Posted on 12/07/2007 10:22:07 AM PST by Graybeard58
WASHINGTON — If Ron Paul's supporters got together for a family portrait, it would be one of those pictures in which no one seems to resemble anyone else.
"You have old-school Republicans, the conservatives who backed Barry Goldwater (in 1964). You have the antiwar crowd who are principled non-interventionists," said Jim Forsythe, a former Air Force major who's organized meet-and-greet sessions in New Hampshire for the Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate.
You also have businessmen tired of government regulation, college students who like his views on holistic medicine and middle-aged folks who don't see Social Security helping them in a few years. There are people who supported Democrat Howard Dean four years ago and others who backed conservative Republican Pat Buchanan in the 1990s.
What brings them together is a common belief that government is too big, obtrusive and unresponsive.
"It's a desire to get government out of my life. That's it," said Rick Grote, a pharmacist in Hampton, Iowa.
That bond has made Paul one of the more striking phenomena of the 2008 campaign. He's slowly climbed to poll respectability in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and his fundraising now rivals better-known foes such as Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson.
Perhaps ironically for a 72-year-old physician who ran a barely noticed campaign for president on the Libertarian Party ticket 19 years ago, his current success is in part due to the Internet, which has brought together like-minded voters who've never met and probably never would have.
Like Crystal Schryver, a homemaker from Earlham, Iowa.
"I've always voted," she said, "but I'm what you would consider nonpolitical. But my husband heard him speak, I looked on the Internet and I was hooked."
The more she looked, the more she liked. Schryver had home-schooled three of her four children, and she found that Paul was a strong supporter of nonpublic education. On another visit to the Paul site, she found information about his bill to expand Americans' ability to use alternative medicine.
"Every night I look on the Internet and I find something interesting from that campaign," she said. "We love to listen to his speeches. He's so fascinating."
The Paul campaign counts more than 40,000 supporters on Facebook, nearly twice as many as Mitt Romney has, and more than 90,000 friends on MySpace, twice as many as McCain.
While the Paul army may share a belief that government needs to shrink and even disappear, its members have very different motives for joining. Among them:
THE BUSINESSMAN
David Fischer has run a three-person research firm in Des Moines, Iowa, since 1993. When he started his firm, he had to pay state and federal unemployment insurance and fill out lengthy forms.
Eventually, his obligation to provide payments to the state stopped, because no one at his firm was laid off, "yet I have to file reports every quarter, and I keep getting mail from the government," Fischer said.
"This is a small example of what's wrong with government. There's too much regulation," he added. "I can't even put a Ron Paul sign in my yard without making sure I've complied with all kinds of city and county ordinances going on for hundreds of pages."
THE NEW GRADUATE
Meghann Walker voted for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.
"I didn't educate myself. I was influenced by my friends. When you live in Chicago and you're young, you tend to be a Democrat," the 25-year-old said.
Now she's in Des Moines, helping the Paul campaign, and she finds a lot to like. She has serious questions about the USA Patriot Act, the Iraq war, immigration policy and more, and Paul seems to have a lot of answers.
"I don't want government regulating anything in my life," she said. How about border control, she's asked.
"Look at the Minutemen," she answered, citing the citizen border patrollers. "They're helping to protect and defend our country."
THE SOCIAL SECURITY SKEPTIC
Roger Barr, 50, is nervous that Social Security won't be much help when he retires.
Give him the money, the Newton, Iowa, Internet-technology manager said, and he could invest it. "I am able to take care of myself and my family," Barr said. "But the government instead takes it and gives me all those programs."
Until Paul, he said, candidates forgot that "I am the employer, and the government is the employee."
THE ABORTION FOE
Every major Republican candidate is anti-abortion, though they differ about how far they'd go to outlaw the practice. Paul, an obstetrician-gynecologist who's delivered more than 4,000 babies and says he's never considered performing an abortion, says he'd end federal courts' ability to interfere with state legislation to ban abortions (although the Supreme Court might block him).
