Mar 19 2008

Can we woo the Ron Paul crowd? Is the Pope a Southern Baptist?

Posted by: Neocon in 2008 Race, McCain, Nutter Butters, Republicans, Terrorism

In response to a Washington Post article covering how the Paul campaign is lamenting that mainstream Republicans haven’t made an effort to win their endorsement, John Hawkins over at Right Wing News wonders if there is anything the Republican Party can do to bring Ron Paul voters back into the fold. John doesn’t believe there is, and I’m inclined to agree with him. The Ron Paul faithful, who weren’t large enough to really register during the Primary, certainly won’t be the deciding factor in the 2008 election. If there is one thing to be said about the Pauliacs, they are committed to their cause, or more particularly the man at the head of it (more on that later).

Ron Paul fans, ignoring for now the sizable amount of obvious racists and people who subscribe to a 9/11 conspiracy theory, are traditionally libertarian. Just as Paul is not the example of a ‘true conservative’, these voters are not examples of regular Republicans. They subscribe to outlandish policy decisions such as turning the financial market on its head by reinstating the gold standard or cutting off ties with most of our allies.

In general, the Pauliac economic policy is technically closer to McCain than either of the Democrat nominees. Unfortunately for Republicans who would like to court Paul’s voter base for the general election, the economy hasn’t been the driving force of Paul’s campaign, the Iraq war has. Acting as a catch-all for people who dislike the Democrat Party, or don’t subscribe to the weak socialism being offered by Obama and Clinton, he has scooped up the remaining extremist anti-war element.

In my dealings with Ron Paul supporters, the majority of the describe Paul as the only real conservative in the race, yet they don’t actually support the policies that he uses to justify this title. More often than not, Paul voters can’t reconcile his anti-abortion stance against their own, or his desire to cripple government spending on entitlements. All they are proud of is that Paul won’t continue the “imperialist oil crusade” that every other non-Democrat has supported.

This rhetoric comes doubly so from the more angry Paul supporters, particularly 9/11 truthers who have spent countless hours spamming and sending threatening e-mails to non-Paul bloggers all over the world. Thankfully for me, these threats trickled off to a stop when Paul all but dropped out of the race recently. Now I only receive one or two a week, the latest of which informed me that America has already set up 800 concentration camps and that I needed to “choose a side” when the time came. I was also accused of being a CIA agent for the millionth time (would a devilish CIA agent need to run t-shirt ads on his website?) but spared spaces between sentences. I can only assume that the CIA can’t track you if you keep your finger jammed on the caps lock key.

I won’t go so far as to say that the bulk of Ron Paul supporters fall into the truther or violent racist category, but I will say that I’ve received a lot more mail from the latter than the former. None of these aren’t people who would be inclined to vote for Republicans in the first place but I have to wonder: if Paul has been able to turn this supposed ‘revolution’ into a personal cult for him, which it is obvious that he has, what percentage of the Pauliacs would take the plunge if dear leader told them to?

John concludes that anything the Ron Paul crowd has to offer would hurt the Republican party, but I think that if Paul is as starved for attention as he seems, throwing him a small bone like a longer speech at the convention this fall might be enough to have Dr. Paul turning on a dime and endorsing McCain as the lesser of two evils. I don’t know exactly what Ron wants, but he must still want it if he’s getting sympathy stories published in the papers. There’s no reason not to at least engage the campaign. A bonus would be that those fringe elements would desert Paul, as many of the less radical supporters did after his racist letters surfaced, and we might finally be finished with the Ron Paul Revolution.

Of course, if Paul decided that he wanted to do a third party run, I think he would cut into more Democrat vote than Republican, assuming he was still far to the left of either Democrat candidate on foreign policy. Throw in Dennis Kucinich and you’ve doubled the leftist appeal while weeding out some of the more discerning libertarian Paul supporters.