What is a right-leaning homosexual to do in this presidential election? Start by taking a closer look at the candidates in the Republican field. There is substantial variation, and not just in their positions on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Call it the Giuliani-Keyes Spectrum of Gay Friendliness. On one end, there is Rudy Giuliani, a former New York mayor who has lived with gay friends, favors gay domestic partnerships, and sometimes dresses in drag. At the other end, there is Alan Keyes, who calls lesbians “selfish hedonists,” even though his only daughter is a lesbian. There exists, shall we say, a veritable rainbow of variation in between.

In service to the one in four gay voters who chose George Bush over John Kerry in 2004, and anyone else who might want to know, Salon now presents its first ever Gay Guide to the Republican Candidates.

Rudy Giuliani: The Party Bender

About a year before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani donned a wig and a dress so he could squeal with girlish delight when real estate mogul Donald Trump nuzzled his fake breasts. It was a harmless comedy sketch for the charity dinner of the Inner Circle of City Hall, a press club for New York City reporters. But the mayor’s antics spoke directly to his notable comfort with all things gender-bending and socially liberal. A few months later, after his estranged second wife, Donna Hanover, kicked him out of the mayor’s residence, he moved in with two close friends, a wealthy gay couple. According to one of the men, Howard Koeppel, Giuliani even agreed to marry the men “if they ever legalize gay marriage.”

As mayor, Giuliani marched in gay pride parades, and after he left office he continued to keep up relations with the community, even penning a 2002 letter to one gay group to commemorate the “triumph” of the 1969 Stonewall riots, when the New York gay community fought back against a police raid of a Greenwich Village gay bar.

Since becoming a presidential candidate, however, Giuliani has tried to distance himself from his socially liberal past. On the stump, he now emphasizes his opposition to same-sex marriage, though he also opposes a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, putting him in the same camp as most of the Democratic presidential candidates. In April, his campaign came out against New Hampshire’s civil union law, even though Giuliani says he continues to support domestic partnerships that give gay and lesbian couples legal rights similar to those of marriage. Giuliani has dodged the issue of gays in the military, by saying “now isn’t the time” to revisit the policy, given the war in Iraq. He pushed for a hate-crimes law in New York to punish crimes motivated by homophobia, but he has dodged questions about his support for the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA. As for the Supreme Court, Giuliani says he plans to appoint judges to the Supreme Court in the mold of Antonin Scalia, who wrote a famous dissent arguing that the government should have the right to prosecute sodomy between consenting adults.

The specific issues aside, Giuliani’s candidacy is seen by religious conservatives as a direct threat. Were Giuliani to win the nomination, many conservative Christian leaders, including Focus on the Family president James Dobson, have promised to withhold their support, suggesting the potential defection of many of the “values voters” so crucial to GOP victories.

John McCain: The Almost Agnostic

Back in March, John McCain sat in the Straight Talk Express, fielding questions from reporters about his views on gay and lesbian issues. As the coach coursed through Iowa, the Arizona senator mostly dodged and weaved.

Had he ever dressed in drag during college? “No. At the Naval Academy, it was frowned on.” Did he have an opinion on Vice President Cheney’s lesbian daughter, Mary, having a child? “No opinion.” What did he think about recent comments by Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that homosexual acts were “immoral”? “He said he regretted those statements … so I don’t want to say I wished I had said them.” What would he do if one of his own daughters said she was gay? “That’s one that really is a family matter.”

Though the exchange was not satisfying for the press, it aptly summarized McCain’s approach to gay and lesbian issues. With rare exception, he has avoided engaging in the politics of sexuality through much of his political career, evidently because he doesn’t really see much role for government in these matters. As he put it, “I’ve never talked about people’s private lives or their personal conduct.”

During his 2000 run for the White House, he fused this sentiment with sharp attacks on the right-wing evangelical elements of his own party, whom he dubbed “agents of intolerance” for stoking the culture war. “Political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value,” he said at the time in Virginia Beach, a military community that is also home to evangelist and erstwhile Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson. “We are the party of Ronald Reagan, not Pat Robertson.”

