Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul raised $4.5 million in January, his campaign just announced. The Texas congressman ended the month with $1.6 million in the bank.
Paul's announcement comes as candidates and the super PACs aiding their campaigns file reports with the Federal Election Commisson. Overall, Paul, a prodigious Internet fundraiser, has collected $30.6 million for his presidential campaign.
Paul's aides say the January fundraising totals reported today don't include an additional $1.7 million Paul raised recently through an ongoing online fundraising drive, called a "money bomb."
"Naturally we're pleased that our growing support base continues to generously support Ron Paul, so in turn he can spread his message of constitutionally-limited government, sound money, and a foreign policy that keep America safe," campaign chairman Jesse Benton said in an e-mail. He said Paul is the only Republican who can mount a 50-state campaign "in terms of organization, ballot access and fundraising stamina."
As we noted earlier today, Paul's presidential hopes are getting a boost from a super PAC dubbed Endorse Liberty. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel donated $1.7 million to that group in January.
Candidate and super PAC reports are due by midnight tonight. Paul's Republican rivals haven't yet reported their January fundraising totals.
In Maine caucuses Saturday, feisty Ron Paul hoping to extend Mitt Romney’s losing streak
By Associated Press, Updated: Saturday, February 11, 8:54 AM
PORTLAND, Maine — Mitt Romney hoped to avoid a fourth straight election setback Saturday in the GOP presidential nomination race, but feisty Ron Paul could extend that losing streak with a victory in Maine’s caucuses.
Romney, the one-time front-runner, stepped up efforts to court Republicans in recent days, reflecting growing concern about the outcome of what has become a two-man race in Maine.
Neither Newt Gingrich nor Rick Santorum, who won in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado on Tuesday, is actively competing in Maine, where party officials planned to declare a winner Saturday evening.
Romney wants Maine voters to help in his struggle to convince his party’s conservative wing that he should be the candidate they back. The former Massachusetts governor said in a Washington speech Friday that he was “a severely conservative Republican governor.”
Paul, a libertarian-minded Texas congressman, is fighting to prove he’s capable of winning at all, particularly in a state where his campaign has focused considerable attention. He has scored a few top three finishes in other early voting states, but his strategy is based on winning some of the smaller caucus contests where his passionate base of support can have an oversized impact.
There is no reliable polling to gauge the state of the Maine election, which drew fewer than 5,500 voters from across the state four years ago. But Romney’s recent activities suggest a victory is by no means assured, despite the natural advantages of being a former New England governor competing in a state he won with more than 50 percent of the vote four years ago.
He changed his schedule Friday night to add personal appearances at two caucuses Saturday; he had planned to take the day off.
Romney faced a rowdy crowd at a town hall-style meeting in Portland Friday night, where one heckler was removed by police. Others asked pointed questions about his off-shore bank accounts, feelings about the nation’s poor, and his continued support for the natural gas extraction process known as fracking.
“That’s a good question. I gotta take some shots now and then or it wouldn’t be interesting,” Romney said when asked about investments in the Cayman Islands. “I pay all the taxes I’m required to pay under the law — by the way, not a dollar more.”
The nonbinding presidential straw poll, which began Feb. 4, has drawn virtually none of the hype surrounding recent elections in Florida and Nevada, where candidates poured millions of dollars into television and radio advertising.
Romney and his allies spent a combined $15.9 million in Florida. But his campaign had placed only a small cable television ad buy airing Friday and Saturday, at a cost of several thousand dollars. But he sent surrogates to the state in recent days and hosted a telephone town hall in addition to Friday’s campaign stop.
Paul has been more active and scheduled three public appearances Saturday. There is reason to believe he won’t make things easy for Romney.
Paul did reasonably well here four years ago, earning more than 18 percent of the vote, and his support has grown since then in a state whose electorate isn’t afraid to support candidates outside the mainstream.
The tea party, hardly a Romney ally, has exerted significant influence, taking over the GOP platform and helping to elect Gov. Paul LePage.
“Paul needs to show he can win somewhere,” GOP strategist Phil Musser said. “My sense is a win in Maine for Romney would be nice. But to be honest, Ron Paul is camped out up there and he needs to win one.”
The timing of the contest also raises the stakes.
The narrative coming out of Maine will likely reverberate in the political echo chamber for weeks, given there isn’t another election until Arizona and Michigan host their contests Feb. 28. Romney hopes that narrative will be more positive than it has been over the last week, arguably his worst of the year.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Ron Paul gains ground, further stirring Republicans
AMHERST, New Hampshire (Reuters) - Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul declared on Wednesday his campaign was "peaking at the right time" as polls show him closing in on the two perceived front-runners.
The libertarian congressman from Texas with a passionate core of followers complained that pundits were dismissing his longshot campaign prematurely and sounded optimistic about catching former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich.
All three and others are seeking to represent the Republicans and unseat Democratic President Barack Obama next November. The first of a series of Republican nominating contests is set for January 3 in Iowa.
"The momentum is building up and a lot of the candidates so far would come and go. They would shoot to the top and drop back rapidly. Ours has been very steady growth, then in this last week or two there has been a sudden extra growth," Paul told reporters after meeting voters in Amherst, New Hampshire.
Public Policy Polling released a survey on Tuesday showing him one percentage point behind Gingrich for the lead in Iowa.
Paul took 21 percent in the survey compared to 22 percent for Gingrich with Romney third at 16 percent.
In New Hampshire, which follows Iowa's caucus with a primary election on January 10, Romney led with 33 percent in a Rasmussen Reports poll released on Tuesday. Gingrich was second with 22 percent and Paul third at 18 percent. Paul's four-point gap behind Gingrich narrowed from a 10-point gap in the previous week's poll and marked Paul's best showing so far, Rasmussen said.
"In political terms, it probably means we're peaking at the right time," Paul said.
INFLUENCE THE RACE
Paul, who is making his third bid for the White House, is unlikely to take the nomination. But he may influence the race all the way to the end, acquiring delegates that stand to give him clout at the party's nominating convention next August.
He could tilt the nomination to one candidate should the race remain undecided by convention time.
"The other candidates are scared of him and his ability to attract strong supporters," said Jennifer Donahue, a fellow at the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College.
"If Romney had a core like Paul does, no matter how small, he'd be much better off," Donahue said, referring to Romney's status as the establishment candidate.
Paul, 76, attracts voters with a libertarian vision of eliminating a role for the state wherever possible. But some of his views alienate traditional bases of the Republican Party.
His call to abolish the Federal Reserve alarms Wall Street Republicans. His advocacy for withdrawing from U.S. military engagements abroad concerns national security Republicans. Social conservatives may be wary of his refusal to oppose gay marriage, as Paul says the federal government has no business regulating any marriage.
"The special interests on Wall Street -- they might have a lot of money but they don't have a lot of voters," Paul said.
Loyal and boisterous followers flock to his campaign events, such as a town hall meeting in Peterborough, New Hampshire, on Tuesday.
"He doesn't think he's better than any of us. You can tell by the way he speaks to us. He seems very genuine and plain. He doesn't embellish," said Susan Davidson, 49.
"He's an extremely brave man to be able to speak his mind so simply but eloquently in the face of all the big stars and heroes in Congress. He's not afraid of them," she said.
Paul has also gained attention for television ads that have attacked Gingrich.
"He definitely takes more from Gingrich than he does from Romney," said Ford O'Connell, a Republican strategist who said he is neutral in the nominating process. "He's doing to Newt Gingrich what Romney hasn't been able to do. In a lot of ways he's Newt Gingrich's worst nightmare."
US Republican presidential candidate Ron
Paul meets supporters after a Town Hall meeting in Boone, Iowa.
Photograph: Jim Young/REUTERS
He is a veteran candidate, with an isolationist and libertarian agenda perhaps more suited to a bygone era. But Ron Paul, one of the fringe Republicans, might just be capable of producing a surprise upset in the first of the Republican primary elections in Iowa, thanks to support from a unlikely quarter – the young.
