Them and those afraid of the trilateral commission and illuminati.
It looks that way right now, I agree.
Not in a million years. The bottom line is this: Paul’s moment already came and went. He generated some buzz in 2008 but never had a shot at winning anything of consequence because most of his views are nowhere close to the public’s. By now the general paranoia that characterized his supporters has filtered into the Tea Party, so other candidates are now competing for it, and they are more appealing than he is and have more money. Another problem is that he’s nuts. I like to cite his immigration views as my example on that point.
Mr Paul believes in fiscal responsibility, and as such has no chance of ever winning a popular election in the United States, particularly against candidates such as Mr Obama. Mr Obama has figured out that the American public (actually, pretty much the entire world) will vote for the candidate who gives them today from Other People’s money.
Since there are fewer people than ever even paying federal income tax, it makes no sense to campaign as a fiscally responsible candidate. Who would vote for you when the next guy over is willing to tax the successful more and borrow from your children for any residual gap?
The Tragedy of the Commons principle has won the day from a fiscal standpoint. Mr Obama recognizes this and has the temerity to actually criticize the voters who want more responsible spending while at the same time benefiting from current largesse.
It turns out we can all be bought, even those who feel like we overspend. Just because Warren Buffet thinks the tax rate should be higher on his capital gains does not mean he does not take advantage of the system. Mr Paul apparently feels the system should spend responsibly. This is a (permanently) minority position.
Does he? I mean, he says he does, but no candidate in my memory has every ran saying they weren’t going to balance the budget. Paul seems to think he can keep entitlement spending, massively cut and in some cases abolish taxes and pay for it all by cutting the military and various general fund programs. The numbers don’t even vaguely being to work out, even if you get rid of the military all together. Not to mention that there is no way he’d be able to implement more then a small fraction of his cuts in the remote possitbility he was elected.
If he has a budget with actual numbers, I’d be willing to look at it (I can’t view youtube from here). but just reading the OP, he sounds like he “cares” about fiscal responsibility percisely the same way other recent candidates have, as a buzz word.
Ron Paul is in many ways the Republican equivalent of Dennis Kucinich. He represents an extreme while popular within the party, is not viable to the public at large. He’ll do well in polls of no consequence, especially those that are gatherings of year round party supporters.
Those that only show up to vote for actual elections do not share the same enthusiasm, they want someone that can win. In order to win the candidate needs to be able to appeal to at least some of the members on the other side, Ron Paul doesn’t do that.
Oddly enough if Ron Paul runs in the Republican primary it will bring in some sanity, forcing discussion on the place of government rather then the emotion and hypocrisy that now dominates Republican elections. I doubt he can win but I welcome his presence in a Ross Perot style merit.
Ron Paul has a lot of power to influence politics in the next election but not enough to win it.
If he loses the Republican nomination his presence in the debate can serve to help the party.
If by some miracle Ron Paul wins the Republican nomination he will doom any chance the Republicans have of beating Obama.
If he runs as a third party candidate he guarantees Obama’s victory.
Unfortunately, Washington is harsh to intelligent men like Ron Paul. The American public has shown that it prefers image over substance-which is why we have a our present “teleprompter” president.
Of course, if things continue this bad, Paul might have a chance.
I totally agree, it is high time to end the “American Empire”-it is bankrupting us, and has delayed important reforms. Of course, the military-industrial complex will fight tooth and nail to prevent this-which is why I expect Obama will launch a new war against Iran, sometime next year.
I think we’re officially through the looking glass on this one. From about 2003 to 2008, liberals kept saying (wrongly) that Bush was going to invade Iran because of his aggressive foreign policy, war on terror, etc. And now a few conservatives are saying Obama (who is in the middle of pulling soldiers out of Iraq) is going to invade Iran because he’s trying to negotiate international sanctions against their nuclear program.
Yes, the perfect Republican to go up against Barack Obama is someone with a history of posting bigoted comments in his wing-nut newsletter:
“If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”
“Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”
Yeah, right. Ron Paul has support from African-Americans in the same way Stephen Colbert has a Black friend. Oops, wrong picture – see this one too.
The idea that liberals are going to support a guy who wants to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, the Department of Education is just laughable. He says abortion is murder. He encourages school prayer. He opposes stem cell research. He wants to repeal the 16th Amendment to eliminate income taxes. He supports the Defense of Marriage Act in opposition to same-sex marriages, and voted to ban gay adoptions of children in DC. He encourages school prayer and wants to limit judicial review of the issue.
The list goes on and on. He’s not only a doctrinaire conservative on social matters that liberals care about, he’s also a crank. In short, there may be a couple issues in which he may agree with liberals and moderates, but there are many, many more which he is the boogey-man: right-wing social views plus crazy equals unacceptable.
Oh yeah, and he doesn’t have the balls to tell 9/11 Truthers to go blow themselves. Instead he feeds them nonsense like, the government always lies about things like the Kennedy assassination, so we better investigate who was responsible for 9/11 one more time.
I don’t want to know the context of this. It’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all week.
