Ron Paul's Last Crusade

Ron Paul’s Last Crusade
 A report from the Iowa Antistate Fair

 BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 U. S. Rep. Ron Paul — habitually, Doctor Paul to his admirers — is as unlikely an idol for a personality cult as can be imagined: a sometimes stammering Elmer Fudd minus the menace, in rapturous love with liberty. His extraordinarily self-deprecating manner is, to say the very least, unusual in a presidential candidate. Whereas your Michele Bachmanns and Tim Pawlentys and Mitt Romneys talk about themselves in endlessly heroic terms — ad sometimes literal nauseam here in Iowa, especially after a stomach-unsettling state-fair porkchop-on-a-stick — Doctor Paul rarely speaks about himself. Rick Perry has that cowboy thing he does, Barack Obama poses with his chin elevated at a distinctly Mussolinian angle, Romney is self-parodically “presidential” — and Ron Paul is kind of a dork. Whatever Ron Paul is about, it is not the elevation of the Great and Mighty Ron Paul, pontifex maximus. He is, for better and for worse, a man of ideas — maybe the last true man of ideas in American politics.

 But he is, in fact, right smack dab in the middle of a raging personality cult. “Ron Paul IS the Constitution!” reads one supporter’s sign, and the others are hardly less worshipful. His ideas are a mixed bag: The split runs about 85 percent sensible American classical liberalism and 15 percent conspiracy-kook lunacy, and the main problem with Ron Paul, and his movement, is that neither he nor his followers can tell which is which. It’s not entirely clear how thoroughly Doctor Paul’s puritanical libertarianism is soaking in with his followers, a distressingly large number of whom, here in Iowa at least, seem to believe that this champion of free trade is going to deliver a federal law against “outsourcing our jobs to China.” (Doctor Paul refers to those who support trade sanctions against Iran as “phony free-traders.”) Some of them may not be entirely clear on this whole “free and boy do I mean free” markets thing, but this much they are certain of: The United States of America is an “empire,” the Federal Reserve is the capitol citadel of wickedness in the modern world, and Ron Paul — Doctor Paul — is “the one man in America who is willing to tell the truth,” “the one man who truly cannot be bought,” “the one man for the people,” and, in the Paul campaign’s own fevered imagination, “the one who will stop the spending, save the dollar, create jobs, bring peace — the one who will restore liberty. Ron Paul: The one who can beat Obama — and restore America now.”

 They’re pretty confident about that “beat Obama” business. Drew Ivers, chairman of Ron Paul’s Iowa campaign, says, “Ron Paul is the most electable candidate in the race. I truly believe that.” Mr. Ivers, who worked on Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign in 1988, and Pat Buchanan’s temper tantrums in 1996 and 2000, perhaps does not have the best eye for electability in the history of American politics. According to the Campaign for Liberty, Doctor Paul’s 501(c)(4) organization, Ivers also worked on the 1972 American Independent‒party campaign of John G. Schmitz, a Republican congressman chased out of the party by Richard Nixon who would later get kicked out of his leadership role in the John Birch Society for his overheated rhetoric. (Too crazy for the John Birch Society — make a note.) Schmitz was something of a wit and once declared: “I have no objection to President Nixon going to China — I just object to his coming back.” But some of his other remarks — “Jews are like everybody else, only more so” — proved too much even for the Eisenhower-was-a-red crowd. (Totally random but absolutely un-excludable trivia: Schmitz is the father of Mary Kay Fualaau, formerly Letourneau, the hot teacher with the 13-year-old boyfriend from that 1997 student-sex scandal.) There’s a lot of good sense in the Ron Paul movement. There’s also a lot of paranoia.

 This is the point in the story at which Ron Paul’s partisans stop reading and start typing up angry e-mails accusing National Review of trying to smear their man by associating him with the fringe lunatics at the John Birch Society. But the man who has done the most to undermine Ron Paul’s reputation by associating him with the John Birch Society is Ron Paul. He still addresses the group and has other political connections to it. Asked about this by the New York Times, Doctor Paul said: “Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society! Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution. I don’t know how many positions they would have that I don’t agree with. Because they’re real strict constitutionalists, they don’t like the war, they’re hard-money people.”

 The John Birch Society: hard-money heroes. That is an example of what one longtime Paul-ologist calls “Ron’s Ronness.” He is so maniacally focused on his issues — the Federal Reserve and American military action above all — that he has a hard time making judgments about friend and foe alike. If you agree with him on the critical issues, then you’re on his side — even if you’re irredeemably bats. That was what was at the heart of the 2008 controversy over Ron Paul’s old newsletters, and the racially charged, anti-gay sentiments expressed therein. Doctor Paul did not write the newsletters that went out under his name. “Everybody knows in my district that I didn’t write them,” he explained at the time, “and I don’t speak like that.” Of course he doesn’t — but he willingly associates with people who do. The John Birch Society may in fact be rock-solid on monetary policy; they also think that vast swathes of the U.S. government and business community are part of a secret socialist cabal actively working to replace American sovereignty with a one-world government under the United Nations. It’s the only political organization I know of that lists “CONSPIRACY” as a major title under the “Issues” tab on its Web page. They’re crackpots — but they’re Ron Paul’s crackpots.

