Ron Paul is blowing up real good

The rambunctious GOP candidate wants to drag the U.S. out of Iraq, can the war on drugs, and overturn the Patriot Act. No wonder Republican power brokers want to boot him off the stage.

By Michael Scherer

Read more: Republican Party, Rudy Giuliani, Politics, News, Bill Maher, Michael Scherer, Iraq War, 2008 election, ron paul

June 2, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- The antiwar, pro-gold, libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul tells me he would rather be riding his bicycle than speaking to another reporter on a Thursday afternoon. "My vice is that I'm obsessed with exercise," says the Republican congressman from Texas.

But running for president does not exactly disagree with him. All day long, he has been hustling from one press appearance to the next, a high-energy bundle packed into a lithe 71-year-old frame. His brown eyes sparkle with fire as he blurts out one big adjective after another. "Preposterous," he says of Rudy Giuliani, who accused Paul in mid-May of blaming America for the attacks of Sept. 11. "Horrendous," he says of the security screenings at airports. "Tremendous," he says of the Internet response to his presidential candidacy.

We are sitting in the Speaker's Lobby at the U.S. Capitol, a fireplace-studded salon off the floor of the House of Representatives. I have come to find out why so many people care so deeply about Paul, who is to the Republican Party about what Cindy Sheehan has been to the Democrats, an outsider sounding the alarm in unconventional tones and demanding an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. For years, Paul had been the GOP's doddering old uncle, advocating strict small government principles too extreme for most of his colleagues. In the last few weeks, however, he has evidenced the first inklings of becoming something more -- the public face of a small but passionate Republican revolt against President Bush's foreign policy. Paul's dissent is public enough, and his views inconvenient enough, that some Republican power brokers have wondered aloud about ushering him off the public stage.

In a few hours, the Memorial Day recess will begin, but Paul is not in any rush. He appears, in fact, to be having the time of his life. If exercise is his principle obsession, then sharing his unorthodox theories of economics and foreign policy comes in a very close second. "I don't think we have a republic anymore," he tells me, sitting up in his chair. "I think we have a very domineering federal government, where we have a world empire we have to manage every single day."

This is why Paul is running. Though he has no real shot at winning, he has a lot to say. He's the only Republican candidate who wants to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and withdraw the U.S. Navy from the waters off the Iranian coast. He wants America to pull out of the United Nations, NATO, the International Criminal Court, and most international trade agreements. He wants to abolish FEMA, end the federal war on drugs, get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, send the U.S. military to guard the Mexican border, stop federal prosecutions of obscenity, eliminate the IRS, end most foreign aid, overturn the Patriot Act, phase out Social Security, revoke public services for illegal immigrants, repeal No Child Left Behind, and reestablish gold and silver as legal tender.

"To maintain our current account deficit we borrow almost $3 billion a day," he tells me. "It's unsustainable. It will end. And it's going to end in a worse fashion than it did in 1979 and 1980, when interest rates went to 21 percent." I must not have reacted as he expected, because he presses on. "Nobody seems to care," he says. "It will slip back into a government run by tyrants, where you can't go from one state to another -- you have to show your papers. It already exists on the airlines."

Paul has been speaking like this for years, but few ever really noticed. He often addressed an empty House chamber, boring the C-SPAN producers with his libertarian disquisitions on policy. But then he decided to run for president as a Republican, which gained him entry in the crowded Republican debates. And then former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani took a shot at him in South Carolina, demanding that Paul apologize for suggesting that the Sept. 11 attackers had been motivated by the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. "He really inadvertently gave us a boost that was unimaginable," Paul says of Giuliani.

Since then, Paul has been blowing up. The national interview requests keep coming, despite the fact that he is at the bottom of the bottom tier of Republican candidates. Last week, he flew to California to do HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher." "He's my new hero," gushed the liberal Maher to his viewers. CNN has made him a near-regular Sunday feature. "I'm more Republican than they are," Paul said of his fellow primary candidates in one appearance. This Monday, he will go to New York to sit with Jon Stewart on the "The Daily Show." Then it is on to Tuesday's Republican debate in New Hampshire, where Paul is sure to assume his role as the straight-talking foil to Bush-era Republican dogma.

"The big question is how many people out there are sympathetic to my views," Paul tells me. "We still don't know. But we are surprised to find out that it is more than anybody dreamed of."

By modern standards, the Paul campaign is barely a campaign. He raised just $640,000 in the first quarter, compared to Mitt Romney's $23 million and Giuliani's $16 million. He has made only one visit to each of the three early voting states, has no organized operation in Iowa or South Carolina, and boasts a national campaign staff of just six. But Paul's supporters, who number in the untold thousands, are certainly making their virtual mark.

They have begun to dominate the Republican presidential race on the Internet, though there is no evidence yet that the buzz will translate at the polls. Paul's campaign now has roughly twice as many YouTube subscribers (12,000) as Barack Obama, and more than twice as many as all the other Republican candidates combined. Paul regularly wins unscientific online polls, while barely causing a blip in the scientific offline ones. His name is among the most searched terms on Technorati, the blog search engine. Before his appearance on Maher's show, online activists used the Web site Eventful.com to organize an impromptu rally for him outside the studio.

"The toothpaste is out of the tube," says Kent Snyder, a former telecom executive who is chairman of the Paul campaign. Snyder helped manage Paul's relatively insignificant 1988 White House run as the Libertarian Party candidate. Paul came in third in that election, with 431,499 votes, or .47 percent of the electorate, which was better than Lyndon LaRouche's .03 percent. Back then, there was no way to easily organize national support on a shoestring budget. "We were doing faxes and phone trees," Snyder says. Now Paul's supporters are doing the work on their own, bombarding news organizations with demands that Paul get more coverage, setting up Web sites like RonPaulLibrary.org in honor of Paul's writings, and laying the groundwork for an antiwar protest campaign in the spirit of Howard Dean, circa 2003.

The online outpouring has, in some ways, forced the campaign to play catch-up. Travel to Second Life, the online virtual-reality social networking site, and you will find a Ron Paul campaign headquarters, above which hovers a virtual libertarian bar with a marijuana plant growing behind one of the couches. (Paul does not advocate smoking pot, though he is sympathetic to medical marijuana; he sees the war on drugs as a costly failure that takes away civil liberties.) "No one on the campaign has ever seen it," campaign spokesman Jesse Benton says of the virtual weed. Benton tried to visit the Second Life site, but could not figure out how to move around in the virtual space. "After 45 minutes, I couldn't get out of the second room on that island," Benton said. Like so much else in the Paul campaign, the virtual headquarters was created by an enthusiastic supporter, independently.

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