The libertarian Republican warns of impending disaster, reaches out to the left, and prepares for a presidential campaign.
Brian Doherty, Senior Editor
Reason
Ron Paul by now is well-known for many things, yet he remains an underrated retail politician. Paul has the extraordinary distinction of having won a seat in Congress as a nonincumbent on three separate occasions. After fighting his own Republican Party to regain a House seat in 1996 (the GOP establishment preferred a turncoat Democrat in the primary), Dr. No has won re-election in the 14th Congressional District of Texas by progressively larger margins in every campaign but one. In 2004 and 2008 the Democratic Party didn’t bother running a candidate against him. All this even though Paul eschews such fail-safe political gambits as co-sponsoring (or even voting for) spending bills that benefit his constituents and makes a point of directly challenging such modern Republican notions as an ever-expanding warfare state—all while representing what he characterizes as a Bible Belt conservative stronghold.
Paul’s newsmaking 2008 presidential run emphasized a noninterventionist foreign policy that made him anathema to the rest of his party. But those views helped inspire a ragtag, young, and surprisingly large political movement that shows few signs of dissipating three years later. Animated by this unlikely coalition, Paul’s career-long crusade to shed light on, rein in, and ultimately destroy the Federal Reserve became a mass populist cause. Provisions of his perennial “audit the Fed” bill were incorporated into a bill the House passed in 2009 (although it did not become law). To the surprise of many, after Republicans retook the House of Representatives in November 2010, he became chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy, which oversees the Federal Reserve.
As I write, the man who earned the fourth-highest delegate count in the 2008 GOP presidential primaries seems to be preparing for another run in 2012. An official exploratory committee was launched in April, and Paul was on stage making his pitch at the first Republican presidential primary debate in South Carolina in early May 2011. His public profile and continued relevance were buoyed in 2010 when his son and (for the most part) ideological heir, Rand Paul, became the gadfly superstar of the anti-government side of the Tea Party movement by winning election as a U.S. senator from Kentucky.
In conventional political terms, Ron Paul has not done much to exploit his considerable fan base and reputational juice. He has a political action committee (LibertyPAC), which in a show of strength pulled off a $700,000 one-day fundraising “money bomb” in February for no particular reason. But befitting his very exacting political philosophy, Paul is a reticent endorser. In the 2010 campaign, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) figures gathered at OpenSecrets.org, LibertyPAC gave just $17,220 to eight federal candidates. (Year-end papers filed with the FEC for 2010 also show LibertyPAC giving to a handful of state candidates, most in the early-caucus state of Iowa.)
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