As he prepared for the 2008 campaign, McCain attempted to rebuild some of the bridges he had burned to the party’s religious base, though he has had little tangible success. At Pastor Jerry Falwell’s invitation, he spoke at Liberty University, where homosexual relations can be grounds for expulsion. In 2006, he supported an amendment to the Arizona Constitution to ban gay marriage, which failed at the ballot box.

In the Senate, McCain has been an ardent opponent of a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, arguing his case on federalist grounds. “The constitutional amendment we’re debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” he declared in 2004. “It usurps from the states a fundamental authority.” McCain has declined to take sides in the debate over civil unions in New Hampshire, though in the past, he has voted against the inclusion of sexual orientation in hate-crime laws. He also supports the current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military and opposes ENDA, because he thinks it could “open a floodgate of litigation.”

That said, there is little doubt that a McCain presidency would avoid any crusades against gay and lesbian rights. For this reason, among others, Focus on the Family’s Dobson has also promised not to vote Republican if McCain wins the party’s nomination.

Ron Paul: The Libertarian

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas sees the issu e of homosexuality, as he sees most things, through the lens of his strict interpretation of the Constitution. He believes that government’s role is to stay out of the lives of citizens. It follows, therefore, that he is against a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. In fact, he is not even sure that government needs to be involved in marriage in the first place. “Marriage only came about, and getting licenses only came about — in recent history for health reasons,” said Paul, who is a medical doctor, in a “Values Voter Debate” on Sept. 17. “True Christians, I believe, believe that marriage is a church function, not a state function. It’s not a state function. I don’t think you need a license to get married. We should define it.”

This door swings both ways. He is also against federal laws that could protect gays and lesbians from discrimination, including hate-crime laws and ENDA. He says the current Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy is “a decent policy.” If Paul becomes president, it is a safe bet that he will not do much to help or hinder the cause of gay and lesbian rights. “All individuals have the right to their life if they do no harm,” he said at the debate, before a deeply religious crowd. “You don’t try to do a whole lot about it.”

Fred Thompson: The Third Way

During his announcement tour in early September, Fred Thompson told reporters that he had found a third way through the thicket of the gay marriage debate. He would not support amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage. But he did support amending the Constitution to prevent state or federal judges from legalizing marriage without the consent of state legislatures. He also wanted to amend the Constitution to make it clear that a same-sex marriage in one state did not have to be honored by any other states. “There have been no state legislatures that have affirmatively allowed gay marriages in the United States,” he said on Sept. 7, as his campaign bus barreled through northern Iowa. “It’s a judge-made problem.”

His timing was unfortunate, because on the same day Thompson spoke those words, the California Legislature approved a bill to give gays and lesbians the right to marry, though the bill is likely to be vetoed by the governor. But Thompson’s intent was clear. He was staking out a position to the right of Giuliani and McCain, without abandoning his belief that states should have autonomy to do what they want in a federal system. “A marriage is between a man and a woman, and that has been accepted through the millennia as the basis of civilization,” he said. “But I am also a federalist.”

At an event in Sioux City, he was asked by a voter to explain what he would do about sexual “deviancy.” Again, he said government should take a mostly hands-off approach. “Society’s position and the government position, and what the government ought to do to exercise the power of the federal government, is not necessarily the same thing,” he said. On other gay-rights issues, he generally toes the larger Republican Party line. He opposes hate-crime laws to protect gays, opposes ENDA, and supports the military’s policy as it stands today.

In his short time as a candidate, Thompson has seemed to downplay most social issues. He is hesitant to speak about his own religion. Though he grew up in the Church of Christ, he does not regularly attend church in his present-day hometown of McLean, Va. Predictably, these positions are not good enough for the Focus on the Family’s Dobson. “Isn’t Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S.?” Dobson wrote in a recent e-mail to supporters. “Not for me!”

