In a response to Rich Lowry's missive, Daniel McCarthy revisits the NR founder's thoughts on the candidate. He points to this interview between Buckley and Bill Steigerwald from four years ago:
Q: Has conservatism made a bargain with the state or with government power that it should not have made over the last 50 years? Has conservatism forgotten the message of Albert J. Nock’s seminal book, “Our Enemy, the State”?
A: The answer is, “Yes, it has.” Accommodations have been made, the consequences of which we have yet to pay for. Albert J. Nock, although he could express himself fanatically on these subjects, would certainly have pronounced these as major, major mistakes. So, the answer to your question is, indeed those excesses have been engaged in and they affect the probity of the conservative faith.
Q: You know who Ron Paul is — the congressman. He’s derided and discounted by many conservatives and his fellow Republicans as a kook. Yet his strong stands in favor of limited constitutional government, lower taxes, more personal freedoms and nonintervention overseas make him in many ways sound like a conservative of old — a Robert Taft, or a Coolidge kind of conservative in some ways.
A: I agree, yeah.
Q: Is he getting a bum rap?
A: I think that people who cast themselves as presidential contenders are almost universally derided on the grounds that they don’t have manifest orthodox qualifications. In the case of Ron Paul, he doesn’t have a broad enough or huge following and under the circumstances he becomes rather a quaint ideological aspirant than someone who is realistically seeking for power.
McCarthy's conclusion:
[W]hat would Buckley have made of Paul now that he does have a broad and huge following, at least in Iowa? John Derbyshire opined in 2007 that there was “not much” in Paul’s platform with which a young WFB would not have agreed. (Buckley’s father, Will Buckley, was rather a Paul-like libertarian, it’s worth noting.) One thing is clear from the Steigerwald interview: Buckley would not have disqualified Paul on grounds of insufficient fealty to neoconservative foreign-policy objectives.
The Dish 