wouldn’t win the Republican nomination if he did.” The Fox News crowd repeated the “Paul is dead” mantra as if the congressman were a Beatle. As for Glenn Beck, who spoke at CPAC, he termed the winner of 31 percent of the audience’s votes “a crazy, kooky guy.”
Quite an achievement for a man who may be the single most unexciting speaker in American politics today. I mean that as high praise. The U.S. Constitution is a dry, unemotional document. And Paul, as its leading proponent in Congress, is a dry, unemotional guy.
So why do his opponents get worked up into such a fervor?
I’ve been mystified by that since early in 2007, when I first interviewed him. Even though Paul had announced for the Republican nomination for president, I didn’t have to go through a press secretary to contact him. I just asked around and got his home number. We had a pleasant chat about the Constitution.
“Virtually everything the federal government does is unconstitutional, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Basically, that’s pretty true,” Paul replied.
Paul assured me that if elected, he would do almost nothing. I like that sort of thing, but it’s hard to put on a bumper sticker. I expected him to fade away in a field that contained crowd-pleasers like affable hayseed Mike Huckabee and 9/11 fetishist Rudy Giuliani.
I got that wrong. It turned out that young people went crazy over the then-70-year-old candidate. They raised millions for him on the internet. And his candidacy really took off after a debate in which Paul pointed out that Republicans such as Ronald Reagan had wisely avoided getting involved in the Mideast. “I think Reagan was right,” said Paul. “We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.”
This threw Giuliani into one of those fits of 9/11 nostalgia for which he is infamous. The so-called “neo” conservatives at Fox News promptly got into the act and splashed Paul’s comments all over the screen. When that just made him more popular, they reacted by trying to write him out of the race, going so far as to exclude him from a later debate.
In entirety at: blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshinete
