This time around, New Hampshire went nearly by default to former Massachusetts governor and pompous haircut model Mitt Romney – the only time a candidate from Massachusetts has lost in New Hampshire in modern times was former Senator Ted Kennedy’s challenge to incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
What was a surprise, however, was the strong performance by the Republican Party’s resident cranky old man, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who finished a strong second with 22.9 percent of the vote, 16.4 points behind Romney. Paul, who has run for president three times before with little success, has caught fire as an alternative to the standard candidates. After finishing third in Iowa behind de facto joint winners Romney and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, Paul beat the former Governor of Utah and Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, who had campaigned heavily and almost exclusively in New Hampshire.
Ron Paul has a dedicated base of supporters who raise money, vote, and campaign passionately for his anti-federal message. There’s just one problem.
He’s insane.
His policies – abolishing the Federal Reserve, an independent board that is a key stabilizer of the American economy; leaving the United Nations and withdrawing from the international community; eradicating much, if not all, of the social safety net that keeps millions from falling into starvation and suffering across the country – are extreme, irrational, and on the fringes of society. In the last decade and a half, he has introduced only one bill that has become law, which gave a parcel of federal land in Texas to the Galveston Historical Society. While I’m sure that Texan historians appreciate it, one measly act since he reentered Congress in the mid-’90s is an abysmal record to rely upon.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Paul made up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off the sale of his newsletters, variously titled the “Ron Paul Survival Report,” the “Ron Paul Financial Report,” and the “Ron Paul Political Report.” In these newsletters bearing no bylines and no attribution other than Ron Paul’s (in large print in the masthead to boot), the writer asserts a wide variety of dreadful opinions. The newsletter insists that the Rodney King riots subsided because “it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks,” that Martin Luther King, Jr. was “the world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours” and “seduced underage girls and boys,” and that “those who don’t commit sodomy, who don’t get blood a transfusion, and who don’t swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay.” This is but a sample. There is more. Much more.
Paul’s defense is that he did not read nor write these newsletters, and that they are absolutely not his views. “I didn’t write them. I disavow them. That’s it,” he told CNN in December. Even if this is true, the best-case scenario is that Paul let these repugnant views go out under his name and greatly profited off of them while exercising no oversight over what he authorized. Such an absolute failure of management should be an immediate disqualification for the presidency – or any position of authority. Worst-case, he legitimately believes what was written under his name and is desperately trying to cover it up now that it has received heightened scrutiny.
Paul has some good ideas. Our military is too large, and scaling back is smart. But the majority of his views are extremist, irrational, and tinged with appeals to the worst of society. Even if Paul does not stay active in politics beyond the nomination race, his ideas will stay on the national scene for the foreseeable future; his son, Rand, is a Kentucky senator, and is maintaining his father’s level of lunacy in Congress.
Republicans push themselves to the fringes by appealing to Paul’s ilk. His plans, if implemented, would devastate the American economy and our identity as a nation of equals. The fact that we as a country are even considering an extremist like Paul as our executive is a national embarrassment.
