Party Crasher
Ron Paul’s unique brand of libertarianism.by Kelefa Sanneh February 27, 2012
Paul is unflappable and good-humored despite the severity of his message. Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.On December 16, 2007, on the two-hundred-and-thirty-fourth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Ron Paul, congressman and Presidential candidate, presided over a nationwide fund-raiser. This was a new tea party, with a new slogan: “Liberty is brewing.” In Boston, hundreds of Paul’s supporters marched to Faneuil Hall. Paul himself appeared in Freeport, Texas, where organizers had prepared barrels for him to dump into the Brazos River. One barrel read “United Nations”; another read “I.R.S.” The campaign raised more than six million dollars in one day, which was a record, and the event prefigured the protests that became common as the Tea Party movement coalesced, in 2009. The movement, with its focus on economic liberty and small government, sometimes seemed like a continuation of Paul’s campaign for the Republican nomination, during which he won a great deal of attention and a modest number of votes. It’s not much of a stretch to call him the “Godfather of the Tea Party,” as his campaign literature does, quoting Fox News. Ron Paul was ahead of his time.
Paul is running for President again this year, in a field that many Republicans find disappointing. And yet, while Paul is doing better, state by state, than he did in 2008, he has conspicuously failed to establish himself as this year’s Tea Party candidate. Polls have shown that voters who support the Tea Party are actually less likely to support Paul—some have gone for Newt Gingrich, whose denunciations of Obama are pithier, or for Rick Santorum, who is more forthright in his defense of “traditional American values.” In South Carolina, where Paul received thirteen per cent of the vote, behind Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Santorum, he did his best among voters opposed to the Tea Party. The Ron Paul movement has grown, but the events of recent years—the rise of the Tea Party, the fights over corporate bailouts, the messy passage of Obama’s health-care reform bill—have done surprisingly little to raise Paul’s standing among Republicans. Last summer, Jon Stewart mocked cable news channels for “pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist,” and asked, “How did libertarian Ron Paul become the thirteenth floor in a hotel?” The answer is embedded in the question. People don’t think of Paul as a top-tier Republican candidate partly because they think of him as a libertarian: anti-tax and anti-bailout, but also antiwar, anti-empire, and, sometimes, anti-Republican.
“I think parties are pretty irrelevant,” Paul says, and he doesn’t go out of his way to convince Republicans that he is one of them. He firmly opposed Obama’s health-care plan, and he might win a few more votes if he made this opposition the centerpiece of his stump speech. Instead, he tends toward arguments that are almost perversely nonpartisan—elaborating, say, the similarities between Bush’s war on terror and Obama’s. He asks, “Have you ever noticed that we change parties sometimes, but the policies never change?” Even during that first Tea Party appearance, in Texas in 2007, Paul passed up a chance to reassure Republican voters. Skipping over the “United Nations” and “I.R.S.” barrels, he picked up one marked “Iraq War” and heaved it into the river. He was seventy-two at the time, and surely relished the physical act as much as the symbolic one. “Start with that, and then we can solve the rest of the problems,” he said.
The same vigor and attitude were on display on a recent Friday morning, when he arrived, amid heavy snow, at the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor, Maine. “We came where the action is,” he said, and hundreds of supporters—packed into the pews, squatting in the aisles, wedged along the walls—hollered their approval. That day, most of the action was, in fact, in balmy Florida, where Gingrich and Romney were leading reporters on a mad dash, campaigning for the Florida primary, which was less than a week away. But Florida is a big, expensive state, and Paul is running a tactical, grassroots campaign, and so he had come to Maine instead, in the hope of picking up some of the state’s twenty-four delegates.
