Ron Paul: The Great Contrarian

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Ron Paul: The Great Contrarian

The Great Contrarian


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Does Ron Paul matter?
The Texas congressman doesn’t have a chance of winning the GOP presidential nomination. In fact, it’s looking like no one does against Mitt Romney.
Yet Paul seems to be enjoying a certain momentum. The contrarian libertarian placed a respectable third in the Iowa caucus, garnering 21 percent of the vote, just behind Romney and Rick Santorum, who each polled just under 25 percent of the vote.
In New Hampshire, Paul continued to improve. He still finished well behind Romney, taking 23 percent of the vote compared to Romney’s 39 percent, but he took second and looked more like a serious candidate than the fringe also-ran he was in 2008.
It won’t be enough to upset the GOP’s anointed candidate — not in this election cycle. However long Paul remains in the race, he can only hope to hold on as a protest candidate.
Nevertheless, he plays the role to the hilt. Whether he wants to be or not, Ron Paul is this election cycle’s candidate for hope and change.
More persuasively than any other candidate, Paul has presented himself as the candidate who would stand up to corruption at the heart of the American political system. Given to fulminating against the Federal Reserve System, the Drug War, interventionist foreign policy, and any number of other points of consensus in Washington, he clearly doesn’t fit well with the Republican establishment — and doesn’t care. He’s got a motley but growing movement of supporters — young idealists, discontented Middle Americans, many in the tea party movement — and what draws them to him is his incorruptibility.
This at a time when money is poised to corrupt electoral politics as never before. This is the first presidential primary season of the age of the new so-called super PACs. These lightly regulated committees — which can accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, unions and other groups — have already accounted for nearly half of all campaign spending. Made legal by virtue of two U.S. Supreme Court rulings, the groups allow the rich to make an end run around the old campaign finance rules.
To make matters worse, the super PACs have been behind brutal negative ad campaigns that have damaged all the Republican candidates.
Paul, who is distinguished among the Republican field for having amassed his war chest in small contributions from plain folks, is the kind of candidate who gives people hope that our electoral politics can change for the better. That big money will not always dominate, and that the people can unseat the establishment favorites if they muster enough votes. That every vote counts more than every corporate contribution or massive donation by an individual.
The problem with Paul is that his contrarianism often goes too far even for those who sympathize with him. In Paul’s worldview, the U.S. isn’t merely more hesitant to be engaged globally; it is nearly disengaged. He wants the U.S. to pull out of the United Nations.
Paul also aspires to eliminate no fewer than five cabinet departments within the federal government. And the Federal Reserve System to boot. Not reform, mind you. Extirpate. To enact even half of Paul’s to-do list would turn this country on its head.
He has also denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the grounds that it violated the Constitution. With opinions like this, Paul shows symptoms of that malady in which an ideology — in his case, libertarianism — sometimes disables the faculty of common sense.
Long after Mitt Romney is nominated as the GOP candidate, and after the outcome of a Romney vs. Obama matchup is known, will come the analysis of this presidential campaign. We’ll know who funneled the money to achieve the result, and what spoils they reaped in reward. And it won’t make any of us feel good about the health of our democracy.
If Romney fails to unseat Obama, look for the Ron Paul insurgency within the GOP to grow. And where that could take the party is anybody’s guess.
To reach Mary Sanchez call 816-234-4752 or email msanchez@kcstar.com.
(c) 2012, The Kansas City Star.
Distributed by Tribune Media Services

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LGBTs for Ron Paul: Huh?

