For thirty years, 72-year-old Ron Paul, a mild-mannered obstetrician and Republican Congressman from Texas, has been delivering much the same speech. Until last year no one took much notice.
Now, all of a sudden, everyone is listening. His audiences are packed with kids in RON PAUL REVOLUTION T-shirts, who “go nuts” when he starts to speak, reports Time.
This lot don’t see him as a kindly great-grandfather who has delivered 4,000 babies, but as “Awesome Ron” – a presidential candidate, a hardcore libertarian and a beacon for the disaffected who has conducted one of the most memorable grass-roots campaigns in history.
To say that Paul is an opponent of Big Government understates the case. Favouring a return to the gold standard, he would abolish the Federal Reserve, scrap income tax, mothball the FBI and sweep away the Internal Revenue Service. He has such strong views about federal spending that he votes against hurricane relief.
No surprise, then, that he would also scrap the Departments of Education, Commerce and Energy, and abolish all corporate and agricultural subsidies. The impact of Paul’s diehard isolationist creed on the outside world would be equally profound. America would pull out of all international organisations that “infringe on US sovereignty” (including the World Trade Organisation); abandon its policy of “worldwide imperialism”, and bring all US troops home at once.
Paul’s supporters are “a motley army”, says The Washington Post: he draws support from across the political spectrum, uniting everyone from anti-war campaigners and currency sceptics pining for the gold standard, right through to “another relic of the hyperinflationary 1970s: punk-rocker Johnny Rotten”.
Yet even his supporters are somewhat mystified by his pull. “There is nothing spectacular about the man,” one told the New Yorker. “He’s the most boring little old man.” What, then, can explain his attraction? In a nutshell, the internet, “where his presence far outstrips that of any candidate from either party”, says Time. His name is the most searched; his YouTube videos the most watched; his campaign the topic of songs by at least 14 bands.
If Paul’s campaign had taken place in the pre-internet era, it might have gone the way of his, largely forgotten, 1988 Libertarian campaign for president, says The New York Times. But, as well as raising his profile, the internet has given him serious financial firing power. Supporters have majored on “money bombs”: high-profile stunts timed to coincide with significant dates.
On the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, for instance, Paul’s campaigners raised $6m in a day, shattering the record for single-day fundraising. With some $20m raised in the last quarter alone, he starts the new year with more cash in hand than any other Republican candidate.
None of this means he has a hope of winning. Most commentators continue to dismiss him as an oddity and he’s still polling single digits among likely Republican primary voters. “Ron Paul will never be president,” says The Wall Street Journal, but that doesn’t diminish the impact that his cocktail of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism has had on the US electorate: other candidates will have to trim their sails accordingly.
Paul has unleashed a hunger for libertarianism, agrees The Washington Post. “The laissez-faire agitators he has helped energise will find themselves at the leading edge of American politics and culture for years to come.”
Why “Dr No” wants to return to the gold standard
In the course of a 30-year career in Congress, Ron Paul has earned the sobriquet “Dr No” for his lone stands, opposing everything from awarding a gold medal to Pope John Paul II, to laws criminalising flag-burning and marijuana use.
But his chief political passion has always been monetary policy, says the National Post. It was President Nixon’s decision to take the US off the gold standard in the early 1970s that first galvanised Paul to enter Congress in 1976, and he’s been giving speeches about the evils of fiat money ever since.
Paul’s philosophical roots lie in the most “uncompromising branch of free-market economics” – propounded by Hayek and the Austrian School. They have always set him apart from the mainstream, where neoclassical ideas have long dominated. Paul sees these “hopelessly muddled creeds” as a recipe for big government and a threat to personal liberty – a theme that resonates more than ever at a time when “a credit crisis is in full bloom”.
Much of the detail goes over the heads of Ron Paul supporters, but they are all clear, says The Washington Times, on the fact that Paul “wants money to be backed by gold, silver and/or other precious metals”. Supporters have even begun minting “Ron Paul Dollars”, made of gold, silver, copper and platinum.
In November, FBI agents raided the offices of one minter, Liberty Services, on suspicions it was breaking laws against “making or possessing likeness of coins”. As a political tactic, it backfired dramatically. The Paul campaign has long bemoaned “government abuse of civil liberties” and his critics have always slammed him as being paranoid. That won’t be so easy now.