In Defense of Ron Paul*

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted November 29, 2007.

Ron Paul has arrived, thanks in large part to the unrivaled intensity of his supporters. In the weeks since his dedicated -- some say obsessive -- online army organized a "money bomb" that delivered over $4 million in a single day to Paul's war chest, his quixotic campaign has gotten a boatload of media attention. It is officially the quirky, nontraditional candidate story of the 2008 race. If the campaign pulls off the $10 million "tea party" planned for Dec. 16, the spotlight on Paul will get hotter still.

With that attention comes a new level of scrutiny, as one would expect. But most of the media's analyses don't put the Paul "sensation" into a larger context. Often missing is the degree to which Paul's popularity is related to Washington's structural inability to handle the issues most important to American voters -- a flaw that extends to the corporate media as well. Lacking that context, the criticism flung at the Paul campaign is superficial and distracting.

Progressive bloggers have started to take notice of the insurgent campaign as well, and there's been a spasm of critical posts slicing and dicing the Ron Paul experience. Unfortunately, too many of them have focused not on Paul's record, his beliefs or why he's become such a phenomenon in the race for the White House, but on his supporters, who include a nasty little assortment of feverish nativists, half-baked ultranationalists, white supremacists, New World Order conspiracy theorists, etc., in addition to the (no doubt far more numerous) ordinary, pissed-off patriotic Americans who are attracted to his candidacy.

So we've recently discovered that Ron Paul is backed by: people minting their own "cuckoo bananas money" and members of an identity theft ring. We've learned that "Paul has the support of David Duke" and Stormfront has a YouTube audio commercial up supporting Paul. Also supporting him are the "Patriot" movement "nutjobs with guns and anti-government leanings" who were made famous by homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh. He's loved by the owner of a Nevada whorehouse and has even gotten the nod from Hutton Gibson, Mel's wingnut father and the man who taught him everything he ever needed to know about those damn Jews.

To which I can only say: OK, folks, we get it. If we accept guilt by association as a reasonable political argument, then Paul is as guilty as they come.

But not directly so. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out:

The Paul campaign has a hands-off approach when it comes to supporters' activities and political backgrounds. While grateful for the money, aides insist they aren't responsible for what supporters do online. "We don't know who a lot of these people are," says Jesse Benton, a campaign spokesman … "Sometimes Ron Paul supporters get a little overpassionate and maybe a little more shrill than what some might like," Mr. Benton says.

Of course, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and many of the bloggers making hay out of Paul's less savory supporters are happy to slam what the Clintons famously called the "politics of personal destruction" -- the tactic, popular on the right, of turning various public figures who support Democrats into pernicious liberal strawmen whose excesses are supposedly evidence of how out of touch progressives are.

But more than that, the typical analysis misses the fundamental dynamic driving Paul's popularity. His campaign occupies that political space where right- and left-populism intersect, and that space exists only because there are significant areas of national policy where neither of the two parties, nor any of the "mainstream" candidates, have shown any willingness to represent their constituents.

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Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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