Mitt Romney: The Switch-Hitter

This is a tough guy to figure out. More than any other top-tier Republican, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has been running aggressively as the best candidate to protect the “traditional family” from the onslaught of gay and lesbian marriage. Back in 2005, Romney traveled to South Carolina to make his case. “Today same-sex couples are marrying under the law in Massachusetts,” he warned a Republican crowd. “Some are actually having children born to them. We’ve been asked to change their birth certificates to remove the phrase ‘Mother and Father,’ and replace it with ‘Parent A and Parent B.’ It’s not right on paper. It’s not right in fact. Every child has a right to a mother and a father.”

Strong words indeed. But Romney’s own paper record tells a different story. Back when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1994, he told the voters of Massachusetts that he would be a better leader for the gay community than his rival, incumbent Democrat Ted Kennedy. “I am more convinced than ever before that as we seek to establish full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent,” he wrote in a letter just before the election. In a debate with Kennedy, he said anyone should be able to participate in the Boy Scouts “regardless of sexual orientation.” Back then, he supported adding sexual orientation to employment nondiscrimination laws. He called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell the “first of a number of steps that will ultimately lead to gays and lesbians being able to serve openly and honestly in our nation’s military.” As recently as 2002, his campaign distributed a pink flier to celebrate Pride Weekend. “All citizens deserve equal rights regardless of their sexual preference,” the flier read.

In more recent years, he has become one of the nation’s most public supporters of amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage, even testifying before Congress on the issue. He has come out against ENDA and announced that he supports the current military policy as it stands.

In other areas, he has not completely reversed himself. In recent interviews, he has defended his appointment of gay judges as governor and maintained that he supports contractual domestic partnership benefits for gay couples. “There are other ways we raise kids, and that’s fine — single moms, grandparents raising kids, gay couples raising kids,” he said at a high school in Concord, N.H., in June. “That’s the American way to have people have their freedom of choice.”

The Romney record on these issues is such a muddle that his performance in the White House is difficult to predict. On the one hand, he is clearly willing to exploit the culture war for political ends and make common cause with those parts of the Republican Party most opposed to homosexual rights. He has also reversed his positions on several major issues, like gays in the military and employment discrimination, when there was a political advantage to be gained. On the other hand, his history on the issues suggests that the ties to his new friends do not run deep. “If people are looking for people who are anti-gay, they aren’t going to find that with me,” he said at one stop in Iowa this year. “But I am going to fight to protect traditional marriage.”

Mike Huckabee: The Kinder, Gentler Evangelical

As he travels around the country, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee likes to offer this two-line joke. “I’m a conservative,” he says. “I’m just not angry about it.” The phrase aptly describes his approach to gay and lesbian issues. In substance, the ordained Baptist minister matches up with most on the religious right in opposing reforms that would permit gay marriage. He says he will lead a effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, opposes hate-crimes bills and ENDA, and supports continuing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. As governor, he led a state effort to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a heterosexual union.

But on the trail, he tries to avoid coming off like a proselytizing preacher, downplaying his faith-based disapproval of homosexuality. “I want us to be very careful that we don’t come across as having some animosity or hatred toward people, even [those] whose lifestyles are inexplicable to us,” he said at the Values Voter Debate. In stump speeches, he often makes only passing reference to “traditional family” issues. He has told reporters that he is open to state-sponsored civil unions that would bestow the legal rights of marriage on gay and lesbian couples. [Editor's Note: Huckabee now says that he "either misspoke or misunderstood" the question asked by a Concord Monitor reporter in 2006. "I have never supported civil unions, and I don't. I don't think it is something that is a good thing," Huckabee said in a November 2007 interview with Salon.]

At the same time, his language for describing homosexuality can sometimes hit a wrong note. During a New Hampshire debate in June, he referred to homosexuality as an “attitude.” He also supported a state ban on gay couples becoming foster parents in Arkansas. “That whole issue is more about the gay couple than it is the child. And I think that is the mistake,” he said in a January interview. “I feel that we have got to do what is best for the child. I am not sure that putting them in an atmosphere that is still pretty controversial, or still anything but the mainstream, is the ideal situation for the child.”

Tom Tancredo: The One-Issue Candidate

The campaign of Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo is so devoted to a single issue — ending illegal immigration — that he hardly speaks about anything else. That said, he takes a hard-line view of most policy matters concerning homosexuality. “We have to remember that we are always just one kooky judge away from actually having homosexual marriage forced on all the rest of us,” he warned at the Values Voter Debate on Sept. 17.