He is an invigorating speaker, unflappable and good-humored despite the severity of his message, which is that a wide range of institutions and policies must be abolished if liberty is to survive. His toughest verdicts emerge as astonished squeaks, and he keeps cynicism at bay by affecting mild political amnesia: every day, in every speech, he is surprised anew at what is happening around him. In Bangor, Paul called for a moratorium on “illegal” airport searches and for the dissolution of the Department of Education (along with the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of the Interior); he called for the repeal of the Patriot Act and the repatriation of American troops stationed overseas; he called for an immediate end to bailouts and an eventual end to the federal income tax; he called for a trillion-dollar cut to the federal budget. Most pressing of all, he called for the eradication of the Federal Reserve, the rejection of paper money, and a return to the gold standard—in his view, most economic threats can be traced, often directly, to the government’s insistence on devaluing the currency by creating more of it. He asked, “What’s wrong with the idea of taking away the power, from a secret group of individuals, to print money at will”—and before he could say more he was overtaken by the sound of his supporters, who were not just cheering but also chuckling at the insanity of our monetary system. When he finished speaking, Paul posed for a hundred and ninety-seven photographs with supporters; a volunteer uploaded the images onto the Internet. As he left the stage, a local chapter of Youth for Ron Paul serenaded him with “God Bless America.” He listened appreciatively, posed for one last photograph, and then shuffled out, to the sound of a familiar chant: “President! Paul! President! Paul!”
The next day, on the Gorham campus of the University of Southern Maine, outside Portland, Paul wistfully recalled the American Revolution and the days before the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. “We’ve had this great experiment,” he said. “The best results, ever, in the history of the world, and we’re losing it, these last hundred years. It’s drifting away.” During a debate in January, when Wolf Blitzer mentioned that Paul is seventy-six (in the context of a question about his medical records), Paul challenged his rivals to a bicycle race “in the heat of Texas,” adding, “There are laws against age discrimination.” But sometimes he likes to describe himself as part of “the remnant”—a keeper of the old faith, holding on for a new age. Albert Jay Nock, a libertarian essayist, used the term in “Isaiah’s Job,” an influential essay from 1936, in which he imagined “the remnant” as a network of enlightened souls capable of saving and transforming civilization. This is what Paul offers his followers: a chance to get past the insipid illusion of everyday life and join the struggle against an enemy most people can’t even see.
Last summer, Paul announced that he wouldn’t run for reëlection to Congress this fall. In all likelihood, this campaign (his eighteenth) will be his last, although it won’t mark the end of the Paul legacy. His son Rand Paul, a newly elected senator from Kentucky—a libertarian, too, but a smoother political operator—is his political heir. Between now and the Republican Convention, in August, Ron Paul is hoping to capture as many delegates as he can—even though there’s no telling whether he’ll even vote Republican in November.
Paul likes to tell the tale of his political awakening as a conversion narrative, or perhaps a love story. “I thought I was all alone, until I discovered Austrian economics,” he says. He grew up in Pittsburgh, in a German-American family, the son of practical-minded parents who ran a dairy, and who sometimes told stories about hyperinflation in the old country. Paul went to Gettysburg College, and to Duke Medical School, and then, after being drafted in 1962, into the Air Force. When he was discharged, he set up a practice in obstetrics and gynecology (his campaign likes to remind voters that Paul “has delivered more than four thousand babies”), and eventually settled in Brazoria County, on Texas’s Gulf Coast, with his wife, Carol. His interest in economics led him to Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist and philosopher and the author of “The Road to Serfdom,” a polemic on the dangers of government-directed economies. Through Hayek, Paul found his way to Hayek’s teacher, Ludwig von Mises, and to Mises’s American protégé, Murray Rothbard, who grew up in the Bronx and converted to Austrianism at New York University, where Mises led seminars. Rothbard, an original thinker and a tireless polemicist, would also become one of Paul’s political mentors: he was an antiwar libertarian who sometimes styled himself an anarchist, and who eventually found common cause with what he called the “populist right.”