Posted: 1/12/12 10:46 PM ET

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I must confess that I'm truly baffled by the level of support I'm seeing among my friends for presidential candidate Ron Paul. While the number of Paul fans in my circles is relatively small, he nonetheless enjoys the highest level of support from my LGBT-identified and equality-supporting friends out of all the non-LGBT-friendly candidates. In addition, the Ron Paul supporters I know tend to be passionately, often blindly, devoted to their candidate, steamrolling over any criticisms of Paul, no matter how legitimate, and simply dismissing out of hand those they cannot out-argue.
To many people, Ron Paul's sound bites are very appealing. Smaller government. Individual liberty. Legalization of marijuana and other drugs. (Yes, I think this has a lot to do with the support Paul receives, especially among young people and college students.) Unfortunately, it's been my experience that most supporters of Ron Paul stop there and either don't dig any further or ignore the digging done by others. This alarms me, because Ron Paul's record is very, very anti-gay.
On his best days, Ron Paul supports the so-called "states' rights" (http://articles.boston.com/2011-12-21/political-intelligence/30537247_1_gay-marriage-marriage-issue-bob-vander-plaats) position regarding marriage equality. On his worst, he has specifically bragged (http://www.joemygod.blogspot.com/2012/01/ron-paul-new-hampshire-flyer.html) about his efforts to obstruct and attack LGBT people's civil rights and gone out of his way to slander (http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2011/12/30/395881/ron-paul-claimed-an-aids-patient-is-a-victim-of-his-own-lifestyle-in-1987-book/) and mischaracterize LGBT people.
Setting aside the generally disturbing deployment of the "states' rights" argument at all, given its shameful history as a justifier of slavery and Jim Crow laws in this country, I'd like to ask Mr. Paul (as well as those who profess to support both Ron Paul and LGBT equality) why LGBT couples should be the only Americans whose marriages are subject to the "states' rights" standard. Why should only LGBT people, but not straight people, have to seek the approval of our state legislatures and/or citizenry in order to marry the people we love? Why should our marriages be the only ones that dissolve when we cross state lines? And why is this an acceptable state of affairs, especially given the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law to all American citizens?
"Yeah," many of my Paul-supporting friends will say, "but that's just your opinion."
This brings up another point: the difference between opinion and fact. Maybe it's just me, but in this era of false equivalency (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/krugman-the-centrist-cop-out.html) memes, it appears as though this distinction is being increasingly overlooked. A fact is something that is empirically true and can be supported by evidence, while an opinion is a belief that may or may not be backed up with some type of evidence, usually taking the form of a subjective statement that can be emotionally based or result from a person's individual interpretation of a fact.


FACT: Ron Paul's presidential campaign issued a flyer (http://www.joemygod.blogspot.com/2012/01/ron-paul-new-hampshire-flyer.html) that boasted about the candidate's efforts to introduce legislation that would remove challenges to the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act from the federal court system.
FACT: Ron Paul's Iowa state director is Mike Heath (http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/anti-gay-hate-group-chair-is-now-ron-pauls-iowa-state-director/politics/2011/12/29/32460), a long-term Christian-right activist who formerly served as the board chairman of an SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group known as "Americans for Truth About Homosexuality."
FACT: Ron Paul has a long history of racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic comments (http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/98883/ron-paul-incendiary-newsletters-exclusive).
FACT: As state above, Ron Paul supports the so-called "states' rights" approach to marriage, but interestingly, only for LGBT couples (http://www.yourtango.com/20083328/inside-pauls-marriage).
FACT: Ron Paul said (http://www.thepoliticalguide.com/Profiles/House/Texas/Ron_Paul/Views/Gay_Marriage/), "If I were in Congress in 1996, I would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which used Congress' constitutional authority to define what official state documents other states have to recognize under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, to ensure that no state would be forced to recognize a same-sex marriage license issued in another state."
FACT: Ron Paul opposes (http://www.salon.com/2007/09/21/gay_gop/) the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by civilian, nonreligious employers.

Based on the above examples and so many others, there is no way one can honestly characterize Ron Paul's past statements and record as anything other than anti-gay. Of course, LGBTs and supporters of LGBT equality, like all voters, can and should vote for whomever they choose. I am neither disputing that right nor attempting in any way to tell anyone how to vote. What I am saying, however, is that LGBT and pro-LGBT voters should at least acknowledge that a vote for a candidate like Ron Paul is a vote for someone who opposes their rights.



Follow John Becker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/freedom2marry (http://www.twitter.com/freedom2marry)

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Ron Paul and Louis Farrakhan -- birds of a feather?