His
anti-war message, calling on America to stop acting as the world's
policeman, is resonating, with more than 1,000 young people gathering in
the Great Hall in Ames, Iowa, on Thursday night to cheer him repeatedly
as he called on US troops to be brought back not just from Afghanistan
but from Germany, Japan, Korea and 120 other countries round the world.
They
cheered too as he opposed war in Syria or Iran, describing the nuclear
threat posed by Tehran as overblown. More than 200 people, mainly
students but also young people from round the state, including serving
soldiers, stood in line afterwards to have their picture taken with him.
It is one of the oddities of this campaign that the candidate
attracting the youth vote is the oldest in the field, aged 76.
Paul,
a long-time Congressman from Texas, said he does not know why he is
proving popular with the young, beyond saying he may be old but he has
"youthful ideas".
The US media tends to ignore Paul, regarding
him, probably correctly, as a long shot for the White House, his
isolationist and libertarian views too exotic for the Republican
mainstream. In his 2008 election bid he suffered from attracting too
many fringe and special interests groups, such as the Rolling Thunder
vets who believe US troops are still secretly imprisoned in Russia,
China and elsewhere.
But Paul has positioned himself better this
time and his anti-war rhetoric is closer to the public mood. It is
paying off. The Des Moines Register poll, normally the most reliable in
the state, last week had Newt Gingrich on 25% and Paul on 18%, with Mitt
Romney on 16%.
More significantly, Paul has adopted the Barack
Obama playbook. Obama spent a lot of time in the state and built up a
superbly efficient network of young volunteers who helped get his vote
out in each of the 1,700 precincts. His victory in Iowa provided the
momentum that took him all the way to the White House.
Meghann
Walker, Paul's Iowa voter outreach director, is coy about disclosing how
many precinct captains, responsible for getting out the vote on what
will almost certainly be a chilly 3 January 3, she has recruited so far.
But one volunteer said that two weeks ago the campaign had 150 out of
183 in Polk County, the most populous part of Iowa, and were pushing to
find captains for the remainder: if those figures are replicated across
the country, they are close to saturation point.
Iowa's Republican governor, Terry Branstad, said Paul's organisation was by far the best of all the Republican candidates.
Paul,
like Obama, has devoted a lot of time to Iowa. He has visited once a
week since May. Listen to the radio or put on the television in Iowa and
there are regular ads in support of Paul. He has outspent his rivals in
advertising in the state, paid for by the millions of dollars in
donations coming in from small donations gathered on the internet.
Only
Paul knows whether he believes he has a serious chance of becoming the
next president or whether he is simply in the race because of the
platform it provides to air his views. A win or second place in Iowa
would provide him with a pretty big platform.
As well as being the
most prominent advocate in the US today of isolationism, a strand in
American thinking that can be traced back to revolutionary days and was
at a high point in the Depression years, Paul favours drastic measures
to reduce the country's $15tn deficit, pledging to cut $1tn in his first
year as president. Much of those savings would come from ending US
military involvement round the world – $4tn has been spent in the last
decade in Iraq and Afghanistan – but also by cutting federal departments
such as education and cutting back welfare programmes. He would also
eliminate income and other taxes: smaller government would mean less
taxes.
As a libertarian, he is opposed to measures such as the
Patriot Act, introduced after 9/11. He regards the risk to American
security as exaggerated and believes too much liberty has been
sacrificed in the name of security. Among his supporters in the Great
Hall was Gabe Lanz, 24, who is in the military and has done tours of
duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is going to be one of Paul's precinct
captains. He likes the idea of ending US involvement overseas. "He does
not want to use us to fight other countries's wars for them. Let other
countries be self-dependent. That resonates with me. Why do we always
have to be the go-to-guys?"
The other big issue playing well with
youthful voters is the deficit. They look at the $15tn and see it as a
burden they are going to have to bear. Support in the Great Hall was not
universal. A student at Iowa university, Emily Highnam, has not made
up her mind yet who she will vote for. She liked Paul's anti-war message
and plans to cut spending, but did not like the idea of cutting back on
welfare.
A disproportionate slice of the Republican party in Iowa
is made up of Christian evangelicals and home-schoolers, those who
prefer to keep their children out of schools for a variety of reasons,
including the teaching of evolution. Paul has been reaching out to them
too. Among his extensive campaign literature is a Ron Paul Family
Cookbook, full of recipes but mixed in with quotes from the Bible.
