Ron Paul is blowing up real good

It's a safe bet that the virtual marijuana, and the frenzy over Paul's current presidential ambitions, would never have happened without the war in Iraq, which Paul has vocally opposed from the start. He first came to Congress in 1976, motivated by his personal outrage at Richard Nixon for abandoning the gold standard and imposing temporary wage and price controls. A child of Pennsylvania, and an Air Force flight surgeon by training, Paul fashioned himself a student of economic theory. In particular, he was a devotee of the counter-establishment economist Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian whose free-market prescriptions for economic ills -- less government spending during recession, for instance -- made it difficult for him to find paid work in U.S. academia in the 1960s. Paul stayed in Congress until 1984, when he lost the Texas Republican Senate primary and decided to return to his work as a family doctor. After Republicans recaptured Congress in 1994, he decided to give the House another try, winning a seat in a redrawn district in 1996. "They talked about how they were going to shrink government and all these promises," Paul remembers of the Republican revolution. "That's been a disappointment."

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Two weeks later, Paul took to the House floor to advocate a complete reexamination of American foreign policy. "An economic issue does exist in this war," he told the House on Sept. 25. "Oil!" By Paul's reading of history, the rise of Islamic fundamentalists who targeted America resulted from U.S. interventionist policies in the Middle East. He was also one of the first to warn about expansions of federal power in the name of war. "The heat of the moment has prompted calls by some of our officials for great sacrifice of our liberties and privacy," he said. "This poses a great danger to our way of life."

At the time, such pronouncements were unpopular, even to many on Paul's own staff. Eric Dondero, a former Paul staffer and Navy vet who now plans to challenge Paul for his House seat in 2008, said that the staff had to work hard in 2001 to convince their boss to support the authorization for the use of force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. "Everybody on the staff was just baffled and befuddled," said Dondero. "It was a last-minute thing, and it kept us all on edge." In the end, only one politician in both the House and Senate, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., opposed the authorization of force.

But Paul stuck to his guns as the debate turned to Iraq. Before the invasion, he raised questions about evidence that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. He publicly mocked the idea of creating a functioning democracy in Iraq. He rejected the principle of preemptive war. He also opposed the Patriot Act. He attacked the Bush administration for abandoning habeas corpus, authorizing harsh interrogation and permitting warrantless wiretaps. He opposed federalizing Transportation Security Administration workers to guard air travel. He was blunt, forceful and not always politically sensitive.

In the Speaker's Lobby, Paul describes the federal airline security system as an extra-constitutional affront to civil liberties, and thinks security should be handled by the private sector. Then he takes a rather un-presidential jab at the appearance of many TSA screeners, a workforce heavily populated by minorities and immigrants. "We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked," he says. "Most of them are, well, you know, they just don't look very American to me. If I'd have been looking, they look suspicious ... I mean, a lot of them can't even speak English, hardly. Not that I'm accusing them of anything, but it's sort of ironic."

This is not the first time Paul has veered into potentially insensitive territory. In 1992, a copy of his newsletter, the Ron Paul Survival Report, criticized the judicial system in Washington, D.C., before adding, "I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal." Under a section headlined "Terrorist Update," the following sentence ran, "If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."

These quotations became an issue during Paul's 1996 campaign for Congress. During the campaign, he declined to distance himself from the statements. But in a 2001 interview with Texas Monthly, he said he had never written or approved those words for his own newsletter. He said he failed to disavow the words during the campaign on the advice of his political advisors. "They just weren't my words," he tells me. "They got in because I wasn't always there. I didn't have total control. And I would be on vacations and things got in there that shouldn't have been."

It is unlikely that such statements will ever become much of an issue in the campaign. Paul's role in the Republican field -- and much of his current appeal -- is focused squarely on the issue of war. He gives a voice to the isolationist conservative tradition that President Bush abandoned with the invasion of Iraq. He offers a chance for front-runners like Giuliani to burnish their tough-on-terrorist credentials by attacking him. And he brings to the Republican debate the mainstream frustration with America's foreign policy. It is a quirky role that a self-styled intellectual like Paul is only too happy to fill.

"I was always taught that I can't change your mind by grabbing you by the shirt collar and yelling at you," he says before getting up to vote on the House floor. "But if you try to understand the issues, learn how to present them, and make those ideas available, someday, somebody might listen. And now I am beginning to think they are listening a little bit more. And that might lead to much bigger things. Who knows what will happen in the campaign?"

For being such a cynic about government and America's economic future, Paul remains an unabashed optimist about his own political future. But perhaps that is because if you compare him to the rest of the Republican field, Paul has so little to lose.

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