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Saturday 22 November 2008

Ron Paul, new Republican

An American conservative who loves the Constitution

Christopher Caldwell on the impact of Ron Paul, the anti-war congressman running for the Republican nomination and finding unexpected support on the web

That left Ron Paul, the 72-year-old, ten-term congressman from Texas, to bear the brunt of McCain’s wrath. Paul objected to the idea of toppling Saddam Hussein’s tyranny from the moment Bill Clinton first proposed it in 1998. He has called the present war illegal, immoral, un-Christian and, worst of all, unaffordable. ‘I’ve heard him now in many debates talk about bringing our troops home and about the war in Iraq and how it’s failed,’ said McCain, glaring across at Paul as applause began to swell. ‘And I want to tell you that that kind of isolationism, sir, is
 what caused World War II. We allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement.’

Half a century ago Republicans were the more isolationist of the two parties. Paul is the last of the breed. As such, he has been a punching bag for the seven pro-war candidates. When he said in South Carolina in May that the 9/11 attacks were due to American occupation of Arab lands, Giuliani demanded the floor, and a retraction from Paul. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard that before,’ Giuliani said, ‘and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.’ The crowd cheered deliri-ously, and Giuliani vaulted ahead in the polls.

But something funny happened. The episode helped Paul, too. His fundraising rose. Soon he was far outstripping all his rivals on MySpace, YouTube, Meetup and the other internet sites where political organising gets done and buzz gets created. In a 5 November online fund- raiser — pegged to Guy Fawkes Day — he took in $4.2 million, the largest single-day haul in Republican history. So by the time McCain accused him of breaking faith with the troops, Paul could roll his eyes and ask why, then, was he raising more money in contributions from military personnel than any of the other Republican candidates?

Paul is an American political type familiar in mythology but rarely seen any more in the flesh — a backwoods autodidact. Fresh out of the Air Force in the late 1960s, working as an obstetrician in the hellishly humid coastal lowlands of Texas, he began reading the hard-money economists of the ‘Austrian school’ like Hayek and especially Ludwig von Mises. They changed his life. Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard drove him into a fury, and into politics. Paul got elected to Congress on a platform of gold, truth-telling, small government and respect for the US Constitution. By 1984, when he lost an election for the Senate and left Washington for a decade, he was a guru of radical free-marketeers. These would be his supporters (and funders) when he won the Libertarian party’s nomination for president in 1988 and again when he returned to Congress as a Republican in 1996.

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