Editorial
Ron Paul winnable?
Can Ron Paul win election as President? Will the Republicans even nominate him? Could he win with an independent or write-in campaign? And what would a Ron Paul presidency look like?
Career of Ron Paul
Representative Ron Paul (R-TX-14), ironically, has been in Congress for twenty-four years in three separate terms. He won a special election in 1976, but lost the general election that fall (in the Carter election). Two years later he won a rematch with his opponent in the 1978 midterm. He stayed in Congress until 1985. (He tried to run for the Senate in 1984, but lost the primary to Phil Gramm.) More recently, he ran for Congress again in 1996 (the second Clinton term), won, and returned to Congress in 1997. He has been in Congress ever since, but said earlier this year that he would either run for President, or bow out of public life.
In 1988, he ran for President on the Libertarian Party ticket and lost. In 2008, he ran for President again but lost in the Republican primaries. Now, of course, he is running for President again.
In his years between his terms in Congress, Ron Paul’s investment company, Ron Paul Associates, published a newsletter called the Ron Paul Survival Report. (Don’t confuse this with a blog called “Ron Paul Survival Report” by some of Dr. Paul’s detractors.) The real editor-in-chief of this newsletter was Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. In 2008, Reason magazine investigated this newsletter thoroughly after its incendiary contents drew fire even then. Reason‘s verdict: Lew Rockwell wrote all the wacky stuff that came out under Ron Paul’s name. But Ron Paul has never fully apologized for his monumental carelessness. Quite simply, Rockwell wrote many racist and anti-Jewish screeds, and used Paul’s name to advance his highly dubious ideas. Paul let Rockwell get away with this for years. He repudiates those ideas now, but to this day he has never explained how he could let anyone use his name in such a despicable and ugly way. (For that matter, Rockwell himself has since toned down his own rhetoric.)
The Ron Paul personality
The real liability for Ron Paul might be his personality, or the way he says things, and not so much anything he really says. Many who have heard him speak describe his manner as abrasive and cranky. They wonder whether, as President, he could be effective, either as a political leader or as a diplomat.
One other witness gave CNAV another reason why he won’t vote for Ron Paul: his age, and the witness’ impression that Ron Paul has not aged well.
I’m afraid he won’t make it through his first term!
This might explain why people like his son Rand, the junior Senator from Kentucky, better than they do him. Both men espouse most of the same ideas.
Ron Paul’s domestic policies
Ron Paul has some of the most original ideas on domestic policy among anyone running for President today. Some of them might seem odd, but other conservative commentators have sympathized with them at one time or another all his life. The late William F. Buckley of National Review once suggested that the government should legalize all drugs, medicinal or recreational; so does Dr. Paul. Their reasons might be different, but the result is the same.
The issue that has given Ron Paul the most favorable intention is his wish to abolish the Federal Reserve System and restore gold-standard banking. His reason is simple: gold is an objective value, and money should never be political. In fact, Richard M. Nixon’s 1971 decision not to make the US dollar convertible to gold prompted Paul to run for Congress the first time.
Some of Ron Paul’s followers go further: they want to return to full-reserve banking, which America last used in the early nineteenth century. (See also here.) A gold standard would forbid the government to “create” money. Those who favor full-reserve banking say that fractional reserves, at best, contribute to inflation in their own way: they multiply the money supply by the reciprocal of the reserve ratio. That’s fraud, say the full-reservists. (It might or might not be fraud, but a depositor might want a choice in what sort of risk he wants to assume. Furthermore, few depositors understand that any money, once lent, is at risk.) Their opponents counter that loans would be unavailable under full-reserve banking. Loans would be less readily available. But demand deposits (ordinary checking accounts) would not back loans. Only time deposits would. (Anyone could still sell bonds, or take pre-orders on future products, to finance a new business, as businesses often do today.)
Ron Paul has never spoken about full-reserve banking. Most of his followers agree that even fractional-reserve banking would work better with a gold standard than without it.
Ron Paul’s foreign policy
Foreign policy makes Ron Paul most vulnerable, and his old Survival Report makes matters worse in this regard. Today, as Eugene Volokh’s friend David Bernstein points out, support for Israel is today a “litmus test” for conservatives. Twenty years ago, men like Patrick J. Buchanan often legitimized disdain for Israel among conservatives. Ten years ago, the World Trade Center Incident changed conservative minds forever. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and conservatives decided that isolation would no longer serve.