In
Boone, a small town near Ames that looks as if it opted against moving
on from the 1950s, Paul addressed a crowd of about 150 in the library.
Among them was Joany Gorman, 49, mother of four and a home-schooler.
Asked why she supported Paul, she pointed to the Cookbook. "The reason I
support Ron Paul is because I believe Jesus Christ is the one true
God," she said. She had never heard of him before this election but will
vote for him on caucus day.
Ron Paul Outlines Progressives’ Systematic Attack on Americans
It's time for Americans wipe the slate clean
Nov 28, 2011, 3:56 pm EST | By Richard Young, Editor, Intelligence Report
During
the past 100 years, American voters have been brainwashed into
believing a complete portfolio of nonsense packaged by self-serving
bankers and politicians. It is difficult, of course, to admit that most
of what we have grown up believing about our government structure and
monetary system is deeply flawed and skewed with self-interest.
Ron Paul has been outlining the ongoing fraud to Americans for
decades. I have followed his work from the start, and I am not aware of
any other politician in Washington who better understands the mess we
are in and what to do about it. I hope you will read Ron Paul’s End the Fed and Liberty Defined
and come to realize that there is indeed a chance to get America back
on the true Federal Republic course envisioned by Thomas Jefferson.
In Liberty Defined, Ron Paul puts the laser light on the dangers of progressive thinking:
“The Progressive Era in the early part of the twentieth
century saw a systematic attack on the principles of liberty by both
Democrats and Republicans (much like is going on in America this
century) … This involved William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt as well
as the Wilsonian onslaught that gave us the Federal Reserve, the income
tax, the Seventeenth Amendment and an interventionist foreign policy
with World War I … The sharp attack on our liberties was
institutionalized by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s.”
I believe, as Ron Paul believes, that we need to start with 1913 as
base and basically wipe the slate clean and return to the Constitution
as written by our Founders. It is a tall order that would require a
first-ever joining together of a mix of liberal and conservative
interests who are all enlightened enough to have figured out the
100-year sham under which we have been operating. Is the name Leo
Strauss familiar to you? It must be! Ron Paul writes,
“Leo Strauss came to the United States in 1938 … and
built a reputation at the University of Chicago, where he influenced a
lot of future advisors and appointees of the George W. Bush
administration. Some well-known names include Abram Shulsky, William
Kristol, Irving Kristol, John Podhoretz, Michael Ledeen, Stephen
Cambone, and Richard Perle.”
Regarding the views of this group, Ron Paul concludes,
“These views are based on absolute rejection of trust in a free society.”
Poll: Two-Thirds of Paul
Backers Aren't Republican
Thursday, 29 Sep 2011 10:05 AM
By Henry J. Reske
Presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has a Republican problem. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that of the 25 percent who view the presidential candidate favorably, two-thirds don’t identify themselves as Republicans, The Washington Post’s political blog The Fix reports.
The Post notes that Paul is “the most enigmatic figure in the Republican race for president,” with a loyal and large following.
“But, we’ve often wondered just how many Paul-ites are actually Republicans. New data from the Washington Post-ABC News poll suggests that it’s not all that many. Overall, 25 percent of the American public views the Texas Congressman favorably while 27 percent see him in an unfavorable light. Of the 25 percent of people who regard Paul favorably, roughly two-thirds don’t identify themselves as Republicans.”
Of Republicans identifying themselves as conservative, just 8 percent feel “strongly favorable” towards Paul compared to 22 percent who felt the same way about Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Texas Gov. Rich Perry and 18 percent for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. The poll provides empirical evidence that Paul’s support base comes mostly from libertarians who have not traditionally been involved in party politics, according to the Post.
“What that means is that Paul’s support is the most stable among the Republican candidates because it’s the least likely to be shared with anyone else running. … That Paul is a force unto himself can be a good thing but it’s also a major impediment to his ability to expand his support beyond those who are already with him. And, as the Post-ABC poll shows, not enough of Paul’s supporters are Republicans for him to make a major run at the party’s nomination,” the Post said.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul to Retire From Congress
Tuesday, 12 Jul 2011 12:36 PM
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Rep. Ron Paul says he will retire from Congress when his term runs out in 2012 and will focus on his campaign for president.