The Austrians, especially Mises and Rothbard, were—and remain—dissidents among orthodox economists. They viewed markets as highly sensitive data transmitters, and they argued that the government, by manipulating interest rates and the money supply, was corrupting the data, making it harder for financial actors to behave sensibly. Policymakers who tried to muffle booms and busts always ended up amplifying them instead. The Austrians insisted that they were in the business of description, not judgment, but their theory was appealing partly because it resembled a moral fable. Even now, when Paul talks economics, he often sounds as if he were drawing a spiritual distinction between the dubious bureaucratic trickery that might damn us and the hard, productive work—no bailouts, no subsidies, no easy credit—that will redeem us.
In 1971, when President Richard Nixon announced that American dollars would no longer be redeemable for gold, Paul saw disaster, and when he ran out of friends and family members and patients to warn, he became a political candidate, which gave him an excuse to warn strangers. For Austrian economists, the appeal of gold is obvious: it is a precious metal that has been precious for a long time, which makes it relatively immune to government manipulation. And for Paul, talking about gold is a way to talk about inflation, which tends to inspire a visceral reaction in voters. Our hard-earned money decays a little bit every day, just as we do. Most orthodox economists have concluded that eternal inflation isn’t necessarily harmful, as long as it can be kept mild. (They disagree, of course, on how, or even if, this can be done.) And while some of them might prefer the gold standard to our current system, few would want to risk the potentially ruinous transition away from fiat currency. Even so, there is something seductive about Paul’s vision of a gold-pegged dollar, holding its value across the centuries—glittering instead of moldering.
Paul lost his first congressional race, in 1974. Two years later, he won a special election (the earlier winner had accepted a job in the Ford Administration), only to be voted out a few months later, and then, in 1978, voted in again. He was a supporter of states’ rights, drawing on a Southern political legacy that predated the Civil War; his vision of liberty often entailed granting power and discretion to state governments, to help them stand firm against federal tyranny. Paul got used to casting symbolic votes: against spending initiatives with bipartisan support, say, or in favor of his own quixotic resolutions to rein in or defund this or that agency. You get the sense, from Paul’s invariably genial analysis, that his political career has been a series of disappointments, most of which seem predictable in retrospect. “I must confess,” he once said, “I was a supporter of Ronald Reagan, because I believed, through the seventies and during the election of 1980, that he did have an intent to cut back, and that he was seriously concerned about deficits.” Paul left Congress after losing a 1984 Senate race, and he left the Republican Party so he could run for President, in the 1988 election, as the Libertarian Party candidate. But some card-carrying Libertarians viewed him, not implausibly, as a conservative—a pro-life Texan, out of step with the Party’s commitment to personal liberation. (The Party platform called for “full rights” for lesbians and gay men, legalization of drugs, and an end to the drinking age.) Paul eventually won the nomination, having fended off a challenge from the American Indian activist Russell Means, but he won fewer than half a million votes that fall, and soon returned, grudgingly, to the Republican Party.
In 1992, as Paul was preparing to launch his second Presidential campaign, he got a call from Pat Buchanan, who had decided to challenge George H. W. Bush. At Buchanan’s request, Paul agreed not to run and promised—along with Rothbard, the Austrian from the Bronx—to support the insurgent Buchanan campaign. Buchanan emphasized the language of “cultural war,” not liberty, and he thought Americans should be protected from economic harm and from “the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture.” (The most poignant word in this formulation is “our.”) But Buchanan and Paul agreed, for instance, that the North American Free Trade Agreement was a mistake: Buchanan thought it would erase American jobs; Paul was more concerned that the treaty created new transnational regulatory agencies. Paul also shared Buchanan’s disdain for Party élites, and his twinned hostility to welfare and warfare, including the first Gulf War—and, a decade later, the second one.
