Bradley in DC
01-23-2008, 11:35 PM
http://www.anchoragepress.com/site/basicarticle.asp?ID=460
Ron Paul's easy, but it's not that simple
By Brendan Joel Kelley
Although I think I know who I’ll be voting for on February 5, I’ve been harboring a political crush on Ron Paul, the libertarian ten-term congressman from Texas. He’s running in the Republican primary as a strict constitutionalist, a small government, states’ rights advocate who’d pull us out of Iraq immediately, abolish the IRS and rescind the Patriot Act, and sanction consensual “crimes” like drug use and prostitution.
All of those elements appeal to me—the platform is political pornography, as far as I’m concerned—but I have concerns as well.
Ron Paul and his campaign have attracted some dubious support from sordid elements like former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and much of the racist White Nationalist movement. Combined with racist statements unearthed in newsletters like the Ron Paul Political Report and reported on in a lengthy piece entitled “Angry White Man” in The New Republic, it’s more than enough to give potential supporters serious pause (it should be noted that Paul has disavowed the statements, saying he takes “moral responsibility” for not paying closer attention to what was written in his name).
I wanted to see if the campaign could relieve my apprehensions, if it could get me to go all the way with Ron Paul, so I headed to its Alaska headquarters.
That’s where I met Matthew Peters.
Peters, age 25, is the Alaska Field Director for the Ron Paul campaign, and even at his young age something of a campaign veteran; he first campaigned when his father, Tim Peters, ran for (and won) the office of mayor in North Pole a decade or so ago. Altogether he’s worked on 10 campaigns in various capacities.
Peters is tall, bespectacled with short dark hair that’s prematurely receding; he looks tired, but tells me that he slept six hours the night before—more than usual—and that he feels refreshed. We walk next door to the Moose’s Tooth for lunch so I can hear his pitch.
And he’s good. Really good. His speech is peppered with his personal agreement with Paul’s stances (most of which I’m down with, too). “That’s how Ron Paul feels, that’s why I like him so much,” he says frequently and emphatically. It sounds incredibly sincere and free of spin, marked by genuine passion.
Peters’ youth and its attendant enthusiasm sync well with the hallmarks of Paul’s campaign – the Internet-based MeetUps and YouTube videos and pro-Ron Paul blogs; the sign waving on street corners; the newly awakened activists who’ve found something to believe in. And, after listening to Peters for a while, you really want to be a part of this burgeoning wanna-be-revolutionary movement.
The grass-roots activism is reminiscent of Howard Dean’s failed run in 2004, but with its act more together. Paul’s campaign relies heavily on small individual donations culled mostly from the Internet, as did Dean’s; Dean’s best fundraising quarter racked up $14.8 million, while Ron Paul pulled in over $20 million in the last quarter of 2007. As of press time, Paul had pulled in more than $3 million this month from more than 40,000 donors.
After Peters has spieled out several of his talking points—non-interventionism, free trade to all nations, states’ rights—I present him with my concerns. When the newsletters’ racist remarks and the support from the racists comes up, Peters is nonplussed. He even mentions the $500 donation from Don Black, the webmaster of White Nationalist site Stormfront.org, echoing his candidates own rebuttal regarding the money—“Why give it back to him to use for bad purposes?” Paul told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto.
“He doesn’t go to David Duke and say, ‘hey, how can you help me?’” Peters tells me (Duke did author a piece entitled “What Ron Paul Must Do To Win,” that was posted on Stormfront.org). “Whatever they do individually, they have freedom of speech, they can do what they want, but it probably hurts [Paul] rather than helps him. Maybe they should think about that.”
Peters’ version of Paul’s defense was suitably on message—“he doesn’t believe we should be separated into groups like blacks and whites, males and females. What he cares about is individual liberties, whether you’re a black man or a white man” (Also, I’d already heard Nelson Linder, the president of Austin, Texas’s NAACP chapter and a friend of Ron Paul’s for twenty years, defend Paul and state flat-out that he’s not a racist, so my concerns in that regard were assuaged.)
