Rooting for Ron Paul

I found this info. at http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=191721

Comment: Republicans would do well to listen to the Texas congressman

National Post Published: Saturday, December 22, 2007

Ron Paul makes a pretty odd sort of 21st-century JFK. He's a slight-built, goofy-grinned 71-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist from Texas, a man old enough to have delivered milk as a teenager to Honus Wagner's doorstep. In interviews, the congressman comes off a little like your less cuddly but more interesting grandfather. He believes the U.S. should return to a gold-backed currency, wipe out the Federal Reserve and most government agencies, pull out of NATO, and eliminate federal income taxes. At live events, he projects extraordinary charisma. When he starts talking in his bedside-manner voice about the harm done by the blind, senseless War on Drugs, he can move a listener almost to tears.

Even on the libertarian end of the political spectrum, some would consider him pretty hard-core -- a borderline anarchist who has devoted his life to destroying the U.S. federal government as we know it. But if you're looking for a modern candidate who seems to have the Kennedy-like ability to weld disparate social elements into a game-changing campaign, you'll have a hard time making a stronger choice this year than Ron Paul.

He is a Depression-era country boy who has somehow built what may be the strongest Internet following of any 2008 candidate for the presidency -- at any rate, it is the loudest. Cheques from gun-control opponents who admire his strong Second Amendment stance flow into his coffers alongside equally large cheques from peaceniks impressed by his stance against the Second Gulf War. He's an "isolationist" who has thousands of expatriate and libertarian supporters in Europe. By some accounts, his following amongst active-service soldiers abroad towers over those of other Republicans.

In most official polls of Republican voters, either nationwide or in early primary states, he has yet to crack double digits -- yet he now holds the all-time U.S. political record for fundraising in a single day, raising $6-million on Dec. 16, and he has summoned up an astonishing $18-million in the fourth quarter of the calendar year.

Will all this money and energy amount to anything in the end? Republicans on the ground in New Hampshire, which holds the country's first primaries Jan. 8, are warning the national leadership that it is impossible to guess. Congressman Paul may actually be stronger with independent voters than with Republicans, and those independents make up more than 40% of the electorate in the tiny New England state.

It's the same terrain on which John McCain delivered a surprise 49%-30% hiding of George W. Bush in 2000, and where Pat Buchanan edged out Bob Dole in 1996 with his appeal to the "pitchfork-wielding peasants." In other words, it's a playground for "mavericks," and nobody fits the description better than Dr. Paul.

Looking on the Republican race as Canadian outsiders, we're rooting him on -- if not to win (which he won't), then to at least grab his party's bloated, big-spending Bush-ite establishment by the lapels and slap it around a little.

Notwithstanding Dr. Paul's eccentric-- and, many would argue, dangerous -- views on foreign policy, the GOP does occasionally needs a reminder of its roots in limited government and the Constitution. Ron Paul won't be the next president, but the next president will have to take notice of what he has achieved by means of nothing more than patience, plain speaking and stubborn integrity.