The alliance didn’t last. By the time Buchanan ran again, in 1996, he had made himself unpalatable to libertarians by speaking out more plainly against free trade—he wanted the government to implement tariffs and other programs to help American workers. But Buchanan and Paul remained friends, and Paul, who returned to Congress in 1997, often appealed to the same sense of dispossession that inspired Buchanan’s followers. Polls confirm that Paul does best among young people, but his rallies are also full of earnest older voters, alarmed at the changes in the country they thought they knew and angry at the powerful bureaucrats who rig the system. By inviting these alienated patriots to become part of his “remnant,” and by educating them about the machinations of the Federal Reserve, Paul casts himself as the leader of a righteous cabal—a conspiracy of the conspired-against.
This is an appealing message, because virtually all voters agree that the wicked and the well-connected have too much power, even though they don’t always agree on the details. During Paul’s visit to Maine, he paid a visit to Colby College, in Waterville, where he was introduced by Paul Madore, a conservative activist and his state campaign chair. Madore began his introduction on a combative note, assailing “the A.C.L.U. and other leftist organizations” for “forcing us to constantly apologize for our Christian heritage.” In fact Paul and the American Civil Liberties Union agree at least as often as they disagree, and they have worked together in the past. (In 2009, the A.C.L.U. sued the Transportation Security Administration on behalf of a staffer for Ron Paul’s nonprofit organization, Campaign for Liberty, who was briefly detained in an airport after hesitating to explain why he was carrying a box of cash.) When Paul got to the podium, he thanked Madore for the introduction, but, near the end of his speech, he pushed back. “Liberty is liberty,” he said. “Some people would use it for different religious values or no religious values—just so they get to make their choices.” A few minutes later, before inviting his supporters to pose for pictures with him, he remembered something important. “I forgot to talk about the campaign,” he said, grinning. “I’d like to get your vote next week.”
After leaving Maine, Paul returned to Texas for a few days, and then headed to Nevada. He held a Florida primary celebration at Green Valley Ranch, a casino ten miles southeast of the Las Vegas strip, and the mood was exuberant, even though Paul had won only seven per cent of the Florida vote. He had three days of Nevada obligations, some of them to his wife: he and Carol were celebrating their fifty-fifth anniversary, so he allowed himself a night off to see “The Phantom of the Opera” with her. (Backstage, Anthony Crivello, the Phantom, revealed himself to be a Ron Paul fan.) One morning, Paul was driven across town to a community center in East Las Vegas, for a forum organized by Hispanics in Politics, a local political group. Fewer than a hundred people turned up, and Fernando Romero, the organizer, blamed the hour: the meeting was held at nine in the morning instead of the usual seven forty-five. (“Latinos—hey, man, we got to go to work,” Romero said.) Organizers rushed to roll out some floor-to-ceiling dividers so that Paul would seem to be addressing a crowded room.
The audience was divided between button-wearing supporters and skeptical observers, and this mixture may have thrown Paul off balance. He led with abortion, although gauzy paeans to the miracle of life don’t come easily to him—he has no time for phony political empathy, and not much for its non-phony counterpart. “Life is precious, pre-born life is precious, and I, as a physician, have a legal obligation—I knew if I did something wrong, I was liable,” he said, adding, “It wasn’t like it was a blob of tissue that we were dealing with.”
He suggested that Latinos had been “used as scapegoats” (there was no applause), which led him to a brief consideration of Nazi Germany. He rejected the idea of “barbed-wire fences and guns on our border” (this did earn applause), and then pivoted to the vague promise of “a much better immigration service.” He dismissed calls for a national I.D. card, but suggested that he would be open to a work permit for undocumented immigrants, which could mature into full citizenship after a period of, say, eighteen years (because that’s how long natural-born citizens wait before they can vote). He strained for a conclusion:
Under these circumstances, I think there’s a lot that we can—we can improve our relationships with everybody. But my goal, in my lifetime, is to make the grouping of people, hyphenated Americans, less significant. . . . The privileges that we want, as no matter what group you belong to, is that we want to be treated with dignity and equality and the rules of law, and we want to be rewarded by the fruits of our labor, and we want to enhance this idea of the work ethic, and be able to keep the fruits of our labor.
