Shortly before Christmas, Ron Paul appeared on the Tonight
Show, yukking it up with Jay Leno and dishing on his rivals
for the Republican presidential nomination. Michele Bachmann, Paul
said, “doesn’t like Muslims. She hates Muslims. She hates them.”
The Texas congressman agreed with Leno that Rick Santorum is
obsessed with certain minority groups: “Gay people and
Muslims.”
Three things immediately struck me about Paul’s comments: they
are unwise for someone seeking to win a statewide contest in
socially conservative Iowa; they are unfair and uncharitable to his
colleagues; and they are utterly incongruent with the current flap
over his newsletters from the 1990s.
Paul’s instincts don’t jibe with the newsletters’ more offensive
material, which in turn have virtually nothing to do with his
current appeal. Moreover, if Paul held social views that were
unhelpful to his campaign, it is clear he wouldn’t let political
considerations keep him from eventually blurting them out.
That’s not to say that the Paul camp’s explanation for the
newsletters is satisfactory, especially for what is now a top-tier
campaign. Newt Gingrich became the first of the major Republican
candidates to go after Paul on this front. “I think it’s very
difficult to see how you would engage in dealing with Ron Paul as a
nominee,” Gingrich
told CNN. “Given the newsletters, which he has not yet
disowned.”
Paul has disowned the content in question, even if he hasn’t
given a convincing account of its authorship. What vexes the former
House speaker is that Paul has also signed his name to some of the
most effective anti-Gingrich attack ads running in Iowa. “You look
at Ron Paul’s record of systemic avoidance of reality, his ads are
about as accurate as his newsletter,” Gingrich complained.
Enter Eric Dondero, a longtime former Paul aide. Like David
Stockman on Ronald Reagan and John Dean on Richard Nixon, Dondero
has emerged as an insider who can be counted on to give hostile
quotes about his old boss, with whom he now disagrees.
Whatever can be said about the details of Dondero’s
latest statement — in describing others’ views, he
doesn’t see a lot of daylight between “pro-defense
right-libertarians” and “isolationist/pacifist/surrenderists” — he
is surely right that this dispute is less about Paul’s
alleged political incorrectness in the ‘90s than his foreign
policy views now.
Many of the young supporters drawn to Paul’s message on war and
civil liberties had barely been born when Murray Rothbard died. To
them, “paleolibertarianism”
is more ancient history than the creation of the Federal Reserve.
Similarly, the writers most
dedicated to digging through the Ron Paul Survival
Report archives are almost uniformly foreign policy hawks.
None of this makes exploring a presidential candidate’s past an
illegitimate journalistic exercise. Barack Obama had ties to
Jeremiah Wright; Rudy Giuliani conducted three hard-fought mayoral
campaigns in the period of racial polarization that helped give
rise to the Survival Report. If either of them had
published incendiary newsletters, it would be worth investigating
even if the heavy lifting had to be done by scribes who opposed
other aspects of the candidates’ policy agendas.
Moreover, Paul continues to attract some marginal supporters.
Some are kooks and 9/11 truthers, despite the obvious intellectual
contradictions between “blowback” and conspiracy theories alleging
that the 2001 terrorist attacks were an “inside job.” Others are
bigots and anti-Semites. Paul remains convinced that it is more
important to spread the libertarian gospel than to purge the
undesirables in his midst.
Yet it only seems fair to note that today Paul is the lone
Republican candidate who talks about the suffering of black
Americans under the war on drugs, that he is further removed from
the
idea that “[c]ops must be unleashed and allowed to administer
instant punishment” than any major candidate in either major party.
Paul has risen in the polls not because Americans are coming
around to his views on past controversies, whether they concern the
Civil War or the 1988 Libertarian Party nomination fight, but
because they share his belief that the country’s current direction
is unsustainable.
Some of Paul’s war-weary voters might even prefer a candidate
who broke less radically from the American foreign policy
consensus. But the Chuck Hagels and Jon Huntsmans don’t tend to be
with them when it counts. They regret their support for the last
war and then go on to reluctantly support the next one.
A Republican Party free of racism or bigotry is an admirable
goal. A GOP free of meaningful debate on foreign policy is anything
but.
