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Just when you thought you'd heard the last from me...
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
One for your list?
Certainly there are some positions Paul espouses that I support. But it's a package deal; you can't take some of Paul and ignore the rest.
From the interview I linked to earlier:
What we're expecting is that they'll all get registered and vote! Then we're gonna change the rules and have voting only on the Internet, then we're gonna win!Paul, IMHO, would be a dangerous disaster in national security and foreign policy.We're dealing with a few people. Of course, since we're doing the wrong thing, there's a lot more enemies out there now. Terrorists are very weak people. They don't have a political base. They don't have a government. They have no military. We were attacked by people with razor blades.
I think if we pulled out of the Middle East, Arabs would work out a better deal with Israel.
thnx, I think g w bush has the ping list back
“Yes, because there’s nothing nuttier than homeschoolers, gun owners, traditional conservatives and fiscal wonks.”
That’s almost true. The only folks nuttier than those you listed are those who think that the 10th Amendment should mean what it says and those who think that the US should not be policeman of the world.
Those nuts are so anal retentive about their “freedom”. Those nuts thinks that “freedom” means that should be able to do what they want, to be who they can be. They have a misguided “desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom”. They confuse conservatism with libertarianism.
They don’t understand that freedom is all about authority, that every human being must cede to lawful authority a good deal of their discretion to do as they please.
WRT homeschoolers, those nuts don’t understand that schools don’t exist to educate but, rather, “to train responsible citizens” with shared values defined by lawful authority.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E2D9173CF933A15750C0A962958260
You’ve got to go onboard with the new Republican Party.
How his quotes could have been changed to make me a die-hard supporter:
“Then we’re gonna change the rules and have voting only for citizens and not illegals, then we’re gonna win!”
“We should allow our citizens to buy any type of firearm to shoot terrorists. I mean, they attacked our people with razor blades.”
“I think if we nuked the Middle East, it would be a better deal for everybody.”
I’ve got it!
Ron Paul for President, pushing his freedom from government agenda, with Tancredo as VP pusing his borders agenda, with Cheney as Sec. of D., keeping us safe.
I’d vote it!
I didn't mean to imply you had, my statement was just generally addressed to people who simply put "homeschoolers" in the litany of RP-supporting subgroups like another poster in the thread had. I didn't want to post twice in a row, but I should have to avoid confusion. Sorry.
Too bad that surrendering to serfdom under sharia law would negate every one of them.
Ah, back to the grindstone. LOL.
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Hey, the Ron Paul devotees did well in NJ. The unofficial word is Ron Paul made the Primary Ballot. Not all the Presidential Candidates made the Petition deadlines.
Bump and Congrats (unofficially) to the NJ Ron Paul Devotees.
Speaking only for my locale, a campaign can get fined for having political signs up outside of the alloted electorial run.
The Guv’s gotta regulate that time!
I'm in exactly the same position. I count the response to Islamofascism as my only real deal breaker with Paul. We differ on Iraq and the gold standard nonsense as well, but would be willing to look the other way because:
(1) America is already victorious in Iraq; it will no longer be an issue by January 2009
(2) There are no constitutional tools he could use which could in any way bring about a gold standard (I mean, the president is not a dictator - he needs at least 1/2 of both houses of Congress to get anything done, and there is simply no support for such a drastic change even from most staunch fiscal conservatives - while Paul's other domestic policy planks have non-negligible Congressional support).
Don't get me wrong, I am thoroughly enjoying his campaign and see it in an overwhelmingly positive light. But for now I'm happier with Fred Thompson (well, Tom Tancredo foremost, but his candidacy is in the worst shape of all).
What do you see as the drawbacks to the gold standard?
False. Many of Paul's supporters are newcomers to politics. You also have independents, libertarians, old-right Republicans, and the populist Left. 9/11 truthers are a miniscule fraction.
and you can find them on both sides of the political fence. Ron Paul is a 9/11 Truther.
Provide facts, please, instead of hyperbolic statements disguised as such.
I don’t care what any of his cool-aid drinking supporters say.
Supporting a candidate that adheres to the Constitution means we're kool-aid drinkers? Paul is forcing or paying his supporters to support him or something?
Why would someone repeatedly go on the Alex Jones’ show, who is the King of the all Truthers, if they didn’t buy into the 9/11 conspiracy theories?
Same reason why Pat Buchanan, Judge Napolitano, and others went on Jones' show: He's a radio show host. He's media, just like Savage and Rush are.
Now I'm sure you're going to holler that Buchanan and Napolitano are Truthers/wackos too just for appearing on the show.
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