This is what Paul sounds like when he doesn’t know what to say. Buchanan drew rowdy crowds because he was willing to talk about race and culture; he was the last major politician who made an explicit appeal to white voters. Paul draws calmer—but no less fervent—crowds by maintaining a steady, sometimes monomaniacal focus on Austrian economics and shrinking government. He seems concerned that any acknowledgment of racial or cultural identity would undermine his individualist message.
Even so, Paul hasn’t been able to leave behind the passions and controversies of earlier eras. For much of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Paul published a newsletter, in which he shared investment advice and political analysis with paid subscribers. Four years ago, the journalist James Kirchick published excerpts in The New Republic, and the magazine recently uploaded more pages from the newsletter. The articles seemed designed to win readers by offering them content that other publications wouldn’t touch. There was a judgment that the civil-rights movement was “bad from the beginning,” and a statement that, “given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” An essay from 1993 noted “the disappearing white majority” and the spread of “ghetto values,” and it ended with a suggestion: “Every home should be dedicated to Western standards of religion, music, values, education, dress, and manners.” The essay called for resistance through cultural revival. It concluded with a simple diagnosis: “We need a cultural remnant as much as a financial one.”
When these and other quotes first surfaced, in the nineties, Paul claimed that the newsletter was being judged unfairly. In 2001, in a profile in Texas Monthly, he changed tactics, saying, “Those words weren’t really written by me,” and he has since stuck to that claim, while declining to explain who the words were written by, how they came to be published under his name, or why, if he finds them offensive, he didn’t disavow them, early and loudly. Now he says the contents shocked him. “I was devastated,” he said one morning, in the same matter-of-fact tone he uses to explain the looming financial apocalypse. He was sitting, braced by a pillow, on a couch in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas, looking a bit smaller and softer than he does behind a podium. He had some time to talk before his next outing, a chartered-plane campaign swing through Elko and Reno. “As far as the newsletter goes, I maintain that they weren’t my positions,” he says. “I didn’t have to, sort of, reject it.”
It’s easy enough to believe that Paul didn’t write everything in the newsletter, given his anti-inflammatory tendency to turn almost any question into a debate about the federal budget. But it’s impossible to believe that Paul didn’t know about these articles, especially since many of them were written in his voice, complete with references to his son in medical school and his former colleagues in the House. His own record on race is complicated: while avoiding provocation, he has nevertheless dissented, gently but firmly, from the civil-rights consensus. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and reiterated his opposition less than a decade ago, on its fortieth anniversary, arguing that, by mandating “forced integration,” the act “increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.” Paul sometimes seeks to offset this principled stance by reiterating his respect for civil-rights heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, even as he maintains that their political opponents were right.
In the summer of 1981, Paul introduced a simple bill, with no co-sponsors: “A resolution that United States District Court Judge William Wayne Justice is impeached of high crimes and misdemeanors.” Justice had issued a series of rulings in the nineteen-seventies and eighties that led to the desegregation of Texas schools and, in response to claims of overcrowding and abuse, the reform of state prisons. The outcry made him perhaps the most hated man in East Texas. Local businesses refused to serve him, and his detractors printed up bumper stickers that anticipated Paul’s resolution, and may have inspired it. “Impeach William Wayne Justice,” they said. Paul’s resolution was purely symbolic—it never progressed beyond the House Judiciary Committee—and interest in the issue apparently faded. Now, perched on the couch, he was having a hard time remembering how, exactly, the Judge had come to seem like a grave threat to liberty.
“Yeah, I remember I was real energized back then,” he said, sounding puzzled. “I think it was the intrusion aspect. I’m not sure if I have the same opinions that I had—I can’t even tell you what he was intruding on. I think it was how to run prisons, or something?” Paul thought a moment. “He was probably demanding more protection for prisoners. Since I think we have too many nonviolent prisoners, I might have more sympathy for what he was saying, back then.” He chuckled. Liberty is liberty, but that formulation doesn’t necessarily help when a congressman is trying to figure out what to do about a judge who is telling a warden to treat prisoners better. Paul hasn’t changed his principles, but he has changed his emphasis—or maybe he has come to realize that, in politics, emphasis can be nearly as important as principles.
