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Whatever happened to Ron Paul?

He, uh... well, this happened to him: He is running for president still but he hasn't won any primaries. He has 50 delegates. The end.

But how did that happen? How did Ron Paul not win all the primaries and the delegates, after he raised a bunch of money and had big rallies?

His strategists are searching for answers, and one may be that many who turned up for his rallies were less eager to take part in Republican primaries or argue Mr. Paul’s case at Republican caucuses.

Even Mr. Paul cannot entirely explain why the passion he generated, especially among young people and those his campaign identified as motivated supporters, did not translate into more votes.

“I don’t have a full answer for that,” says Mr. Paul, who says he believes ballot irregularities have chipped into his numbers in some places. He adds, “I think there’s some problem with always making sure this energy is translated into getting to the polls.”

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His strong showing against Mitt Romney in Maine is further proof that the libertarian Texas congressman is not going away. So this is as good a time as any for those of us who view him as an off-the-charts extremist to come to grips with two larger questions presented by his candidacy: Why do so many people like this guy?

And even: Do Paul’s followers have a point?

My credentials in the anti-Paul camp are unassailable, and I have the hate mail to prove it. I haven’t changed my mind about his views. I still think that he’s a phony populist, because his positions would favor the 1 percent more than any other Republican candidate. I haven’t changed my mind that his “end the Fed” campaign is diversionary, and that his advocacy of the gold standard would put us in another Great Depression were it ever implemented. I’m concerned by the cult-like fervor of so many of his followers. I don’t buy his excuses for the racism that appears in newsletters that were published under his name.

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We are the generation that continues to pay into Social Security with every paycheck but suspects we may never see the benefits of it. We are the recipients of degrees that don't mean much from educational institutions that teach less and cost more. We are the casualties of wars that have gone on for over half of the lifetime of 2012's first-time voters. In short, we are the screwed generation. The decisions of those before us has left us with an uncertain future and little opportunity to fix things through traditional means.

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One camp cites Paul's hate-filled newsletters and his libertarian opposition to civil rights regulations as evidence that he aligns with racists. As the esteemed scholar Tim Wise puts it: This part of Paul's record proves that he represents "the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe ... the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man’s property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings."

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That’s the question raised by the suggestion in certain quarters that the real progressive in the 2012 presidential contest may be Texas Rep. Ron Paul. Democrats who fail to acknowledge this brilliant insight are alleged to be either blinded by partisanship or actively in league with that warmonger and baby-killer President Obama.

The latest rationalization by Salon’s David Sirota involves distinguishing between the powers of the president as commander in chief and those requiring the cooperation of Congress. That President Paul would move to abolish Social Security and Medicare and repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964 isn’t supposed to matter because he couldn’t do so unilaterally, while President Obama could presumably ignore the War Powers Act (as some allege he did in Libya) plunging the nation into war “with the stroke of a pen.”

Of course, so can any president. But hold that thought.

Meanwhile, anybody who questions the character and judgment of a politician who until fairly recently peddled “The Original Famous Ron Paul Survival Kit” in his eponymous newsletter isn’t playing fair.

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That said, I believe the argument being forwarded by progressive-minded Paul supporters is significant because it embodies a calculating pragmatism that highlights uncomfortable truths both about liberal priorities and about presidential power.

To review the basic Paul profile: When it comes to government social spending and regulation, Paul is more antithetical to progressive goals than any candidate running for the White House. This is indisputable. At the same time, though, when it comes to war, surveillance, police power, bank bailouts, cutting the defense budget, eliminating corporate welfare and civil liberties, Paul is more in line with progressive goals than any candidate running in 2012 (or almost any Democrat who has held a federal office in the last 30 years). This, too, is indisputable.

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A number of commentators I respect greatly are finding aspects of Paul’s platform to be compelling. Among them are Glenn Greenwald on this site and Matt Stoller at Naked Capitalism. Greenwald points out that “Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits” [his emphasis]. He goes on to provide a long list of Obama’s shortcomings that, he points out, are not shared by Ron Paul. Stoller argues that “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.”

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Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics.
The politics of emotion must appear
To be an intellectual structure. The cause
Creates a logic not to be distinguished
From lunacy…
-- Wallace Stevens, “Esthetique du Mal”

Let’s start at the starting place. Rep. Ron Paul has no chance whatsoever of securing the Republican nomination, nor of being elected president under any imaginable circumstances. Ain’t gonna happen. Even Newt Gingrich has basically said he’d vote for President Obama over Paul. Given that Newt would probably back Vladimir Putin over Obama -- robust foreign policy, after all -- that’s definitely saying something.