He supports a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposes ENDA and hate-crimes laws for sexual orientation, and once voted to prevent the District of Columbia from offering domestic partnership benefits to homosexual employees. But he rarely brings up the issue while campaigning. When asked recently how he would deal with the “homosexual agenda,” he responded with a quasi-libertarian argument. “The president of the United States simply can’t make a rule, sign an executive order, changing the morality of the country,” he said at the debate. “It can’t happen that way. You do so by leadership.”

Duncan Hunter: The Straight Man

On the campaign trail, California Rep. Duncan Hunter boasts of having led the opposition to gays serving openly in the military. “I think it’s only because we have been able to resist that particular attempt that we have the very best military in the world today,” Hunter told the Values Voter Debate.

Hunter is among those few Republican candidates who advance the concept that homosexuality itself is immoral. To explain his opposition to ENDA, he says the Boy Scouts have a right to ban gay scout leaders. He is against hate-crime laws for sexual orientation and in favor of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. “Every American family should have the right to say it’s a matter of moral principle that we do not accept homosexual activity,” he said at the debate.

Sam Brownback: Defender of the “Family”

Soft-spoken and sincere, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback has fashioned himself as the Senate’s most outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage. He has spent hours on the floor of the Senate with charts showing the declining rate of heterosexual marriage in Scandinavian countries, where gay unions have been sanctioned for years, arguing that any redefinition of marriage in the United States could have devastating consequences on heterosexual monogamy.

A Catholic convert, Brownback has made marriage and abortion the two central issues of his campaign. At the Values Voter Debate, he criticized President George W. Bush for failing to spend more political capital on passing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex couples from marrying. “I wish President Bush would have led on it,” Brownback said.

When Gen. Peter Pace called homosexuality “immoral,” Brownback was one of the few Republicans to offer his public support. “It was part of his faith, and he believed that this was the right thing to stand up for,” Brownback said. “And I stood up for General Pace, because we should stand up for other people when they will stand up for these basics.” He is against ENDA and hate-crime legislation and supports the current military policy on homosexuality.

In the wake of the Pace controversy, a reporter asked him to describe his feelings about homosexuality. “I do not believe being a homosexual is immoral, but I do believe homosexual acts are,” he told the Associated Press. “The church has clear teachings on this.”

Alan Keyes: The Lord’s Messenger

A perennial political candidate and former State Department employee, Keyes announced his candidacy in mid-September. It has all the markings of a moral crusade, with gays and lesbians in the crosshairs. “Abandon God with respect to the family, and we have no claims to rights,” he announced at the Values Voter Debate, during a discussion of same-sex marriage. He has called homosexuality the practice of “hedonistic self-gratification,” and described Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter Mary as a “selfish hedonist.” After his own daughter, Maya Marcel-Keyes, announced she was a lesbian, she said he stopped funding her college education.

Keyes’ last turn in the spotlight came with his 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate against Barack Obama. After losing in a landslide, Keyes refused to congratulate Obama, saying the Democrat stood for “a culture evil enough to destroy the very soul and heart of my country.”

Everyone knew that when the votes were counted in a few hours, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would win the straw poll, which is as much a test of money and organization as popularity. Romney, who spent $32 million through June, was the only Republican candidate competing on Saturday with the help of large-scale broadcast advertising, hundreds of paid staff, more than 100 buses to bring people to Ames, and about 40 golf carts to move people around on the grounds of Iowa State University. The other top-tier candidates, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson, had all decided to sit out the straw poll, ceding Romney the victory.

The question was who would come in second, and at 5:30 the signs did not look good for Huckabee. Both of his nearest competitors, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, had purchased more of the $35 straw poll tickets that allow people to vote, rented better tents and acquired more buses. Brownback’s staff claimed to have handed out more than 3,000 tickets and hired 51 buses. They even brought in a Christian metal band called Nailpoint Payment to play for supporters. Tancredo gave away about 2,400 tickets, used 20 buses and paid for an aggressive talk radio advertising campaign, according to his staff.