The real issue is electability, and in this respect Peters stretches his optimism to its bounds. “We keep gaining, we’re in the number-three spot in my opinion,” he told us. This was prior to the Nevada contest, where he placed second over McCain, and South Carolina, where he received only 4% of the vote.
The most serious problem with supporting Ron Paul is that he has little or no chance of winning the Republican nomination, even though this year’s GOP convention may be the first contested one in 60 years. Paul could proffer his delegates to another candidate at the convention and effectively secure himself political capital, to somehow be used pursuing his constitutionalist ideology. The problem is, there’s not a Republican candidate in the field that Paul could lend his support to without compromising his principles.
I’ve been burned before by supporting candidates sheerly based on ideology; I liked Dennis Kucinich in 2004 (crazy, I know), but I’d rather have seen General Wesley Clark take the nomination than John Kerry. In this election, my primary vote may well be better spent on a viable candidate.
Yet, in an early December poll conducted by KTUU, Ron Paul is first amongst Alaskan voters, with 29 percent compared to Mike Huckabee’s 22 percent. Mitt Romney, the only other Republican candidate with a paid campaign staffer in Alaska, polled at only 9 percent. (The poll was unscientific, KTUU points out.) Randy Ruedrich, the state’s Republican party chairman, told me that the Alaska’s GOP machinery remains neutral regarding the primary candidates.
Ron Paul may indeed win Alaska, and it’s entirely possible that Alaska will be the only state he wins.
“I’ve worked ten campaigns and you can usually tell whether you have momentum or not; you can tell if you’re going to lose,” Peters tells me. “I don’t think we’re losing at all, we’re gaining ground every day. I think we’ve got a really good shot with Alaska, and regardless of what happens with the rest of the campaign, I think he’s going to win in Alaska.”
Perhaps that will be the case: Ron Paul wins Alaska and takes a majority of the state’s 29 Republican delegates. After spending some time with the man behind the campaign up here, I believe it can happen. But it would be a cold and lonely victory in a state with little electoral sway.
In my heart, where boyish idealism reigns and all utopias can be imagined and implemented, I’m totally down with the Ron Paul campaign. In my head, which understands the brutal realities of politics and governing, Ron Paul’s candidacy is inspiring, but hopeless in the end.
Ron Paul's easy, but it's not that simple
By Brendan Joel Kelley
Although I think I know who I’ll be voting for on February 5, I’ve been harboring a political crush on Ron Paul, the libertarian ten-term congressman from Texas. He’s running in the Republican primary as a strict constitutionalist, a small government, states’ rights advocate who’d pull us out of Iraq immediately, abolish the IRS and rescind the Patriot Act, and sanction consensual “crimes” like drug use and prostitution.
All of those elements appeal to me—the platform is political pornography, as far as I’m concerned—but I have concerns as well.
Ron Paul and his campaign have attracted some dubious support from sordid elements like former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and much of the racist White Nationalist movement. Combined with racist statements unearthed in newsletters like the Ron Paul Political Report and reported on in a lengthy piece entitled “Angry White Man” in The New Republic, it’s more than enough to give potential supporters serious pause (it should be noted that Paul has disavowed the statements, saying he takes “moral responsibility” for not paying closer attention to what was written in his name).
I wanted to see if the campaign could relieve my apprehensions, if it could get me to go all the way with Ron Paul, so I headed to its Alaska headquarters.
That’s where I met Matthew Peters.
Peters, age 25, is the Alaska Field Director for the Ron Paul campaign, and even at his young age something of a campaign veteran; he first campaigned when his father, Tim Peters, ran for (and won) the office of mayor in North Pole a decade or so ago. Altogether he’s worked on 10 campaigns in various capacities.
Peters is tall, bespectacled with short dark hair that’s prematurely receding; he looks tired, but tells me that he slept six hours the night before—more than usual—and that he feels refreshed. We walk next door to the Moose’s Tooth for lunch so I can hear his pitch.
And he’s good. Really good. His speech is peppered with his personal agreement with Paul’s stances (most of which I’m down with, too). “That’s how Ron Paul feels, that’s why I like him so much,” he says frequently and emphatically. It sounds incredibly sincere and free of spin, marked by genuine passion.
