At least one voter hasn’t given up on what Ron Paul has achieved:
I would certainly say that Ron Paul is probably the first person outside of my family I truly loved, dating back to freshman year of high school. I first learned of him at a time when I first became truly interested in politics, particularly economics and political philosophy. This was a time when I didn’t have many friends in life, and probably my only connection to the “in” crowd was the fact that I was an average basketball player at best. Politics, particularly libertarianism, became my passion, and Ron Paul was, and always will be, my hero.
2004 was probably the roughest year of my life in terms of politics. Even as a partisan Republican, I had come to despise George W. Bush. Everything he campaigned on when he ran for President in 2000- small government, humble foreign policy, restoring honor to the White House, being a “uniter, not a divder”- was a complete lie. He ran the biggest deficits in history. He instituted the biggest expansion of government involvement in education in history. He instituted the largest expansion of the welfare state in history. His administration deliberately lied to the American people about a number of things, chiefly pre-war intelligence on Iraq. They used the pretext of the most horrifying event in this history of our country to create a culture of fear and hatred of people thousands of miles away from here and to launch an illegitimate and undeclared war on a country that had nothing to do with the people who attacked us. This is a time when a genuine and informative debate should have been taking place on the reasons why our enemies attacked us on 9/11, a debate that would no doubt have produced the realization of the irrationality and undesirability of spreading the war into Iraq. I had a sense of this all along, and I sensed the war was wrong and hoped it wouldn’t take place. But it did, and at first I made a horrifying decision that I regret t this day: to be a good Republican instead of a good American, or even a good libertarian.
I defended the Bush position when talking to everyone, even when I sensed it was wrong. I got tired of it briefly, and I considered supporting a couple of Democrats: not because I agreed with their entire agenda, because I most certainly didn’t, but because I was disenchanted with Bush. I liked both Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, but I couldn’t bring myself completely to them until either of them could prove they could get the nomination. Both their campaigns floundered, and the Democrats gave me Kerry, who I saw as no better than Bush. Given that choice, I went back to Bush and became an apologist, even though I knew he was wrong. I interned at the Republican Party headquarters, and I participated in the nationwide 24-hour GOTV effort that basically won re-election for Bush by turning out evangelical voters. For years, I told people that I voted for Badnarik in that election to escape the pain, and I really wish that I had not only done so, but worked for his campaign as well; but the unfortunate truth is that I in fact cast my ballot, with great pain, for President Bush. Immediately after the election, I switched my party registration from Republican to Libertarian, and I disassociated myself with Bush permanently. When the LP was decertified in North Carolina, I pretty much gave up on politics for a while.
When Ron Paul got into the race, I was immediately jovial. I thought that this would be the beginning of a movement to reclaim the intent of our country and to restore liberty to our land. I don’t agree with all of Ron Paul’s positions, as he comes from a different variant of libertarianism than I do, but he is a libertarian nonetheless and has done more for liberty throughout his career than any of his contemporaries. And he is truly the most honest and honorable man in Washington, and his record is 100% in line with his principles. As I said, I knew this would be an incredible uphill battle, and it has been. But I watched the fundraising shoot up. I watched the poll numbers go up. I watched the amount of genuine enthusiasm skyrocket. All of this occurred while the media deliberately blacked us out, whereas they gave Howard Dean much more coverage in 2004. As time went on, and as we continued to dumbfound the pundits, I thought maybe, just maybe, the long-term movement we started might just go all the way now.
At this point, though, there’s no use in denying what is inevitable. Ron Paul will not be the Republican Nominee, and he will not be the 44th President of the United States. The deck was stacked against us from the beginning. What his campaign has done, though, is to launch something much more permanent: a movement for liberty. This is a bipartisan movement: libertarians in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, libertarians of all schools, have now gotten the spark and the platform. Libertarianism has gone from something associated mainly with pot smoking and free love and nerds no one knows about to being a force capable of raising $20 million in a quarter of Presidential election. The progress is undeniable.
What we come to realize through this experience is that Ron Paul is flawed, probably fatally as a Presidential candidate in our current time. The image that many have of him as something of a messiah I think is shattered. But it is when this message is shattered that we can see who he really is by doing research and reading his writing. Upon doing so, you realize that he is a man who is 100% driven by love of his family and the ideal on which this country was founded. When candidates file for the New Hampshire primary, there is a tradition in which the candidates sign a document and write a personal message on them. The other candidates resorted to cheap sloganeering from their campaign. Ron Paul wrote simply: “For Liberty.” This is what is at the heart of it all for him, and you will see that in every speech, online column, and book that you read from him. But as he has said all along, “I have my shortcomings, but the message has no shortcomings.”
Ron Paul knew he would not win the election for a number of reasons, but he threw himself out there to be hammered and ridiculed for us, because he knew the message was the truth and that people would understand it. The base we have now is all because of him. It took him a few months to accomplish what the Libertarian Party has been trying to accomplish for four decades, almost four now. Despite his flaws, which all of us have in some form or another, he is our pioneer, our man, and our hero. But as he would tell us, we need to keep sight of what is at stake and what our motivation is. The Founding Fathers gave us the greatest ideal known to man, and it’s been our responsibility over time to maintain it. We’ve shirked on our responsibility, and we’re teetering on collapse for it. Ron Paul is our new Founding Father: he’s founded a new movement to reclaim the ideal our previous founders gave us, and it’s our responsibility to maintain it and carry it forward. We cannot shirk on this responsibility. We need to keep working, both for Paul’s campaign, for other campaigns, and for the cause of liberty.