 The willful blindness of the Ron Paul movement is rooted in the mental habits of the good doctor himself. In another interview, Doctor Paul said, “Libertarians are incapable of being a racist because racism is a collectivist idea.” This is preposterous. Who put racist sentiments into Ron Paul’s libertarian newsletter if not a libertarian racist? (The newsletters are widely believed to have been ghostwritten by Lew Rockwell, who acknowledges involvement as one of several writers but has never owned up to the specific passages at controversy.) Ron’s Ronness means that when ideology meets reality, reality ceases to be real, and philosophy in the ether trumps facts on the ground.

 If Ron Paul has been careless about choosing his friends, he’s been even more careless about choosing his enemies. “I want to totally disassociate myself from the policies that have given us unprecedented deficits, massive monetary inflation, indiscriminate military spending, an irrational and unconstitutional foreign policy, zooming foreign aid, the exaltation of international banking, and the attack on our personal liberties and privacy,” he wrote in a letter offering advice to the Republican party: not a letter about the Obama administration — a letter about the Reagan administration. Ron Paul, who cast his first presidential vote for Ike (who may or may not have been a Communist dupe, according to his Bircher buddies); who stayed on through Nixon and Ford, the Republican creation of the EPA, wage and price controls, and “We’re all Keynesians now,” and who first entered Congress as a Republican in 1977, under the shadow of Watergate and the triumph of Jimmy Carter — he was driven to despair by Ronald Reagan. “There is no credibility left for the Republican Party as a force to reduce the size of government,” he wrote. “That is the message of the Reagan years.”

 Thus bloomed Doctor Paul’s association with the Libertarian party (which, by definition, includes not one racist) and his career as a no-hoper presidential candidate. He still remains at odds with much of the GOP and the conservative movement, telling his supporters in Iowa that the nation is suffering from “too much bipartisanship — from big-spending conservatives and big-spending liberals!” as though there were no difference. It’s a big applause line at the Iowa State Fair, where he also — because the ideas always come first — gives a desultory mini-lecture about Keynesian economics and fiat money, his high, thin voice struggling to be heard above the din of blue-ribbon livestock, tractors, and 100,000 mouths masticating 100,000 corn dogs. And then come the magic words — “American Empire!” — that really puts the spark to the powder. The crowd roars. Ron Paul checks his watch.

 That’s a funny little habit of his: checking his watch in the middle of speeches. During his first appearance at the soapbox at the Iowa State Fair, he spoke for only eleven minutes and then skedaddled with the four men who constitute his security detail. With their dark suits and thick necks and vaguely Eastern European look, they imbued the Great Libertarian Hope’s comings and goings with an ironic goon-Gestapo vibe. (Over the course of stalking Ron Paul around Iowa, I came to appreciate that these four gentlemen were in fact good-humored and courteous and totally professional, and that Ron Paul, at 76 years of age, can hustle down a midway with admirable alacrity.) He’s far from a polished campaigner: He must have checked his watch three or four times in those eleven minutes. His mien is not what the pundits like to call “presidential” — it’s more “barstool philosopher.” With decades of political life under his belt, Ron Paul still is not a smooth speaker, not always even a coherent one, and he careers from topic to topic and mode to mode with a kind of awesomely off-kilter abandon. You can tell when he gets to the moment in a speech at which his stage directions say to start emoting and build to a crescendo, and it’s a little bit painful to watch him ratchet it up.

 In short, he’s the nation’s most successful awful retail politician. Striding down the fairway, he waves at fans wishing him well, and his wave is an irritable, annoyed little gesture, like swatting at a mosquito. When a young fan approaches and asks him to sign her book, she says she read it and is telling all her friends too. He responds: “Yaaaaaaaaaay!” his voice rising about two octaves. She’s about twenty, not six. He is terrible at making small talk.

