Ron Paul is a baby elephant

Amir Hirsch, a resident of Boston, came up to New Hampshire to tell Paul about his plan to produce 15,000 pieces of gilded "liberty dollar chocolates," with Paul's face embossed on the front, a symbol of the need to return gold as legal tender. "I would love to get raided by the feds," Hirsch said. "Because I would eat all the evidence." Tom Moor, a 42-year-old musician from Dedham, Mass., came up to ask Paul if he wanted to come to a rally in his honor at Faneuil Hall in Boston on Dec. 16. There were also three day-traders from Austin, Texas, all in their mid-20s, who had flown up Saturday morning to spend a week canvassing for Paul. "This is the biggest bang for your buck, so to speak," one of the traders, Jared Morris, 26, said of the Granite State.

This extraordinary outpouring of enthusiasm is reminiscent of nothing so much as the early months of Howard Dean's 2004 presidential race, when money streamed in over the Internet and excitement coursed through the Democratic base. But when I sat down to talk to Paul in Nashua, he was less than enthusiastic about the comparison. "Philosophically, I hope we can do a lot better, because not many people identify him with getting the war over with," Paul said of Dean. "I would hope that what we are doing is bringing many people from the left as well as the right together to have an ultimately significant change in foreign policy."

Philosophy is something that Paul speaks of often. It is the driving force in his life and his politics, and he hopes it can become his legacy. "Our country has gone astray," he told me. "There are all kinds of problems. People are hurting. They want something new. The philosophy comes along. We offer this. And it's a potential solution." But when you talk to his most die-hard supporters, the ones who have traveled north at their own expense, it's difficult to attach their motivations to any single theory of government. They tend to worry about encroachments on their liberties. They oppose the Iraq war. They harbor concerns about an Orwellian future for the nation, and significant pessimism about the current state of the economy. Many of them talk about how refreshing it is to find a politician who speaks bluntly and forcefully about the importance of personal liberty.

"He's got the brass ones to go where the other ones are afraid to," explains Fenimore, the door-to-door salesman who is leading cheers at Murphy's. To hear him tell it, Fenimore's affection for Paul is rooted in his love for his country as the land of the free. "In elementary school, I fell in love with the idea of America," he says, adding that he is not sure he will be able to afford staying in New Hampshire through January. "I tell people I can't afford to do it, but I can't afford not to do it."

But perhaps the best explanation of the Paul phenomenon came from Rammelkamp, the young man from Long Island who had taken on significant credit card debt for the Paul campaign. He told me that to understand Paul, I had to think of the American people as a baby elephant, chained to a tree. "It realizes that it can only walk 5 feet in each direction. It realizes that it is a slave. When it grows old enough, it is strong enough to break away from the tree. But it doesn't know." He pauses, to let this sink in -- the American people are a captive animal unaware of its own power to claim liberty. "When was the last time you tried it?" he asks me of breaking free. "Maybe you are strong enough."

And so for thousands of his supporters, Paul has begun to symbolize freedom itself. He is the baby elephant who broke his chains, the Guy Fawkes for a new millennium. And with his candidacy, his supporters believe he shows a way out of the morass in Iraq, a way away from the burden of taxation and the fear of economic insecurity, a way to strike back against the creeping power of the federal government and the free-spending culture of Washington. He is a political savior for people who feel trapped by two political parties that have failed to solve the nation's problems, by a political dialogue that often skirts the real issues, and by a federal government that expands its power by marketing fear. Ron Paul, they hope, is the way out. "It's like do or die," says Linda Hannan, a 35-year-old paralegal from Staten Island, N.Y., as the Murphy's celebrations continue. "Liberty and freedom are our future."

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