COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Stores and restaurants nearby remained
darkened, shuttered and without power from an ice storm the ended
only hours ago. Few cars were on the roads, save for a peculiarly
steady line gingerly easing into the still-glassy Mid-America
Center parking lot. Inside nearly 500 Iowans gathered to hear a
longtime Republican congressman from Texas nicknamed “Dr. No” break
most of the conventions of modern campaigning by promising them
less largesse from their government not more and
spending more time discussing what he wouldn’t do as
president than what he would.
“Thank you for inviting me to your revolution,” Ron Paul
announced as an extended, raucous standing ovation finally simmered
down. The roaring crowd would no doubt surprise members of his own
party as well, many of whom — if the booing and grumbling at
Republican debates are any indication — largely view him as little
more than a pestering gadfly.
Yet here Paul was, standing before a throng as large as those
crowds many of the frontrunners for the Republican nomination draw
in similarly sized towns. It is difficult to imagine any candidate
save Paul uniting those non-interventionist/anti-war activists who
will also cheers calls for dismantling the Federal Reserve with
local farmers, lawyers, scruffy college students and earnest young
women wearing Prolifers For Ron Paul and Ask Me About
Ron Paul buttons, all rising to whoop as one at promises to
cut the North American Union off at the pass.
The crowd was brought to its hollering feet at promises to get
the U.S. out of the UN, out of NAFTA, out of CAFTA, the WTO, NATO,
the IMF… There are moments, truth be told, when a Ron Paul rally
can make the John Birch Society look like a committee that might as
well be weaving welcome baskets for United Nations delegations.
On television, Paul frequently comes across as a crotchety
neighbor, exasperated that the damn federal government keeps
kicking its ball into his yard. This night, however, he is warm and
at ease, adopting a conversational tone as he leaned casually on
the lectern, even telling jokes not so different from those his
colleagues crack. The crowd is attentive and animated. When someone
asks how many are new to the caucus process, hundreds of hands
shoot up.
Not long before Paul took to the dais, I asked him why he
thought that after decades of extolling the virtue of these
principles — during ten terms in Congress and a 1988 campaign as
the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, no less — his
message was finding a fervent following now.
“I’ve been presenting these views since the Seventies and they
were pretty unknown back then,” Paul, who admitted he had initially
been “skeptical and reluctant” to make a 2008 run, said. “The most
significant change since then has been the education of many, many
intellectual leaders in this country in economics and limited
government through the study of Austrian economics. The groundwork
has been laid…and now comes a time when the failure of the system
is becoming very evident. Social Security isn’t working. Foreign
policy isn’t working. Taking care of New Orleans didn’t work very
well. It’s just that government doesn’t work very well and people
are beginning to realize we can’t continue this.”
The fervor of Paulites is undeniable. Many Paul events and
fundraisers — including the record-breaking November
5 and December 16 hauls — are dreamed up outside the campaign
infrastructure.
“I always marvel at what is happening now because at the
beginning of the campaign we were told you have to come up with a
logo and make everyone do the same thing,” Paul said. “The main
characteristic of our campaign is that everything is different.
It’s a lot of creative energy that really shouldn’t have surprised
any of us since that’s exactly what I believe in: Individualism
with no centralized planning.”
“THE POLITICAL DISCUSSION IN this country now takes place in the
arena of fear, not philosophy,” Council Bluffs attorney Aaron
Rodenburg told me, as he strode over to a bookcase in his office
and ran his finger across Thoreau collections, The Rights of
Man and Common Sense before finally falling on
The Federalist Papers. He tugged the volume out from
behind a brass Abe Lincoln bookend and held it aloft. “Where is
this in the debate? We’ve lost track of our constitutional
grounding. It’s like people today learn political philosophy from
Cliff Notes.”
You would not have had this conversation with Rodenburg in 2004.
“There’s a saying you hear a lot — ‘Ron Paul cured my apathy,’ and
that’s definitely how I feel,” the lawyer explained. “I was
absolutely sickened by the plasticized candidates and the
plasticized media with the five-second blitzes they expect us to
judge a person by. I was done with it all until I heard about this
guy who had a message that was pro-Constitution, a guy who didn’t
waver or pander for votes. I scoured his literature pretty good
because I was a bit gun-shy, but I finally came to the conclusion
that Paul is the real deal.”
Now Ron Paul signs line the windows of Rodenburg’s law firm,
alongside a woodland scene with an Abe Lincoln mannequin cavorting
with several taxidermied animals. In the small lobby, you can read
Ron Paul pamphlets and Democrats for Ron Paul handouts (“Find the
true candidate for peace, freedom and ethics in government”) under
a giant buffalo head. The Paul campaign has even rented out an
empty office in the building, at now-fellow tenant Rodenburg’s
urging.
“I’m just a small town lawyer,” he said. “I don’t know how much
my opinion is worth, but I work with the Constitution every day. I
don’t defend big corporations. I defend ordinary people, and so
when I hear someone talking about protecting the individual
liberties and rights enshrined in the Constitution it hits me
here.”
Rodenburg tapped his chest then, passing a framed illustrated
copy of that same document as he showed me out so he could finish
his work and get to the Ron Paul rally.
EVEN IF ONE WERE TO OVERLOOK the animosity towards Paul in the
party whose nomination he is seeking, it’s fairly clear the country
is not ready to elect a strict constitutionalist so long as
reporters continue to ask Paul questions like…well: “What’s it
mean to be a Constitutionalist?”
The first request made of “Ron Paul Revolution” volunteers on a
sheet handed out at the Mid-America Center is “Pray.” And that
seems like pretty good advice when Paul is constantly predicting
our “fiat monetary system” is set to trigger an almost unavoidable
global depression in the not-too-distant future (“Just as the
Soviet system collapsed because it was not viable, our system is
not viable either because we’re living way beyond our means”)
during a race the mainstream conventional wisdom pundits insist
will be decided on optimism and likeability.
It is a shame Paul’s relationship with mainstream Republicans
has become so (perhaps unavoidably) contentious. Not only is the
hard challenge to other candidates’ ideas healthy, but when it
comes to the gospel of limited government, Paul also has a
particular credibility and flair for describing how each bad,
statist decision feeds the next, growing the government beast.
“Now we have a medical-industrial complex,” Paul said, tying the
healthcare mess in with our budget problems at large. “Everybody
knows about the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us
of, but there are so many industries that benefit from what we do
in Washington. The system we have today is very divisive because
government gets control of our lives, control of the economy and
control of our money. And everything goes to Washington.”
The gap between Paul and the GOP certainly won’t be bridged by
calling a hard-line approach to Iran “insane,” advocating a swifter
Iraq pull-out than most Democrats or suggesting an end to American
subsidies for Israel, even if it is along with all Arab nations.
Still, Paul seems to recognize Rome won’t be deconstructed in one
day. “What we need to have is a renewal in our confidence that
freedom works,” he said. This renewal, he said, shouldn’t begin or
end with his campaign.
“What freedom does is release creative energy and energizes
people,” Paul told the crowd as the speech came to a close. “Not
everybody will take care of themselves like they should. Not
everybody will be responsible. But when we allow people to become
more creative, then we understand the real true purpose in life is
to strive for virtue and excellence. We can’t do that with
government bearing down on us every single day.”
