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.
This CPAC poll drove Fox into yet another frenzy. One wag on the internet put together a montage of more than two minutes of Fox News talking heads discounting Paul’s poll win. Meanwhile, the congressman’s critics have over the years tried to link him to all sorts of dubious characters, from the 9/11 truthers to the neo-Nazis.
If the guy is such a sure loser in 2012, why all the attacks? In his quiet way, Paul must have tapped into something. And you can get an idea of that something from what Pat Buchanan wrote the other day about the CPAC poll.
After asking "how do conservatives justify borrowing hundreds of billions yearly from Europe, Japan and the Gulf states — to defend Europe, Japan and the Arab Gulf states?" Buchanan answered his own question by making the case that such policies are not conservative at all.
"Ron Paul’s victory at CPAC may be a sign the prodigal sons of the right are casting off the heresy of neoconservatism and coming home to first principles," Buchanan concluded.
Buchanan has put his finger on why the unemotional Texas congressman produces such an emotional reaction. The party establishment has to dread the prospect of a candidate who can unite the youthful libertarian conservatives with the Buchananite America-first types. Such a character might win a plurality running against Romney, Huckabee and neocon Barbie doll Sarah Palin.
And Paul might have the most money of them all, thanks to the support of those young voters who actually understand how the internet works. I suspect this is what all the shouting is about, even though the subject of it all never raises his voice.
J/k...
. Although in the last election his supporters spammed online polls inflating his position greatly but when the election came along he was nowhere. This though is obviously something more concrete although it might be a protest vote which considering the atmosphere is to be expected.