Huckabee, by contrast, had no buses, no broadcast advertising and 1,850 tickets. “Let me make it very clear today: I’m not the best-funded candidate in America,” Huckabee had admitted early in the afternoon, in his address to straw poll voters. “I can’t buy you. I don’t have the money. I got another thing: I can’t even rent you.”

But when the votes were all counted at 8:30, Huckabee beat the odds, surprising the other campaigns and many in the political press corps. “Holy shit,” exclaimed one reporter when the results were read — Romney, 4,516 votes; Huckabee, 2,587 votes; Brownback, 2,192 votes; and Tancredo, 1,961 votes.

A few minutes later, Huckabee was charging toward the pressroom to declare victory, abandoning his earlier plan to let Romney and Brownback hold their press conferences first. “Hey, seven weeks ago, would anybody have thought about this?” Chip Saltsman, Huckabee’s ecstatic campaign manager, called out to another supporter. Sarah Huckabee was also in tow, bearing a smile as wide as her face. “I think ‘Free Bird’ is what did it,” Huckabee told the press scrum, referring to the fact that his band, Capitol Offense, had played the Lynyrd Skynyrd anthem earlier in the day for voters. “When ‘Free Bird’ can play to the voters up north, you know you have a winning combination.”

The key to Huckabee’s second place finish was the block of roughly 700 voters who either paid for their own tickets or had another campaign or organization buy their ticket. Not everyone who boarded Romney’s buses, for example, planned to vote for Romney. Earlier that morning, Joe and Edie Morr, a 70-year-old couple from Ankeny, Iowa, disembarked from a Romney bus with every intention of voting for McCain, who only earned 101 votes at the poll. Joe said he met Edie when they were both 18 years old in the Navy, and he had served on the USS Forrestal, an aircraft carrier where McCain served in Vietnam. “We got a free hamburger, a T-shirt and a fan,” Morr said of his Romney bus ride, though he decided not to wear the bright yellow Romney T-shirt. “I’ll use it when I get home and work in the yard,” he said.

The full impact of the straw poll may not be known for days or weeks. Two days after the 1999 Iowa straw poll, which President Bush won by a margin similar to Romney’s, Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander dropped from the race. But this year was different, in several ways. Not only did many of the top Republican contenders not compete, but the turnout dropped considerably, from 23,685 votes cast in 1999 to just 14,302 votes on Saturday.

The longshot candidate Texas Rep. Ron Paul also outperformed expectations, placing fifth with 1,305 votes, even though the campaign only purchased 800 tickets, according to his spokesman. Paul clearly gathered even more attendees than voters, people like Jeff Molby, a software engineer from the Detroit suburbs, who stopped by the poll on his way to California for a wedding. “My brother and I decided to make a huge road trip out of it,” he said. When Paul was asked before the polls closed how he would do, the Libertarian candidate was somewhat circumspect, since only Iowans were allowed to vote in the straw poll. “We’ll have to find out if we got anyone from Iowa,” he joked.

The most immediate impact is likely to be the exit of former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, who placed sixth with 1,039 votes. Thompson has said repeatedly in recent weeks that he was unlikely to continue the campaign if he did not win or place in the poll. Like Paul, a visible portion of Thompson’s supporters, motorcyclists who wore black T-shirts, were from out of state. Whole portions of Thompson’s speech to voters Saturday had the whiff of a farewell address. “It’s quite an honor to run for president of the United States,” Thompson said. [On Sunday night, Thompson announced he was dropping out of the race.] Brownback and Tancredo, meanwhile, are destined to continue their campaigns, having met their own vague benchmarks of placing in the top half of the field. (Rep. Duncan Hunter, R- Calif., who did not seriously contest the poll, bought only 100 or so tickets and tallied 174 votes, ahead of John McCain but behind Fred Thompson’s 203 and Rudy Giuliani’s 183.)