 Which is not to say that he’s insincere — he is manically, 100 percent sincere. But he sincerely does not want to talk about the many-splendored thing that is the Iowa State Fair: He wants to talk about fiat money, the American Empire, the Fed, and why we should be more or less cool with atomic ayatollahs. There are dozens of members of the extended Paul family around, but there’s no sense that he’s using them as props, the way most politicians do. The Pauls seem to be a genuinely tight and happy and prosperous clan, and there’s an emerging consensus among Iowa straw-poll goers that whatever happens to Ron Paul, his wife, Carol, would make a superlative first lady. She offers me a copy of the Paul Family Cookbook, which she’s signing and giving away to fans. I ask her which recipe is her favorite. She says she doesn’t know, because she hasn’t read this version. She laughs and tells me to send her a recipe. I take the cookbook, which is, oddly enough, my second libertarian-themed cookbook, the other one being Liberated Cooking by former Reason magazine editor Marty Zupan. (If you want to know how Rose Director Friedman did stuffed cabbage, that’s your source.)

 While Mrs. The One Man Who Can Save Us All is signing cookbooks, I sidle over to the candidate and chat a little bit. “What do you think of the fair?” Blah-blah, fiat money. And this is probably the time to mention the reason there’s no real Ron Paul interview in this Ron Paul profile. Ron Paul’s partisans complain that the media won’t talk about Ron Paul. On the other hand, Ron Paul won’t talk to the media — at least not the little media outlet called National Review, not if it is represented by your obedient servant named above. Forgive the personal aside, but it’s a part of the story: Ron Paul’s campaign, cheesed off at me for having noted that their guy has seemingly become softer on illegal immigration, refused to speak to National Review unless I was taken off the story. During my time stalking Ron Paul around New Hampshire and Iowa, I spoke with dozens of his supporters, with his son Sen. Rand Paul, and a few longtime associates, but the campaign never consented to an actual interview with the candidate. The Paul campaign went so far as to call Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, and ask that somebody else be assigned to the story. (Mr. Lowry, of course, was having none of it.) And that’s the weird personality cult of the Ron Paul movement on full display: I doubt that there’s anybody at National Review who is closer to Ron Paul politically than I am, but I do not believe that Ron Paul is the “one man who can save America,” or endorse the risible notion that he is the “most electable” candidate, or think that it’s fun to run with the Birchers.

 To challenge any of these articles of faith among the faithful is to see the dogmatic side of libertarianism on angry and sometimes ugly display. A charming and well-spoken young woman informed me that Ron Paul was sure to win because his ideas have “universal appeal.” I asked her why, if his ideas had “universal appeal,” he was such an unpopular candidate, and why libertarian ideas in general are not energetically embraced by the American body politic. She responded with a point-for-point, and possibly word-for-word, recitation of Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent thesis. “The media,” she protested, “is all controlled by seven or eight corporations.” I pointed out that National Review was friendly to libertarianism and independent. I pointed to Brian Doherty of Reason magazine, standing next to me, and explained that the whole point of Reason magazine is to further libertarian ideas, but not many people buy Reason magazine. (Sorry, guys. I meant, you know, compared with Vogue, or Cat Fancy.) And so the conversation turned to brainwashing, and I turned to leave.

 It’s no accident that you get a lot of freeze-dried Chomsky leftovers among the Paulists, because his movement is, in no small part, the culmination of the far-left/far-right coalition dreamed of by Murray Rothbard and other libertarians during the Vietnam era. Ron Paul did not rocket to prominence as a libertarian candidate — he rocketed to prominence as an antiwar candidate. He’s George W. Bush’s parting gift to the Republican party.

 The Ron Paul party, unlike the Republican party, is full of people who whisper darkly about “international bankers,” “the New World Order,” “globalization,” “American imperialism,” “war profiteers,” and the like. They hate Dick Cheney more than any three-espresso leftist ever hated Dick Cheney. And if Ron Paul is not the nominee — and let me go ahead and break the bad news to you guys: He’s not going to be — many of them will not be supporting the Republican in 2012. They’re already talking about an independent or third-party run for the most electable Republican who isn’t going to be elected as a Republican. And the fact that Ron Paul is on his way out — he’s not running for the House again — has a few Republicans worried that he’s going to be a looser cannon than usual. Operators in the other Republican campaigns, who want to see Paul out of the race for their own selfish reasons, have been circulating the idea that the other primary candidates should demand that Paul promise to support the Republican nominee in 2012, no matter who it is. “If he won’t do that,” one campaign aide says, “they should refuse to appear on stage with him.” But the Republican party probably isn’t too worried about Ron Paul making a break for it. Like Richard III trying to ensure the loyalty of Lord Stanley, the GOP is holding a hostage.

 Sen. Rand Paul is a lot like Ron without Ron’s Ronness. Padding around the Iowa State Fair in shockingly neon sneakers, a T-shirt, and some truly hideous plaid skateboarder shorts — this is a U.S. senator here — he looks like every other word out of his mouth should be “dude.” But it’s not. Deft where his father is clumsy, and having learned to keep himself on a much shorter leash, Rand Paul is hailed from the stage at Ames as a future presidential contender himself. Who’s doing the hailing? That loopy Ivers guy from the Schmitz and Buchanan campaigns.