The 75-year-old Republican said Tuesday that he has been criticized in the past for running for Congress and the presidency at the same time. He says he believes he can fight for the issues he believes in from outside of Congress.
Paul says he will serve out his term through December 2012.
Paul's supporters made him the top online vote-getter in an unscientific survey sponsored by Time magazine. Time asked readers to predict the winner of the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, with a mail-in vote and via an online vote. Mitt Romney was the top pick by mail-in voters, but Paul easily won the online vote.
Ron Paul: Dump TSA for Abusing Searches
Tuesday, 05 Jul 2011 12:53 PM
By Dan Weil
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has received a lot of flak for humiliating air travelers with enhanced body searches. And Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul says the TSA should be disbanded, The Hill reports.
In his weekly "Texas Straight Talk" audio address, the House member from Texas said recent reports claiming a 95-year-old woman was forced to remove her adult diaper and an 8-month-old baby's diaper was inspected demonstrate that the TSA is out of control.
"The press reports are horrifying," Paul said. "Ninety-five-year-old women humiliated, children molested, disabled people abused. Men and women subjected to unwarranted groping and touching of their most private areas, and involuntary radiation exposure.
“If the perpetrators were a gang of criminals, their headquarters would be raided by SWAT teams and armed federal agents. Unfortunately, in this case, the perpetrators are armed federal agents."
Rep. Ron Paul, G.O.P. Loner, Comes In From Cold
Jim Cole/Associated Press
Ron Paul in November 2007 campaigning for president. He is considering another run in 2012.
WASHINGTON — As virtually all of Washington was declaring WikiLeaks’s disclosures of secret diplomatic cables an act of treason, Representative Ron Paul was applauding the organization for exposing the United States’ “delusional foreign policy.”
The latest on President Obama, the new Congress and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.
Rand Paul and his father will be Congressional roommates. “I told him as long as he didn’t expect me to cook,” Ron Paul said.
Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch, via Associated Press
It was hardly the first time that Mr. Paul had marched to his own beat. During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, he was best remembered for declaring in a debate that the 9/11 attacks were the Muslim world’s response to American military intervention around the globe. A fellow candidate, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, interrupted and demanded that he take back the words — a request that Mr. Paul refused.
During his 20 years in Congress, Mr. Paul has staked out the lonely end of 434-to-1 votes against legislation that he considers unconstitutional, even on issues as ceremonial as granting Mother Teresa a Congressional Gold Medal. His colleagues have dubbed him “Dr. No,” but his wife will insist that they have the spelling wrong: he is really Dr. Know.
Now it appears others are beginning to credit him with some wisdom — or at least acknowledging his passionate following.
After years of blocking him from a leadership position, Mr. Paul’s fellow Republicans have named him chairman of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which oversees the Federal Reserve as well as the currency and the valuation of the dollar.
Mr. Paul has strong views on those issues. He has written a book called “End the Fed”; he embraces Austrian economic thought, which holds that the government has no role in regulating the economy; and he advocates a return to the gold standard.
Many of the new Republicans in the next Congress campaigned on precisely the issues that Mr. Paul has been talking about for 40 years: forbidding Congress from any action not explicitly authorized in the Constitution, eliminating entire federal departments as unconstitutional and checking the power of the Fed.
He has been called the “intellectual godfather of the Tea Party,” but he also is the real father of the Tea Party movement’s most high-profile winner, Senator-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky. (The two will be roommates in Ron Paul’s Virginia condominium. “I told him as long as he didn’t expect me to cook,” the elder Mr. Paul said. “I’m not going to take care of him the way his mother did.”)
Republicans had blocked Mr. Paul from leading the monetary policy panel once before, and banking executives reportedly urged them to do so again. But Republicans on Capitol Hill increasingly recognize that Mr. Paul has a following — among his supporters from 2008 and within the Tea Party, which helped the Republicans recapture the House majority by picking up Mr. Paul’s longstanding and highly vocal opposition to the federal debt.
