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| Ron Paul: Another Kind of Conservative |
| Presidential candidate challenges Republican Party orthodoxy |
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Jeremy Jacquot (jjacquot)  |
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Published 2007-05-30 15:52 (KST) |
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Emerging from the back of the stage to a vociferous round of applause from the audience, Ron Paul quickly took a seat next to the show's host, a visible look of surprise on his otherwise placid face. Leaning into him, the host quipped that he had never seen such an animated audience before and attributed the tangible excitement in the room to Ron Paul and his appearances at the Republican debates and other talk shows.
With the recent surge of support for Paul's once obscure presidential candidacy, spurred in part by the tremendous amount of buzz he's garnered online (his name was the #1 most-searched-for term on blog search engine Technorati), the overwhelming approval he met on the show may not seem that surprising. What was surprising was the audience that accorded it to him: the mostly liberal crowd that had come to watch HBO's "Real Time" with Bill Maher.
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| For those unfamiliar with the exploits of Bill Maher, he is the famously outspoken liberal host of Real Time and a risque comedian who has made no effort to hide his contempt for the president, his acolytes and the religious right, amongst other conservative bogeymen. Indeed, in the latest episode of the show he proclaimed President Bush the worst president ever, noting, "And while other presidents have sucked in their own individual ways, Bush is like a smorgasbord of suck. He combines the corruption of Warren G. Harding, the war-mongering of James Polk, and the abuse of power of Richard Nixon."
Yet here he was agreeably interviewing arguably one of the most conservative of Republican candidates, a true red-blooded conservative in the tradition of former Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ). Maher recently praised Paul thusly:"I watched the Republican debate, and I saw this guy Ron Paul, who has no chance of winning it, and therefore he was very honest, and he's my new hero. I used to think he was Rupaul. And then we had him on our show a few weeks ago and I realized he was a completely different person. And he spoke real truth about the war on terror, about 9/11, about Iraq. He said 'you know what, they hate us because we're over there. They don't hate us because of our freedom, or any of those stupid slogans that the Bush people put out.' I'm just wondering why a Democrat isn't saying things like that. Say, a Democrat that could use a bump in the polls." And while he has become an overnight sensation on the Internet for some segments of the conservative faithful, he has also attracted a fair amount of criticism from the mainstream Republican right, particularly right-wing blowhards like Fox's Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, who have repeatedly impugned his credentials and conservative credo, labeling him a "crackpot," for, amongst other things, his virulent opposition to the war in Iraq and many other policies advocated by the Bush administration.
In the second Republican debate held in South Carolina, he was widely derided for his contention that U.S. policies in the Middle East had contributed to the attacks on New York and Washington. Republican front-runner and former New York mayor Rudy Giulani dismissed the notion by stating, "I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11th," to raucous applause from the audience.
It is perhaps a consequence of the Republican Party's shape-shifting and rapid movement away from its core principles during the Bush years that once traditional conservatives like Ron Paul have found themselves besieged by aggressive mainstream party operatives. Though he holds many positions popular with the conservative base, including support for gun ownership, opposition to abortion and support for tax cuts, his mistrust of the religious right and opposition to U.S. foreign policies have earned him the enmity of many current power-brokers. Andrew Sullivan, in a recent posting on his blog, The Daily Dish, characterized the opposition to Ron Paul's candidacy thusly:"We have a real phenomenon here -- because someone has to stand up for what conservatism once stood for. Whether you agree with him or not (and I know few outside doctrinaire libertarians who agree with everything he says), he has already elevated the debates by injecting into them a legitimate, if now suppressed, strain of conservatism that is actually deeper in this country than the neo-conservative aggression that now captures the party elite and has trapped the U.S. in the Iraq nightmare. Last night, Fox News tried to destroy him. Today the right-wing blogs will. My view is that the Beltway has this wrong again, as Byron York is finding out. Paul is saying things many Americans and many Republicans believe." An obstetrician-gynecologist from the Houston area, Paul has built a career out of defying the mainstream political winds, winning his first off-term House election in 1976 following the Watergate scandal that sunk Nixon's and many other Republicans' fortunes. Although he lost the regular election in 1976, he won the subsequent elections in 1978, 1980, and 1982 and then left the House to mount a quixotic and failed challenge against Senator Phil Gramm. He later ran for president as the Libertarian Party candidate in 1988, drawing slightly over 400,000 votes, after which he removed himself from politics for several years before going on to win another term in the House in 1996, where he has remained until this day.
He has always been a vocal proponent of small conservative government, famously proposing to abolish the Department of Homeland Security and voting against both the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the USA Patriot Act. Nicknamed "Dr. No" for his tendency to vote no on all bills he considers unconstitutional, he has often been a thorn in the side of his colleagues in the House for refusing to consistently vote along party line. He has also rankled some by repeatedly refusing to vote for Congressional pay raises and for his strong opposition to pork-laden bills and earmarks.
As many have noted, the chances of his winning the candidacy are minute, if non-existent. Among a field of candidates desperately vying to out-Reagan one another, it is refreshing to see a candidate willing to stand solidly on his own merits, even if it means going against the political current. When one looks at the current crop of Republican heavyweights, which include Mitt Romney, Rudy Giulani, and John McCain, it is not difficult to see why a majority of the base still feels unsatisfied with its options. Whatever one might think of the Gipper, it's hard to conceive that he would've been satisfied bequeathing his legacy to any of the current frontrunners.
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©2007 OhmyNews
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