The impact on Huckabee, meanwhile, will be measured largely in fundraising dollars over the coming weeks. Historically, 85,000 to 105,000 Republicans vote in the Iowa Caucuses, making a few thousand straw poll votes far from determinative on Election Day. But Huckabee told reporters that he is hoping the results Saturday will signal that he is a serious contender to wealthy Republicans. “All those people that told us if we got some traction they’d be with us, well we’ve got the traction. They should be with us,” he said.

If he does get traction in the form of campaign checks, Huckabee is likely to position himself as a candidate who can unite the country, even though he takes more conservative positions than the leading Republican candidates. An ordained Baptist minister, he is vocal about his religious beliefs, unassailably pro-life, a skeptic of evolution and an opponent of gay marriage. He was helped at the straw poll by supporters of Christian home-schooling, and the poll results may mean that Huckabee, at least on Saturday, won the duel with Brownback for evangelical voters, who will loom large in the upcoming caucus. His showing may also reflect his enthusiastic backing of the so-called Fair Tax, which would replace the national income tax with a national sales tax. Fair Taxers were well-represented at the straw poll, even bringing a Fair Tax ferris wheel.

Despite these views, Huckabee packages himself in a largely populist message, which he can deliver with uncommon skill on the stump. On CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, he restated the central thesis of his campaign. “I am one of the few Republican candidates that’s having the courage to talk about how we need to really separate ourselves from being the Wall Street Republican crowd. We need to be the Main Street Republican crowd,” he said. “We need to quit being a wholly owned subsidiary of the major fund managers on Wall Street and start being more concerned about the people out there in places like Iowa.”

Though the straw poll results are largely symbolic, it’s a refrain that more Americans may be hearing soon. But not right away. First Huckabee is going back home to Little Rock, Ark., to take some time off. “I am dying to see my dogs,” he said Saturday night, after the results were announced. “I haven’t seen them in over two weeks. And I hope they can remember me.”

Yet beyond the horrors of Iraq and the excesses of the “war on terror,” for which history will hold him culpable, Bush at least has acknowledged the importance of reaching out to the world’s Muslims (although he tends to reach out too often with bombs and a torture technique known as waterboarding). In his rhetoric, the president usually seeks to distinguish the religion of Islam, which he has honored in the White House on many occasions, from the murderous perversion of that faith. And in his best moments after 9/11, he has defended the rights of Muslim Americans to live here without suffering persecution or prejudice.

Perhaps Bush’s efforts deserve to be dismissed as little more than lip service, but semantics matter. The Republicans most likely to win their party’s presidential nomination constantly use language that is meant to inflame anger against Muslims for political advantage.

During the last Republican debate, on Aug. 5, Rudolph Giuliani eagerly provided an example of this syndrome when he attacked the Democratic presidential candidates for failing to describe terrorism as Islamic. “During four Democratic debates,” he complained, “not a single Democratic candidate said the word [sic] ‘Islamic terrorism.’ Now, that is taking political correctness to extremes.” To him, the absence of that phrase in their speeches, no matter how tough their stance against terror, proved that Democrats are guilty of “weakness and appeasement.” The other Republicans, again except for Paul, agreed — although as John Dickerson of Slate has pointed out, that phrase is also assiduously avoided by the Bush White House.

There is an obvious reason not to say “Islamic terror,” which stupidly suggests that terror is indeed Islamic, as the ideologists of al-Qaida would argue. There is also an obvious reason to say that same phrase — if you believe that we are careening toward a war of civilizations and your aim is to inflame.

Throughout his career, Giuliani has pandered to the far right on Mideast policy. More than a decade ago he made a fool of himself on the world stage but became a hero to the religious right and Likud extremists when he told his aides to eject Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from a Lincoln Center concert during the United Nations’ 50th anniversary celebration in New York. He played to the cheap seats again after 9/11, when he ordered the return of a $10 million charitable donation to a victims fund returned to a Saudi prince who had urged more balance in America’s Mideast policy.

Like many other Republican candidates, Giuliani has a limited understanding of Islam and Islamist movements, despite his claims to expertise. Not long ago, he told Charlie Rose that the West must be on guard against the “Islamic Brotherhood,” which doesn’t exist. (The PBS host noted that Giuliani probably meant the Muslim Brotherhood, a relatively moderate Islamic party that isn’t much of a problem compared with al-Qaida or Hezbollah.)