But Ron Paul is the exception. A year and a half ago, Paul made some of the same complaints about Israel that Arabs commonly make. Most of these are false, as CNAV can directly attest. (CNAV has been to Israel; Ron Paul has not, to the best of our knowledge and belief.) To cite only one example, no “concentration camp” would ever have rockets to fire into a defenseless town.
This year, Ron Paul has tried to portray himself as a true friend of Israel. Once he spoke scathingly of Israel; today he speaks of granting that country its full independence from American largesse. But Israel is not his only problem and might not be his biggest. Iran is. So is his apparent desire to avoid war at all costs, or perhaps not to count the cost of avoiding war.
Any libertarian wants to reduce the size and cost of government as much as possible. Most libertarians recognize the three functions of government that Ayn Rand describe: police, military, and courts. Ron Paul understandably wants to eliminate any other function. But he seems also to want to limit the military as much as he can. “War is the health of the State,” said Randolph Bourne, and Paul seems to agree wholeheartedly. But to make such a limit practical, a libertarian (or especially an anarchist, one who wants no government at all) must downplay or even deny the threats with which the military (or even the police) must deal. So Paul insists that George W. Bush’s administration greeted the World Trade Center Incident with “glee.” (His theory: Bush and company saw the attack as an excuse to go, Caesar-like, to war as one would go into a new business.) In last night’s Iowa debate, Paul denied flatly that Iran had any project to develop or produce nuclear weapons. The problem: even if Iran does have such a project, Paul would do nothing in response. Or so he says.
Paul’s problem is so severe that the Republican Jewish Coalition refused to hear him speak, though they invited all his rivals to speak. Perhaps they should not have done that. Had they invited him, the other candidates would have had the chance to challenge him directly, and he would have had the chance to answer. As it is, he leaves people with an impression of him as, at best, naïve, and at worst, willing to excuse mass murder in the United States and especially in Israel. If that’s not true, then he has lost a vital part of his message while trying to translate it. (His most fanatical followers don’t do him any favors. Concerning the World Trade Center Incident, Paul blames past US policies in the Middle East. Some of his followers go further: they accuse the US government itself of destroying that office complex and killing all those people.)
Whither Ron Paul?
Paul has consistently denied that he would “go third party” if the Republicans refuse to nominate him. But several of his followers have said that they will vote for him anyway, even if they have to write him in. The problem: a write-in campaign for Presidential electors would be extremely difficult. (Regulations for selecting such electors vary from State to State.)
If Ron Paul wants to win, then he must clarify his message, especially on foreign policy. His domestic policies will sell easily. (How has fractional-reserve banking under the Federal Reserve System worked out for everyone? Not well.) His foreign policies will not. Not unless he can convince people that Israel will get along better under a President Paul than under four more years of “President” Obama (or eight years of Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, or even Mitt Romney). That will be a tall order.
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Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.
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Did you actually go to Gaza when you visited the holy land? I don’t know that you can necessarily see much more from 6 miles away than you can from 6000 miles.
To Gaza? No. Nor would the IDF have wanted to risk letting an American into the Negev. But: the bus I was on drove through Judea and Samaria (“the West Bank”) to get to the Dead Sea, and then to get up to Jerusalem. I have stood on Matzada, on Mount Carmel (overlooking Ramat David AFB), on the Golan Heights (overlooking the Damascus Road), on the Mount of Olives, and on the Temple Mount.
And I have talked to one who knows what it’s like in Sderot. They get only fifteen seconds’ warning, did you know that? The kids may not have anything as simple as a rock-climbing wall, because: suppose the whistle blows, and they have to get down from there? Fifteen seconds from whistle to shelter. That’s it. And then: boom, boom, and more booms.
You might want to search on “Israel” here on the site.
I don’t know that having rockets to fire is necessarily a counterpoint to what Ron Paul was trying to say. The problem isn’t that they cannot access weapons (indeed there are tunnels to them where they smuggle weapons in) it’s that their is too little food. There are people in Gaza who are being extremely nasty to Israel and taking the lives of Israelis often enough to be a real concern, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t under a blockade so fierce that it is impossible to get enough food in.