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American Voices January 12, 2012

In trying to get a handle on the mania around Ron Paul, I've been thinking a lot about another figure who, despite a history of bigotry, once inspired a rabid following by speaking to deep truths. It is first necessary to journey back to the Crack Era -- the late '80s and early '90s -- when the general sense was that the black youth of America had lost their minds. In our cities, young black men were bleeding in the streets. All of us had friends who were dead or jailed. All of our high school classes included at least one young woman who was a mother or about to become one. All the brothers were out.

The need was real. And the man who best perceived that need, Louis Farrakhan, preached bigotry, and headed a church with a history of violence, and had patriarchal and homophobic views. We knew this. Some of us even endorsed it. A few of us debated about it. But, ultimately, we didn't care. Farrakhan -- and his cadre of clean, disciplined black men and modest, chaste black women -- spoke to our deep and inward sense that we were committing a kind of slow suicide, that -- as the rappers put it -- we were self-destructing.



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In the late '80s and early '90s, Farrakhan beguiled young African-Americans. At the height of his powers, Farrakhan convened a national meeting of black men on the Mall. (Forgive my vagueness. The number is beside the point. It was a group of dudes.) The expectation among some media was violence. What they got instead was a love-in. I was there. I don't know how to describe the feeling of walking from my apartment at 14th and Euclid, down 16th Street, and seeing black women of all ages come out on the street and cheer. I can't explain the force of that. It defied everything they said we were, and, during the Crack Era, so much of what we had come to believe.

During Farrakhan's peak years, national commentators generally looked on in horror. They simply could not understand how an obvious bigot could capture the imagination of so many people. Surely there were "good" Civil Rights leaders out there, waging the good fight against discrimination. But what the pundits never got was that Farrakhan promised something more -- improvement, minus the need to beg from white people. Farrakhan promised improvement through self-reliance -- a tradition stretching back to our very dawn. To our minds, the political leaders of Black America had fled the field.

As surely as Ron Paul speaks to a real issue -- the state's broad use of violence and surveillance -- which America's political leadership has failed to address, Farrakhan spoke to something real, something unsullied, which Black America's political leadership failed to address, Both Paul and Farrakhan, in their glamour, inspired the young, the disaffected, the disillusioned.

To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on a placard, and could not move the party machine, men such as these become something more than political operators; they become symbols. Substantive charges against them, no matter the reasons, are dismissed. The movement they represent means more. But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug war, who oppose the Patriot Act, deserve better than Ron Paul.

We are faced with a candidate who published racism under his name, defended that publication when it was convenient and blamed it on ghostwriters when it wasn't, whose take on the Civil War is at home with Lost Causers, and whose take on the Civil Rights Act is at home with segregationists. Ostensibly, this is all coincidence, or, if it isn't, it should be excused because Ron Paul is a lone voice speaking on the important issues that plague our nation.

But the dispatches must be honestly grappled with: It must be argued that a man who could not manage a newsletter should be promoted to managing a nuclear arsenal. Failing that, it must be asserted that a man who once claimed that black people were knowingly injecting white people with HIV, who fundraised by predicting a race war, who handsomely profited from it all, should lead the free world. If that line falls too, we are forced to confess that Ron Paul regularly summoned up the specters of racism for his own political gain, and thus stands convicted of moral cowardice.

Let us stipulate that all politicians compromise. But the mayhem and death which attended the talents of Thomas Watson and George Wallace renders their design into a school of sorcery all its own. I do not mean to be unsympathetic here. It is regrettable to find ourselves in this untenable space, where all our politicians cower and we are bereft of suitable standard-bearers. But the fervency for Ron Paul is rooted in the longing for a redeemer, for one who will rise up and cut through the dishonest pabulum of horse races and sloganeering and speak directly to Americans. It is a species of saviorism which hopes to deliver a prophet unto the people, one who will be better than the people themselves.

But every man is a prophet until he faces a Congress.

(Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer and senior editor for The Atlantic and its website. His blog can be found at www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates (http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates).)