Jeremy DeWitt, a Des Moines painting contractor, sees that as an uncompromising position.
There shouldn't even be a debate over where life begins, DeWitt said; "most scientists agree life begins at the point of conception."
THE NON-INTERVENTIONIST
Debbie Monaghan voted for Dean, the antiwar Democrat, in the 2004 Iowa caucus.
She thought then, and thinks now, that the Iraq war is a fool's mission. And she wants the U.S. government to stop getting involved in so many foreign adventures.
"We're spending so much money trying to be peacekeepers," the Hampton employee of Cargill said. "Yet our borders are wide open. Why aren't we spending the money to protect us over here?"
The anti-interventionist theme probably echoes more loudly across Paul's campaign than most, because more than any other issue it illustrates what Paul backers see as the most obvious evil of big government.
Forsythe, a New Hampshire aerospace engineer, spent 12 years in the Air Force, flying missions in Bosnia, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. He was at Khobar Towers, a residential complex in Saudi Arabia, just before it was bombed in 1996. Nineteen American servicemen died.
"The people in Saudi Arabia didn't like the American military walking the streets. They didn't want us there. Their government did," Forsythe recalled.
He'd joined the military in 1990, as the Cold War was ending. He saw the need to defend the United States from the communist threat. But with that threat gone, he found, "we tended to get into conflicts for political purposes. We're not driven by well-defined goals."
Paul understands that, Forsythe said. Grote, the Hampton pharmacist, agreed.
"There's a difference between defense and just going out there and building an empire," Grote said. "Ron Paul understands that, and he has a history of voting that way."
ON THE WEB
Data on presidential candidates' number of MySpace friends: http://techpresident.com/scrape_plot/myspace
Data on Facebook supporters of presidential candidates: http://techpresident.com/scrape_plot/facebook
they forgot the muslims..
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1914466/posts
Lip-service pandering and non-committal shoulder-rubbing?
Yes, because there’s nothing nuttier than homeschoolers, gun owners, traditional conservatives and fiscal wonks.
And I find it odd Republicans are claiming his non-interventionism is “nutty” when it’s almost word-for-word what they were saying when Clinton was in power.
Count this gun-owning, Bible-believing, future-homeschooling fiscal conservative in with the “nuts” that USED to be called the Republican Party, until it because “let’s support explosive spending, massive entitlements and ‘nation building’ so we don’t offend Dear Leader.”
Read this Interview and you'll see why this small government conservative is not for Paul.
I am not saying none of these support Paul. I am saying MOST of these do not support Paul. He also gets support from a bunch of pot smokers and anti-war types. Where are they in your list?
Okay, I'm going to post some quotes on foreign policy and terrorism. One is from Ron Paul, the others are from other elected conservative Republicans. Guess which one is his.
"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?" (1)
"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace." (2)
"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy." (3)
"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area." (4)
Okay, so none of them were from Paul. But it just goes to show that most Republicans flip and flop on foreign policy and terrorism, even after the Cole and first World Trade Center attacks, based on whether the guy in charge has an R or D next to his name.
1) Sean Hannity 2) Tom DeLay 3) Rick Santorum 4) Trent Lott
To court Alex Jones' deranged listening audience. See my reference to "non-committal shoulder-rubbing" above. I'd at least respect Paul MORE if he had the guts to actually come out and say he subscribes to the 9/11 Truth conspiracy theories.
BTW, this is one homeschooler who isn't buying what Paul is selling, and I know many more. There are a good number who are, sadly, but please don't lump "homeschoolers" into Paul's fanbase like he commands the allegiance of the entire community. I'm bewildered and dismayed at the support he enjoys among some homeschoolers.
Kool Aid anyone?
(chuckle)
Yep.
And David Koresh.
And Ayatollah Khomeini.
That's more than Paul acknowledges.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.