 There was a real sense of the torch changing hands there in Iowa, personality cults having a hereditary aspect. Senator Paul, whose libertarianism is more of the populist Tea Party variety than the I’ve-read-every-Mises-book variety, seems to have found a formula for balancing his slightly more traditional conservatism with the Ron Paul movement’s more theoretical libertarianism, particularly on the subject of foreign policy. “Our movement has people from all walks of life who have come together under the banner of freedom,” he says. “The Republicans will have to someday acknowledge that not all military spending is sacred or well spent, and that we can save money from the military budget. Democrats will have to acknowledge that all money spent on social welfare and entitlements is not sacred or well spent, and the Democrats will have to acknowledge that they have to cut social spending. That is the compromise — the compromise is about cutting spending across the board.” Defending the Tea Party from accusations of extremism, he asks, “Is it extreme to say that we should balance the budget gradually, over a seven-to-eight-year period? I tell people that is the compromise — I’m compromising by not doing it immediately.” He jokes about John McCain’s Tolkien-themed dismissal of the Tea Party movement: “I’d rather be a hobbit than a troll. And didn’t the hobbits win the battle of Middle Earth?” To which a supporter shouted in response, “One Ron Paul to save them all!” No, not that far from the tree at all.

 Ron Paul’s most remarked-upon moment at the Ames debate was his heated exchange with former senator Rick Santorum, who also is never going to be the Republican nominee or president of the United States. Santorum came down pretty hard on Paul for his laissez-faire attitude toward the hideous little cabal that rules Iran, which is eagerly pursuing nuclear capabilities and has vowed to use them. Doctor Paul pointed out that the Soviet Union had thousands of warheads, and we never felt the need to invade it over that fact. And that’s his foreign-policy thinking in miniature. It surely must have occurred to him by now that one big reason we never invaded the Soviet Union, which at the time was one of the most formidable military powers in the world, is precisely the same reason we don’t knock off Kim Jong Il in North Korea, one of the least formidable military powers in the world: They already had nuclear weapons. The question of whether opening a can of regime change on the bad mullah-faqīhs in Tehran is wise or just or good is an entirely different question from whether we can try it without getting ourselves or our allies nuked in the process. Foreign policy is not just about principles, but possibilities, odds, and options. Can and should aren’t the same thing, but answering the latter requires answering the former first. But that kind of Machiavellian analysis is an unalterably square peg that will not be fitted into the round hole of Ron Paul’s doctrinaire libertarianism. The exchange with Santorum was not his finest moment.

 But he had some very fine moments in Iowa, too, including a measured, sober, and, to my ear, moving defense of his lifelong pro-life stance. “There is something that precedes liberty, and that is life. I believe in a very limited role for government, but the prime reason that government exists in a free society is to protect liberty, and to protect life — and I mean all life.” Doctor Paul, an ob-gyn who has delivered uncounted babies, tells of witnessing a caesarean section–turned–abortion during his days as a medical resident. “They lifted up a baby that was breathing and crying, put it in a bucket, and left it to die. And they pretended nobody heard it.” The hall fell silent. But for Ron Paul, every issue is every other issue, and his pro-life speech ended up being a foreign-policy speech in which he maintained that his anti-abortion scruples also prevented him from sending those babies into “undeclared and unwinnable wars” once they were are of age — as though sending the all-volunteer U.S. military into military action were morally indistinguishable from slaughtering the unborn in the womb to accommodate our national sexual convenience.

 There was a much more boisterous scene a few weeks before the Ames Straw Poll, when Doctor Paul gave a speech up in Nashua, N.H., to a group composed largely of college-age supporters, talking up the Tax-Free Tips Act of 2011, a piece of legislation he introduced in March. The act would exempt bartenders, waiters, and other hospitality workers from paying federal income taxes on the income they derive from gratuities. It would, in other words, legalize the near-universal practice of income-tax fraud that persists in those professions. Later in the evening, a group of New Hampshire Paulistas organized a pub crawl to promote the bill. The pub-crawlers were mindful to point out that it was not an official campaign event.

 And that’s Ron Paul, too: a candidate of ideas, of war and peace, of life and death, and of nickels and dimes, all thrown in the wash together, all of them put through the same ideological wringer, each question a theater of operations in the great philosophical war in which he has long served as an unlikely field marshal. This is, presumably, Ron Paul’s last crusade. But the Ron Paul movement goes on. Whether it goes on as part of the conservative movement or as a separate and possibly hostile phenomenon will depend upon such qualities as the good judgment, sense of proportion, and political realism exhibited by leaders in both camps. It will depend, in other words, on the absence of Ron’s Ronness.