Mitt Romney, his most formidable rival at the moment, uttered a similar gaffe during a debate last May, when he jammed all of Islam into a single hostile juggernaut. “There is a global jihadist movement,” said the former Massachusetts governor. “And they’ve come together as Shi’a and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda with that intent.” A more ignorant description of the Islamic political and theological dispensation is difficult to imagine, but Romney’s clumsy conglomeration reflected fears that are common on the Republican right.

Stoking those fears may serve the immediate interest of a politician courting primary voters, but even the Bush administration understands that turning a billion Muslims against the West is a losing strategy. Every time an opportunistic candidate blames Islam for terrorism, that grim prospect grows and the possibility of a modern Muslim movement for peace, development and democracy recedes. The president understands this danger, however dimly, but too many in his party do not — and at the moment they seem all too eager to encourage the indiscriminate and bigoted oratory that he has rejected.

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.

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.

But another moment with ripples beyond Tuesday came when former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the man the Onion says is running to be “president of 9/11,” tore into Rep. Ron Paul after Paul suggested American foreign policy, particularly our post-1991 attacks on Iraq, was a factor behind al-Qaida’s attacks on the U.S. The mayor of 9/11 is a well-known bully, and he teed off on Paul immediately. “That’s really an extraordinary statement,” Giuliani interrupted Paul. “That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq.” The crowd rewarded Giuliani with applause, and he went on. “I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.” The feisty — some would say eccentric — Paul refused, and he’s been beaten up by Giuliani supporters and Iraq war flacks for his remarks ever since. Even McCain praised Giuliani’s assault on Paul this week.

But Paul has picked up support in other quarters, and that has some Republicans irritated. He’s been Technorati.com’s top search term much of this week; he’s got more YouTube followers than any other GOP candidate, and he’s apparently got savvy enough online supporters that he won the post-debate poll at MSNBC.com and came in second at Fox. The Iraq war hawks at Littlegreenfootballs.com are not amused; they banned Paul from their poll Tuesday night when they saw he was winning, claiming his supporters were “spamming” them. Over at Pajamas Media they banned Paul from their poll, too, citing his barely measurable support in major opinion polls like Gallup. The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party is trying to keep Paul out of future debates, according to the Associated Press, because of his remarks about 9/11. Big Bill Bennett agrees.

It’s all led to a fascinating intra-right dust-up, with Brent Bozell’s Cyber News Service publishing a piece today hyping Paul’s online support. (That’s where I learned about Littlegreenfootballs.com and Pajamas Media banning Paul from their polls.) “This is not a handful of people,” Paul spokesman Jesse Benton told CNS. “This is a grassfire movement.” I’m not sure that Paul’s online support is as big as the CNS.com piece suggests, but it’s certainly motivated, as the National Review’s Byron York learned when he attacked Paul for his 9/11 remarks after the debate. York got “a groundswell of e-mails” from Paul supporters, leading him to concede, “Paul may not have a lot of supporters out there, but the ones he has are intense.” Shades of Howard Dean’s defense forces in 2003? Maybe, although Dean’s defenders (who targeted me when I was insufficiently respectful of his candidacy) tended to be more polite than the e-mails York got from Paul’s brigades.

Andrew Sullivan has been paying attention to the maybe-groundswell for Paul, as well as the shameful GOP effort to distort what he said about 9/11. I think he overestimates Paul’s support, but he’s right to do battle with conservatives who are smearing Paul about his opposition to the war, and what he said about the roots of the 9/11 attacks. It’s worth noting that, as was the case with Howard Dean in 2003, the two candidates who’ve spoken most clearly against the Iraq war in the early debates — Mike Gravel and Paul — are getting the big surge of attention online. I don’t think either man has a prayer of being nominated, but both candidates’ online fan clubs show the hunger Americans in both parties feel for straight talk about the disaster of this war, as well as the foreign policy that led to it. Efforts to muzzle Paul are cowardly, and will backfire on the GOP.