So don’t tell me about Paul’s political courage. It’s easy to be a fearless iconoclast when nothing’s at stake. That said, it was heartening to hear the Texas congressman, during a Fox News-sponsored Iowa debate of all places, stress the similarities between the current “bomb Iran” chorus and the 2003 propaganda campaign that led the U.S. to invade Iraq. Paul dismissed as “absurd” Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann’s assertions that the Iranian government’s “theology” would lead it to start a nuclear war for the sake of national martyrdom.

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 By equating the Civil Rights Act, which expanded American civil liberty, with the Patriot Act, which reduced it, on the grounds that both are federal laws with sanctions, Ron Paul displays the moral idiocy of someone who declares that a person who pushes a little old lady out of the path of a bus is just as bad as a person who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus, because both are equally guilty of pushing little old ladies around.

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Paul has a comparable cadre of die-hard young fans and the ability to raise serious online money. Obama not only had that loyal core support, but also a great national operation, and he was a fully mainstream Democrat who had the backing of leading national politicians – and Wall Street money. If Paul begins to rack up delegates, look for Romney's PAC friends and Karl Rove's Crossroads to hit him with everything they have. Sadly, Paul's Achilles' heel to the GOP isn't the racism in his newsletters and his ever-changing story about how it got there, it's his strong antiwar stance and other foreign policy views.

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In January 2008 the New Republic ran the most thorough exposé of the hateful opinions published under Paul's name – that the Los Angeles riots stopped only "when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks," that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "seduced underage girls and boys" and the national holiday to honor him was "Hate Whitey Day," plus various screeds blaming crime on African-Americans – and Reason revealed that Paul mined far-right groups like Holocaust denier Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby to build his mailing list. But the newsletter controversy, along with Paul's hateful friends, drew the attention and wrath of mainstream conservative opinion leaders only when Paul began to surge in the polls.

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Here's Paul on C-SPAN in 1995, talking about his newsletters:

The fact is, Paul has lied like a very old-fashioned sort of politician about these newsletters, and he has been lying for years. He has gone through the motions of public regret about their contents, but has never acknowledged knowing who wrote the offensive material or even being aware that offensive material went out under his name. That's bullshit. Now he ducks questions on the subject entirely (and his supporters complain that it's "old news," because they have no serious defense of the comments or Paul's responsibility for them).

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In Fed-speak, this is known as cutting in half the Fed’s “dual mandate” to curb inflation and unemployment, by taking out the “unemployment” part — the nation's persistently high jobless rates notwithstanding. The ranking Republican on the Joint Economic Committee, Kevin Brady, disclosed this week that he is drafting legislation that would turn the Fed’s long-standing “dual mandate” into a single mandate.

This great leap backward isn’t likely to happen as Democrats remain in control of the Senate. But what it does show is the extent to which Ron Paul’s fixation with the Fed has infected the Republican Party. Anti-Fed rhetoric, once the province of ultra-right groups like the John Birch Society, has gone mainstream with the rise of Paul, who has been surging in the polls and now ranks third behind Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. He is actually leading in Iowa, and a victory there would really rev up his famously loyal followers.

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And it features plenty of them. Watch it yourself, below. It's titled "Newt Gingrich: Serial Hypocrisy," which seems an arch reference to Gingrich's history of serial adultery. But the ad ignores the messy divorces and the Tiffany's credit line to stick to politics, and there's plenty to work with.

It starts with Gingrich blathering on about "policy and values and seriousness," and it then marches through examples of his flip-flops and hypocrisy on each of those points. The ad he made with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, back when he admitted climate change was real, is damning, but news anchor voice-overs reporting his changing positions on the bank bailouts are pretty bad too. We get his attack on Paul Ryan's budget, and Ryan's angry reaction, as well as the GOP voter who told Gingrich he was "an embarrassment to the party." We see Fox anchors and CNBC's Larry Kudlow voicing disapproval for his shifting stands on Freddie Mac, before and after it was revealed he took almost $2 million for strategic advice (don't call it lobbying!).

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"Let me address that for a minute,” the Republican presidential candidate said, “because if you listen carefully, I’m very much involved with the 99. I’ve been condemning that 1 percent because they’ve been ripping us off --” He was interrupted again, this time by cheers, almost drowning him out.

After the usual chants of "We are the 99 percent" and "There are criminals on Wall Street who walk free," Paul quickly took back the audience, not that he had ever lost it. “Do you feel better?” he asked, to laughter.

“We need to sort that out, but the people on Wall Street got the bailouts, and you guys got stuck with the bills, and I think that’s where the problem is.”

It was a masterful performance. Ron Paul — fraudulent populist, friend of the oligarchy, sworn enemy of every social program since Theodore Roosevelt — had won the day, again.

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Ron Paul lambasted the president yesterday, not for being too weak on matters of national security, but for being far, far too strong. After expressing skepticism toward the notion that the U.S. will actually withdraw from Iraq, Paul launched into an attack against the use of drone attacks on enemy targets:

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