For political completists, the New Yorker‘s Kelefa Sanneh has a nice meaty summary of Ron Paul’s actual political career to date, as opposed to the gauzy claims and fables of both his supporters and his opponents:
… Paul is running for President again this year, in a field that many Republicans find disappointing. And yet, while Paul is doing better, state by state, than he did in 2008, he has conspicuously failed to establish himself as this year’s Tea Party candidate. Polls have shown that voters who support the Tea Party are actually less likely to support Paul—some have gone for Newt Gingrich, whose denunciations of Obama are pithier, or for Rick Santorum, who is more forthright in his defense of “traditional American values.” In South Carolina, where Paul received thirteen per cent of the vote, behind Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Santorum, he did his best among voters opposed to the Tea Party. The Ron Paul movement has grown, but the events of recent years—the rise of the Tea Party, the fights over corporate bailouts, the messy passage of Obama’s health-care reform bill—have done surprisingly little to raise Paul’s standing among Republicans. Last summer, Jon Stewart mocked cable news channels for “pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist,” and asked, “How did libertarian Ron Paul become the thirteenth floor in a hotel?” The answer is embedded in the question. People don’t think of Paul as a top-tier Republican candidate partly because they think of him as a libertarian: anti-tax and anti-bailout, but also antiwar, anti-empire, and, sometimes, anti-Republican…
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If Ron Paul doesn’t win the Republican nomination, he will have to decide whether to support the candidate who does. Four years ago, he was incredulous when the John McCain campaign asked for his endorsement. “The argument was he would do a little less harm than the other candidate,” Paul said. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t like the idea of getting about two or three million people angry at me.’ ” Instead, he convened a press conference to announce an alliance between four independent candidates: Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman, of the Libertarian Party; Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic congresswoman, of the Green Party; Ralph Nader, running as an independent; and Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist preacher, of the Constitution Party. When Barr declined, at the last minute, to join the press conference, Paul praised the remaining three—they all pledged to end the wars, uphold civil liberties, slash the debt, and audit the Federal Reserve—without endorsing any of them. Two weeks later, Paul changed his mind and endorsed Baldwin, partly, it seemed, out of spite for Barr. Together, the four candidates won about 1.6 million votes: a respectable sum, but a confusing statement, and a deflating end for Paul’s campaign…
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There is only one politician whom Paul regularly praises in his speeches—a man he coyly refers to as a “senator from Kentucky.” If Paul sees a future for himself in the Republican Party, it is through his son Rand, who might have an easier time than his father in attracting traditional conservatives to his cause. (During his campaign for the Senate, for example, Rand Paul declined to rule out using force to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.) Unlike most politicians on the verge of retirement, Paul can’t accurately claim that he has nothing to lose by breaking with the party that has been his home for all but one of his years in politics. Hope for his son’s prospects—and a disinclination to put him in an awkward position—might be enough to keep Paul from ending his political career with another third-party campaign. If he split the vote, indirectly helping to reëlect Obama, it might be a long time before Republicans were willing to get behind anyone named Paul.
What’s on the “quirky and unpredictable” agenda for the start of the weekend?