To see Ron Paul on the Republican debate stage is to be reminded that the Party’s libertarian streak is so thin as to be almost invisible. During the debates, when he warns against threatening Iran, or calls the war on drugs “a total failure,” or observes that “rich white people don’t get the death penalty very often,” he seems like a man competing in an entirely separate contest, and perhaps he is. Last summer’s fierce fight over the debt limit convinced some liberals that the Republicans had become the party of small-government extremism. But in Paul’s view that kind of dispute—an argument about whether to attach conditions to a bill authorizing the federal government to pay an enormous debt that it has already incurred—only illustrates how far the Republicans are from the kind of radical bureaucratic abolition that he would like to see. Unlike many of his Republican colleagues in the House, Paul cares more about cutting spending than about cutting taxes, because he knows that tax cuts don’t necessarily make government smaller—sometimes they just make the deficit bigger.
In theory, Paul should be able to find common ground with Democrats on non-economic issues, and he cites Dennis Kucinich, the liberal congressman from Ohio, as an ally on foreign policy and civil liberties. But he hasn’t found much to admire about the Obama Administration, which has hung its reputation on expansive domestic programs and aggressive antiterrorism. “We thought Obama might help us and get us out of some of these messes,” he says. “But now we’re in more countries than ever—we can’t even keep track of how many places our troops are!”
In “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” (Oxford; 2012), the political scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson take the measure of the recent amorphous uprising. They find that, despite a focus on economics, Tea Party groups often entertain “socially conservative moral arguments” and don’t generally identify as libertarian. “The Tea Party came, during much of 2010, to be (misleadingly) portrayed as a formidable, independent political movement that threatened to overturn the two-party system,” they write. In fact, Tea Party supporters tended to be indistinguishable from conservative Republicans—the energy was new, but not the ideology. Individual Tea Partiers have become influential within the Republican Party, especially at the local level, but few people now view the movement as a threat to the political duopoly. This election season, no viable Tea Party Presidential candidate has emerged, and the Tea Party itself has been all but invisible, subsumed within the broader Republican electorate.
Paul’s campaign faces the opposite threat. He is nothing if not independent, incompatible with both major parties and also, sometimes, with his fellow-libertarians, who might not share his opposition to legal abortion or his qualms about immigration or his devotion to the gold standard. This independence isn’t always distinguishable from isolation: although Paul can’t be coöpted by the major parties, he can certainly be ignored by them, especially if they deem his followers too stubborn to be worth courting.
If Ron Paul doesn’t win the Republican nomination, he will have to decide whether to support the candidate who does. Four years ago, he was incredulous when the John McCain campaign asked for his endorsement. “The argument was he would do a little less harm than the other candidate,” Paul said. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t like the idea of getting about two or three million people angry at me.’ ” Instead, he convened a press conference to announce an alliance between four independent candidates: Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman, of the Libertarian Party; Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic congresswoman, of the Green Party; Ralph Nader, running as an independent; and Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist preacher, of the Constitution Party. When Barr declined, at the last minute, to join the press conference, Paul praised the remaining three—they all pledged to end the wars, uphold civil liberties, slash the debt, and audit the Federal Reserve—without endorsing any of them. Two weeks later, Paul changed his mind and endorsed Baldwin, partly, it seemed, out of spite for Barr. Together, the four candidates won about 1.6 million votes: a respectable sum, but a confusing statement, and a deflating end for Paul’s campaign.