No way is Ron Paul “electable” as President. I have no idea why that idiot even ran. He says “off the wall” stuff, doesn’t seem to be dealing with the same reality the rest of us do, and he has screwball ideas about foreign relations. He’s an amusing dingbat that does come up with some innovative ideas….but other than that, he’s good for “comic relief” and that’s about all he’s good for.
The only thing that Ron Paul says that really stands in his way is that they don’t hate us for our freedoms, and he is 100% dead on right about that. More freedom is better, it was stupid of Bush to say and it was stupid of us to believe. We can have the maximal level of freedom possible and it will not call them down on us.
I think you need to read the Koran, and to listen to their actual pronouncements. Actually, the Muslims just shot themselves, and just possibly Dr. Paul, in the foot by actually trying to sue the United States and insist that the United States criminalize the defamation of Islam in America. That in fact is a threat: do this, or more people will die by Muslim hands.
If I were Dr. Paul, I wold cite the Muslim Organizations of America declaration as grounds for changing my mind about whether we are, or are not, engaged in a war of civilizations that the Muslims, and not the CIA, started.
I have read the Koran, the whole thing, I am absolutely sure that you have not.
They certainly don’t like that we can speak ill of them, no religion does, the history of our civilization contains many many similar incidents of Christians punishing others (often with death) for speaking ill of Christianity, even within the US.
I think you have a semi-decent point there, that that is a freedom that they hate, but we gave up a whole lot of other freedoms that they couldn’t care less about under the Bush “they hate our freedoms” plan; furthermore, they told us why they attacked us, and defamation of Islam was not listed among the reasons. No one who has attempted a terrorist attack on the US has ever listed excessive freedom as the reason.
What they told us, was their excuse. And tell me this: did you assume that the Koran is assembled in the order of its writing? It wasn’t. It is assembled, except for Surah One, in the order of length, from the longest to the shortest. The result is a crazy-quilt of chapters, written at different time.
When you re-sort the surat in the order written, from the oldest to the newest, and apply the Abrogation Principle (which says that the chapter written later takes precedence), a disturbing pattern emerges. According to that pattern, the Fighting Words remain in force today and supersede the Peaceful Words.
Children make excuses, subordinates make excuses, politicians make excuses. What use do terrorists have to make excuses? If OBL had hated us for our freedom don’t you think the other muslims he was trying to recruit with his videos would also have hated us for our freedoms? Wouldn’t he have gained tremendously from saying what h meant instead of hiding it?
Terrorists are trying to recruit support. What they say when trying to recruit support is not the same thing as what’s in their heads.
I predict that if we do what they say, they’ll find another reason to attack us.
They want the world. I don’t propose to give them any part of that world where we live.
If OBL thought that freedoms were a good reason to attack the US, then why wouldn’t he expect those from whom he is seeking support to think so as well? Listen to your self Terry, take a moment and listen. Maybe try to make the same argument with something that people erroneously say about Republicans. Share it with us and see how it sounds to you then.
He has two different populations that he’s trying to reach: a large population of gullible people, and a smaller clique upon which he relies for the very serious logistical support.
OBL is dead now. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is very much alive. He in fact is the problem. He has declared it his mission to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and create such turmoil as will cause the Twelfth Imam to reappear and take command.
Tell you what: would you support a repeal of the Neutrality Act, so that those of us who recognize the threat for what it is, can raise our own support to carry the war to that threat? That way, we don’t have to hit you up for any money, if that’s your worry.
More broadly: Talents for defense, and not a mite for ransom or any other tribute.
I am not sure of your age, so you may not remember that the U.S. has been causing turmoil in that region for well over a half a century.
I agree with Ron Paul that they hate us because we have been crapping in their back yard for decades. I guess you might want to retaliate too if your friends and family were threatened or worse slaughtered with the planned collateral damage we call shock and awe.
A policy of friendship, diplomacy and free/fair trade with the world might just work. Our war policy(?)sure hasn’t.
Terry wrote:
The real liability for Ron Paul might be his personality, or the way he says things, and not so much anything he really says.
Geno answers:
I tend to agree. High level politicians have to be very careful about how they phrase things.
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Terry wrote:
The problem: a write-in campaign for Presidential electors would be extremely difficult. (Regulations for selecting such electors vary from State to State.)
Geno comments:
Yeah. In Oklahoma write-ins are not permitted at all and there are no third parties currently allowed on the presidential ballot.
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