Ron Paul Launches (Another) Presidential Bid
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On Good Morning America Friday, Texas Congressman Ron Paul announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination the way only Ron Paul could.
Ron Paul says he's running for president. Maybe he'll do better than the Atlas Shrugged movie
The 75-year-old libertarian stalwart is making his third run for president. He ran in 1988 as a Libertarian and in 2008 as a Republican. But in both races – and his third is unlikely to be any different – he is really running as an iconoclast. And the media is eating it up.
When George Stephanopoulos asked him to clarify his sparsely shared position that President Barack Obama improperly carried out the raid that resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden, Paul went into his characteristic rant against United States’ foreign policy, though he first explained that he was criticizing Obama’s “procedure”:
“I endorsed the whole idea of going after him. I supported going into Afghanistan. I thought we blew it then. We had him cornered. We let him get loose. Then We went and invaded Iraq. We spent a million dollars. We lost 5,000 American lives. We killed many, many innocent people.”
That is the type of position that has resonated with his followers in the past.
Then he addressed the original question:
“Ignoring the Pakistani government doesn’t help us at all. It makes it look like we’re trying to be more antagonistic toward the Pakistanis. They’ve helped us in the past at catching many terrorists.”
See Paul's original statement on the Bin Laden raid here:
As Stephanopoulos pointed out, about 10 percent of Americans agree with Paul on this point.
Some media reactions to the announcement of Paul’s presidential bid have been predictable: He can’t win. “Quixotic” is a key word that keeps popping up, and it’s a fitting term given how long Paul and his legion of disproportionately young supporters have been fighting windmills such as the Federal Reserve and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Paul recently joined Democrats like Dennis Kucinich in calling Obama’s strikes on Libya “unconstitutional” and impeachable. But for his supporters, his against-the-grain philosophy is what makes him so attractive.
This month’s edition of Esquire gives an exhaustive, entertaining breakdown of how Paul has attracted such a cult following that credits him with, among other things, warning the country that the its financial system was on the brink of collapse. According to the magazine's profile, he’s been more influential than mainstream conservatives understand:
The Republican leaders who are putting on this show have been as startled as the rest of the country at the sudden potency of once marginal ideas. But to the kids, it’s obvious. This is Ron Paul’s moment. He’s been warning for forty years that easy money would lead to economic collapse, then easy money led to economic collapse. He warned that the Iraq war would be an expensive and bloody mistake, and the Iraq war was an expensive and bloody mistake. He spent forty years asking Congress to follow a strict interpretation of the Constitution and investigate the Federal Reserve, and now there’s a powerful freshman class of Republicans pushing a strict interpretation of the Constitution and an investigation of the Federal Reserve. In 2009, he slipped an amendment into the Wall Street — reform legislation that forced the Federal Reserve to release the details of thousands of secret loans it made during the 2008 financial crisis — the Korea Development Bank? Caterpillar? — and suddenly polls started showing that Americans disliked the Fed even more than the IRS. Every Republican in the House signed on to his bill to audit the Fed. In Virginia, Republicans have introduced a bill to study the possibilities of a state currency “in the event of a major breakdown of the Federal Reserve System.”
His anti-big government and anti-abortion stances are hits with the more mainstream conservatives. His pro-drug legalization stance: less so. Sure, he was the CPAC straw poll favorite, but when Donald Trump calls you unelectable, you are indeed a long-shot.
The Washington Post blog “The Fix” compared Paul to the television show “Friday Night Lights”: Both have deep, passionate followings, but these followings are not wide enough to make an impact.
In politics like in television, deep support matters but wide support is ultimately what (usually) wins the day. That’s “FNL”’s problem — and Paul’s problem too.
Friday Night Lights is currently in its last season, incidentally, and while we’re on television analogies, Paul’s comments about the Bin Laden raid more closely resemble the Fonz jumping the shark.
At least one commentator (John Avalon of The Daily Beast) writes that while the media focuses on Paul and his son Rand, "viable" libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is being completely ignored. Who? Exactly.
Paul’s announcement may be a pick-me-up for libertarians. The movie version of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus has tanked magnificently at the box office, and the one major positive review came from the New York Post. With a tough political season coming up, and no serious Republicans emerging, Paul seems to have given Atlas just one more thing to shrug about, besides terrible acting.