This time, the Ron Paul movement is more ambitious. His famously unbuttoned staffers have been persuaded to wear business attire when interacting with the public, and the entrances to his campaign events are monitored by serious-looking young people with clipboards, endeavoring to make sure that no one gets in to see the candidate without surrendering his or her name and e-mail address. During his time in Nevada, Paul made an excursion to a skating rink in Pahrump, a desert town in Nye County, which is a Paul stronghold—in the 2008 Nevada primary, it was the only county that voted for him. Volunteers in “Ron Paul Rocks America” T-shirts patrolled the parking lot, on the lookout for Paul’s S.U.V. and for a blue sedan with California license plates. (There was a rumor that a man had threatened to drive across the border to assassinate Paul.) Inside, a tropical-colored carpet extended halfway up the yellow walls; a banner gave voters a forum to send their own messages to the candidate. Someone had written, “Thank you to our modern founding father for liberty,” and someone else had drawn SpongeBob SquarePants saying, “Ron Paul is amazing : )” The organizers had added inspirational quotes from like-minded thinkers and politicians, including Murray Rothbard: “Monetary expansion is a massive scheme of hidden redistribution.”
Paul spoke at two minutes past noon, from inside the rink’s d.j. booth, explaining the country’s problems in such grisly detail that he made the coming disaster seem almost like a blessing. “Something dramatic happened about four years ago: the market declared that this country is no longer solvent,” he said. When he was finished, the organizers played pro-Ron Paul pop songs over the loudspeakers (“Ron Paul! Start a revolution! / And break down illegal institutions!”), and Paul spent half an hour posing for photographs and signing books. People were still wandering into the rink—some locals had been told that the speech was scheduled for one o’clock. And so, at precisely one, Paul withdrew from the crowd and returned to the stage to deliver an expurgated version of the speech he had just given. Even the people who had been there at noon sat and listened, happy to hear Paul make the case for liberty one more time.
So far, the Paul campaign is neither a groundswell nor a failure. He is slowly collecting delegates, a particularly unsound form of currency—they are worth something until the last night of the Republican Convention, at which point the market for Republican delegates crashes. On caucus day in Nevada, Paul won Nye County by a wide margin; he also won Esmeralda County, to the west, by a single vote. But he lost the rest of the state, and finished third, with nineteen per cent, behind Romney (fifty per cent) and Gingrich (twenty-one per cent). In Maine, the news was brighter: the initial count put him a close second, behind Romney, and because his supporters know their way around the complicated caucus rules, he may yet win a majority of Maine’s delegates.
Maybe another candidate will make an overture to Paul’s followers—that’s what Gingrich seemed to be doing with a speech he made in January. Gingrich said, “Part of our approach ought to be to reëstablish something that Ronald Reagan did, in 1981, and that is to have a commission on gold.” But Paul’s true believers weren’t tempted. After all, Paul was on that commission, which means he is familiar with its conclusion: “Most members of the Commission believe that a return to the gold standard is not desirable.” If Romney wanted to convert Paul voters, he would have to do something more dramatic; even a promise to audit the Federal Reserve might not be enough, although it would be a start.
There is only one politician whom Paul regularly praises in his speeches—a man he coyly refers to as a “senator from Kentucky.” If Paul sees a future for himself in the Republican Party, it is through his son Rand, who might have an easier time than his father in attracting traditional conservatives to his cause. (During his campaign for the Senate, for example, Rand Paul declined to rule out using force to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.) Unlike most politicians on the verge of retirement, Paul can’t accurately claim that he has nothing to lose by breaking with the party that has been his home for all but one of his years in politics. Hope for his son’s prospects—and a disinclination to put him in an awkward position—might be enough to keep Paul from ending his political career with another third-party campaign. If he split the vote, indirectly helping to reëlect Obama, it might be a long time before Republicans were willing to get behind anyone named Paul.
In the meantime, Ron Paul seems content to stoke the discontent of his acolytes. He doesn’t know exactly when the implosion will occur, but he knows it’s forty years closer now than it was when he first sounded the alarm. ♦