I disagree. Palin and Huckabee are the Republican equivalent of Kucinich. Paul is the Republican equivalent of Bernie Sanders.
Paul’s whole career is based on image over substance. He has an image as the outsider who has the answers that nobody else will listen to. But his substance is that his answers are wrong.
Like Gorsnak wrote above, anyone who thinks the gold standard is a good idea is not qualified to be President.
The difference is that in the case of Howard Dean that was complete bullshit. Dean was seen as a “kook” because he was an outspoken opponent of the war and a harsh critic of GWB, and as hard as it is to believe, that was enough to be labeled kooky in 2003-04. Other than that (and even including that, these days) he’s a mainstream Democrat, even to their right on some issues.
Ron Paul, on the other hand, is truly kooky. An interesting kook, and one that has managed to gain a foothold among a small slice of the population, but not one that will ever get near the White House.
Nope.
All I need to know about Ron Paul is contained in the movie Brüno.
Well, I’ve already expressed my opinions about Ron Paul in a previous thread. He’s an idiot. And a right wing maniac. And just plain nuts. First, he was a long way from being the only person who was right about foreign policy. Over 150 congressional Democrats opposed Bush on the War in Iraq. Paul may have been the only Republican to do so, but he was far from the only person to do so. He was a long way from being the only person to predict the housing meltdown and the ensuing financial crisis as well. I could give you countless articles from all kinds of sources who did the same. But that’s really the beside the point. The point is that Ron Paul is stupid, crazy, and absurdly right-wing. Consider that:
-
He supports the gold standard, which to real economists makes as much sense as basing the economy on ostrich meat.
-
He published a bunch of newsletters full of racist and anti-semitic garbage less than twenty years ago. When they were brought to light, he tried to duck responsibility and pin the blame on someone else, despite the fact that his name was on the newsletters. Presumably this was a demonstration of how much responsibility he intends to take for his actions while in office.
-
He believes in the NAFTA Superhighway, arguably the stupidest conspiracy theory ever invented.
-
He is happy to include everybody from white supremacists to “truthers” to the most extreme anti-abortion activists in his coalition, just so long as they’ll give him money.
Funny. If Ron Paul is so brilliant in debates, why did he lose the 2008 Republican primary so badly? You earlier mentioned his big fundraising totals. Guess what? The presidency is decided by votes, not money. No candidate in history has squandered as much money as Ron Paul and gotten so little to show for it. He was the number two spender among Republicans in the New Hampshire Primary, yet when the votes came in he didn’t break the top five. It takes a certain special type of utter stupidity to get awful results like that.
Believe what you want, but Ron Paul is a lunatic.
Oh? Can we have a cite for that?
Really? Do you have some pictures of the NAFTA Superhighway to back that up?
I’ve never seen him win a debate, much less a single state in the Republican primary. But I challenge you to put your money where your mouth is with the following wager. If Ron Paul wins the Presidency in 2012, I’ll pay you $1000. If he doesn’t win, you’ll pay me $1. Will you take it?
I don’t think he’ll rise anywhere near to the level of Dean. Dean became chairman of the party after his bid for the nomination. Paul is a fringe guy. The better comparison was Kucinich, but I think Paul is actually much more of a fringe guy than Kucinich. He’s got a laundry list of verbal gaffes, he seems to be a closet Truther, he’s whacked out over the gold standard, etc. I can’t see him even winning one primary, if he chooses to run.
Chiming in with what others have said…Paul will never go beyond being a fringe guy. He has almost zero chance of getting the Republican nomination, and if he somehow manages to beat the odds, he has less chance of beating Obama. He’s have to hit the voting equivalent of winning the lottery twice.
To me, this sums it up:
Anyone who is seriously advocating the gold standards (let alone the other loony things he advocates) is not going to appeal to more than a small, fervent fringe.
-XT
I mean, gold? WTF? What is he, a pirate?
It’s a common position for Libertarians to have, and Paul is a sort-of Libertarian.
Well, I suspect Rudi Gulliani would beg to differ (he held the record for the most money spent for the least number of delegates gained, plus if nothing else, the '08 campaign raised Pauls profile but pretty much finished off Gulliani’s political career), but I agree with the rest of your post.
Flipping through some stuff about Paul from the last election, I agree he’s a pretty standard issue conspiracy theorists whose managed to get a bunch of people who want to see him as something he’s not to follow him without being too critical. While I agree with DoctorJ’s caveat about the two not being equivalent as far as “kookiness” goes, I think the analogy to Dean is still pretty good. I was in VT during Dean’s run and had a lot of friends working for his campaign. They were all fairly liberal Dems fustrated after four years of Bush, and I think there was a lot of desire to see Dean as something he wasn’t, to the point that I think Dean himself bought into some of the mythos, to his ultimate detriment.
But in anycase, I see the same sort of enthusiasm in Paul supporters as with Dean, and in both cases part of me even wants them to be right. Too many people are ultra-critical of government and politicians, its kinda nice to see some uncritical enthusiasm, even if its enthusasim for a politician who wants to try and turn the US into something out of an Upton Sinclair novel.