Aides, supporters and television interviewers now use words like “vindicated” to describe him — a term Mr. Paul, a 75-year-old obstetrician with the manner of a country doctor, brushes off.
“I don’t think it’s very personal,” he said in an interview in his office on the Hill, where he has represented the 14th District of Texas on and off since 1976. “People are really worried about what’s happening, so they’re searching, and I think they see that we’ve been offering answers.”
If there is vindication here, Mr. Paul says, it is for Austrian economic theory — an anti-Keynesian model that many mainstream economists consider radical and dismiss as magical thinking.
The theory argues that markets operate properly only when they are unfettered by government regulation and intervention. It holds that the government should not have a central bank or dictate economic or monetary policy. Once the government begins any economic planning, such thinking goes, it ends up making all the economic decisions for its citizens, essentially enslaving them.
The walls of Mr. Paul’s Congressional office are devoid of the usual pictures with presidents and other dignitaries. Instead, there are portraits of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, titans of the Austrian school. For years, Mr. Paul would talk about their ideas and eyes would glaze over. But during his presidential campaign, he said he began to notice a glimmer of recognition among those who attended his events, particularly on college campuses.
Mr. Paul now views his exchange with Mr. Giuliani in 2008 as a crucial moment in his drive for more supporters. “A lot of them said, ‘I’d never heard of you, and I liked what you said and I went and checked your voting record and you’d actually voted that way,’ ” he said. “They’d see that the thing that everybody on the House floor considered a liability for 20 years, my single ‘no’ votes, they’d say, ‘He did that himself; he really must believe this.’ ”
His campaign that year attracted a coalition that even he recognizes does not always stand together: young people who liked his advocacy of greater civil liberties and the decriminalization of marijuana; conservatives who nodded at his antidebt message; and others who agreed with his opposition to the Iraq war.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, he was out of favor with the reigning neoconservatives who were alarmed at his anti-interventionism. He still gives many conservatives fits with comments like his praise for WikiLeaks.
And many of those who follow the Fed closely say his ideas are “very strange indeed,” in the words of Lyle E. Gramley, a former governor of the Fed who is now a senior economic adviser at the Potomac Research Group. “I don’t think he understands what central banking is all about,” Mr. Gramley said.
Putting such a critic of the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, in such a prominent role, he added, could damage economic confidence.
“The public doesn’t understand how serious the problem was and why the Fed had to take the action it did,” Mr. Gramley said. "Having someone in Congress taking shots at the Fed makes the situation uneasy.”
Still, Mr. Paul says, his colleagues respect his following outside Washington. “I was on the House floor today,” he said, “and somebody I don’t know real well, another Republican, he was talking to two other members, and he knew I was listening. He pointed at me and said, ‘That guy has more bumper stickers in my district than I do!’ ”
Interview requests are so common that Mr. Paul has set up a camera and studio backdrop in his district office to save him the hour’s drive to television stations in Houston.
His bill demanding a full audit of the Fed, which he had unsuccessfully pushed for years, attracted 320 co-sponsors in the House this year.
And the lunches that he has held in his office every Thursday, where lawmakers can meet intellectuals and policymakers who embrace Austrian economics, have become more crowded, drawing Tea Party celebrities like Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.
“For a long time, a lot of people in Congress on both sides of the aisle agreed with Ron a lot of the time but felt it wasn’t safe to go there,” said Jesse Benton, a longtime Ron Paul aide who ran Rand Paul’s Senate campaign.
The father is about to gain even greater visibility. He says he will use his new chairmanship to renew his push for a full audit of the Fed and to hold a series of hearings on monetary policy.
On Web sites for Ron Paul fans, there are urgent pleas for a father-son (or son-father) “Paul/Paul 2012” ticket. But in an interview, the senior Mr. Paul seemed taken by surprise by the suggestion of teaming up. While he is bursting-proud of his son, he is not necessarily ready to yield the spotlight: He is pondering another presidential run on his own.