Peters’ youth and its attendant enthusiasm sync well with the hallmarks of Paul’s campaign – the Internet-based MeetUps and YouTube videos and pro-Ron Paul blogs; the sign waving on street corners; the newly awakened activists who’ve found something to believe in. And, after listening to Peters for a while, you really want to be a part of this burgeoning wanna-be-revolutionary movement.
The grass-roots activism is reminiscent of Howard Dean’s failed run in 2004, but with its act more together. Paul’s campaign relies heavily on small individual donations culled mostly from the Internet, as did Dean’s; Dean’s best fundraising quarter racked up $14.8 million, while Ron Paul pulled in over $20 million in the last quarter of 2007. As of press time, Paul had pulled in more than $3 million this month from more than 40,000 donors.
After Peters has spieled out several of his talking points—non-interventionism, free trade to all nations, states’ rights—I present him with my concerns. When the newsletters’ racist remarks and the support from the racists comes up, Peters is nonplussed. He even mentions the $500 donation from Don Black, the webmaster of White Nationalist site Stormfront.org, echoing his candidates own rebuttal regarding the money—“Why give it back to him to use for bad purposes?” Paul told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto.
“He doesn’t go to David Duke and say, ‘hey, how can you help me?’” Peters tells me (Duke did author a piece entitled “What Ron Paul Must Do To Win,” that was posted on Stormfront.org). “Whatever they do individually, they have freedom of speech, they can do what they want, but it probably hurts [Paul] rather than helps him. Maybe they should think about that.”
Peters’ version of Paul’s defense was suitably on message—“he doesn’t believe we should be separated into groups like blacks and whites, males and females. What he cares about is individual liberties, whether you’re a black man or a white man” (Also, I’d already heard Nelson Linder, the president of Austin, Texas’s NAACP chapter and a friend of Ron Paul’s for twenty years, defend Paul and state flat-out that he’s not a racist, so my concerns in that regard were assuaged.)
The real issue is electability, and in this respect Peters stretches his optimism to its bounds. “We keep gaining, we’re in the number-three spot in my opinion,” he told us. This was prior to the Nevada contest, where he placed second over McCain, and South Carolina, where he received only 4% of the vote.
The most serious problem with supporting Ron Paul is that he has little or no chance of winning the Republican nomination, even though this year’s GOP convention may be the first contested one in 60 years. Paul could proffer his delegates to another candidate at the convention and effectively secure himself political capital, to somehow be used pursuing his constitutionalist ideology. The problem is, there’s not a Republican candidate in the field that Paul could lend his support to without compromising his principles.
I’ve been burned before by supporting candidates sheerly based on ideology; I liked Dennis Kucinich in 2004 (crazy, I know), but I’d rather have seen General Wesley Clark take the nomination than John Kerry. In this election, my primary vote may well be better spent on a viable candidate.
Yet, in an early December poll conducted by KTUU, Ron Paul is first amongst Alaskan voters, with 29 percent compared to Mike Huckabee’s 22 percent. Mitt Romney, the only other Republican candidate with a paid campaign staffer in Alaska, polled at only 9 percent. (The poll was unscientific, KTUU points out.) Randy Ruedrich, the state’s Republican party chairman, told me that the Alaska’s GOP machinery remains neutral regarding the primary candidates.
Ron Paul may indeed win Alaska, and it’s entirely possible that Alaska will be the only state he wins.
“I’ve worked ten campaigns and you can usually tell whether you have momentum or not; you can tell if you’re going to lose,” Peters tells me. “I don’t think we’re losing at all, we’re gaining ground every day. I think we’ve got a really good shot with Alaska, and regardless of what happens with the rest of the campaign, I think he’s going to win in Alaska.”
Perhaps that will be the case: Ron Paul wins Alaska and takes a majority of the state’s 29 Republican delegates. After spending some time with the man behind the campaign up here, I believe it can happen. But it would be a cold and lonely victory in a state with little electoral sway.
In my heart, where boyish idealism reigns and all utopias can be imagined and implemented, I’m totally down with the Ron Paul campaign. In my head, which understands the brutal realities of politics and governing, Ron Paul’s candidacy is inspiring, but hopeless in the end.