“I’d say it’s at least 50-50 that I’ll run again,” he said, adding that he would look at where the economy is. (Aides add that it would depend a lot on what his wife, Carol, says.)
But for all the ways the Tea Party echoes Mr. Paul on fiscal issues, it is not clear such support would carry over into a presidential campaign. The last time he ran, he won less than 2 percent of the vote, though that was before the Tea Party became a force in politics.
Even many Tea Party conservatives are not on board with Mr. Paul’s beliefs about scaling back the United States military worldwide. And Paul supporters look on the Tea Party with some disdain.
Mr. Paul acknowledged the sometimes competing interests among Tea Party supporters and his fans. “What brings them together is this acceptance that there’s something really wrong, that we’ve spent too much money and government’s too big,” he said.
That, he added, was why he had to work at keeping up his influence, particularly in spreading the word about the cost of foreign interventions.
Still, he noted: “We’re further along than I would have expected in getting our message out in front. I thought I’d be long gone from Congress before anybody would pay much attention.”
Eying another longshot bid, Paul addresses
SRLC
Sat Apr 10,
4:14 pm ET
NEW ORLEANS – Eying another presidential bid, Texas Rep. Ron Paul is
telling Republican activists that "the American people have awoken" because
Washington won't address the nation's fiscal crisis.
Paul ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008. He
spoke Saturday to the Southern
Republican Leadership Conference, a so-called cattle call of potential
presidential candidates.
Paul brought to the event a large contingent of
boisterous supporters. Following Paul's lead, they booed some
traditional GOP policies that lead to government spending.
Says Paul: "The reason why the American people have
awoken ... is because the country is broke and the people in Washington
won't admit it."
Much has been made by the new administration of the idea of national service and volunteerism. While service to one’s community is certainly admirable, it is not the federal government’s place to “encourage” or promote volunteerism. Moreover, there are troubling signs that national service could transition from voluntary to mandatory, or de facto mandatory, such as the requirement of service in order to be granted a diploma, or something along those lines.
Involuntary servitude was supposed to be abolished by the 13th Amendment, but things like Selective Service and the income tax make me wonder how serious we really are in defending just basic freedom. The income tax enslaves workers for nearly 4 months out of a year by garnishing what amounts to all their wages in that period of time. A military draft could demand your very life, without your consent. This should be unthinkable in a free society.
Proponents of reinstating the draft claim it is needed to protect liberty from enemies abroad. But what about the enemies of liberty right here at home? I am convinced that there are more threats to American liberty within the 10 mile radius of my office on Capitol Hill than there are on the rest of the globe. If we would get our troops off of foreign soil, those perceived enemies of our liberty abroad are much more likely to stand down and let us be. We have more than enough troops to mind our own business and defend ourselves. It is only for world domination that we have a troop shortage.
Nevertheless, some think recruiting for our military is too low and that the younger generation will not answer the call of duty willingly, and must be drafted by force. I take extreme exception to this characterization of young people today. First of all, I believe they correctly see that foreign policy, as unpopular as it has been under Bush, is not significantly changing under Obama, and has little, if anything, to do with defending the United States, and certainly not the Constitution. Second, many see friends and acquaintances who have voluntarily enlisted, and have taken note of how the soldier, the veteran is treated. Perhaps rather than blaming younger generations for being selfish, older generations should remember their promises to those who volunteer for military service and be mindful of how they are treated. Every homeless vet by the side of the road, every suicide, every report of substandard conditions in veteran hospitals is a sign of how we let our military down. Perhaps we should look to those issues if we have problems with military recruitment, rather than to trample freedom in the name of protecting it.
If that is not enough reason, consider that most in the military are against a draft. There is a vast difference between serving alongside another volunteer, and serving alongside a reluctant conscript. Americans need to be on the lookout for any propaganda trying to ease us back into the draft. Too often a flawed foreign policy prompts the need for a draft. Abolishing the Selective Service is one thing we could do to counter those efforts.
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In his weekly "Texas Straight Talk" audio address, the House member from Texas said recent reports claiming a 95-year-old woman was forced to remove her adult diaper and an 8-month-old baby's diaper was inspected demonstrate that the TSA is out of control.
