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Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution

The rise of an eclectic anti-statist movement

Brian Doherty | February 2008 Print Edition

Note: Watch reason editor Nick Gillespie debate Bill O'Reilly on Ron Paul's candidacy at Fox News.

On the morning of October 30, a large group of people gathered outside The Tonight Show?s Burbank studio. According to GloZell, a local eccentric who attends every taping of the show, only the lines attracted by Hollywood heartthrobs such as George Clooney, Justin Timberlake, and Daniel Radcliffe had ever come close to matching the crowd?s size and enthusiasm. But this throng had gathered to cheer Ron Paul, a 72-year-old obstetrician and Air Force veteran turned Texas congressman. Paul was there to hawk not a movie or a record but his long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

During the broadcast, host Jay Leno respectfully attended to Paul?s calls for hard money, withdrawal from Iraq, and a flat income tax of zero. Offstage, Leno got Paul to autograph his copy of the congressman?s recent book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship.

Later in the show, while performing ?Anarchy in the U.K.? with a reunited Sex Pistols, punk icon Johnny Rotten gave Paul a thumbs-up and a ?Hello, Mr. Paul,? later adding, ?When are we getting out of Iraq?? In between, more ambiguously, he waggled his ass in Paul?s general direction. But he shook hands with the congressman afterward, and according to Paul supporters on the scene he expressed respect to him privately. Paul, watching the broadcast with supporters at a Hollywood Hills fundraiser that evening, shook his head at the aging punk?s antics, noting, well, we do promote tolerance.?

That day encapsulated Paul?s surprising campaign. It featured a powerful show of grassroots support, respect from unexpected places, and an infiltration of radical ideas into American mainstream culture. There was the aging iconoclast Rotten, mixing the anarchy he stood for as a kid and the market capitalism he lived out as an adult (the Pistols had reunited to help promote the video game Guitar Hero III), symbolizing the range of liberties Paul represents to a movement that includes both Christian homeschoolers and heathen punks. And there was the question so many Americans want answered, the question central to Paul?s campaign as the only Republican candidate opposed to the war: When are we getting out of Iraq?

When the Paul campaign began, most of the political cognoscenti considered it a quixotic joke. Now it?s one of the hottest stories of the season. The reason for the turnaround is money. On November 5 alone, Paul took in a gigantic haul of $4.3 million. His third quarter 2007 draw nearly matched that of the far more famous John McCain, and his net cash on hand going into the primaries exceeded that of everyone but front-runner Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson (though millionaire Mitt Romney has his personal reserves to fall back on). As of press time, in the fourth quarter of 2007, Paul had collected $10.7 million, generally in amounts well below the legal $2,300 maximum for individual donations.

By November, Ron Paul was getting respect from surprising and prominent places. Conservative bigthinker George Will called Paul ?my man? on ABC. Texas singer-songwriter-novelist Kinky Friedman told CNN?s Wolf Blitzer that Paul is ?probably telling the truth.? Singer-songwriter John Mayer was caught on video informing a pal that ?Ron Paul knows the Constitution, and I?m down with that.? Even Eleanor Clift, conventional wisdom on the hoof, said on The McLaughlin Group that ?Ron Paul with his antiwar libertarian message will be the story coming out of New Hampshire for the Republicans.?

Paul is also the wonder of the Internet, with campaign mojo fueled almost entirely by his shockingly large number of fans on Meetup.com, a website that allows people with a shared interest to find one another and meet offline. Paul has more than 67,000 Meetup followers, about 20 times more than his nearest competitor, Barack Obama. That virtual presence has translated into more than just donations. Five thousand Paul supporters showed up at a November rally in Philadelphia, and his poll numbers in New Hampshire reached 8 percent in a mid-November CBS/New York Times survey?exceeding both Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson.

If news is the unexpected, Ron Paul?s rise was the news of the presidential campaign last fall. But Paul himself is not news. He?s been pushing his libertarian values, derived from his love of the U.S. Constitution and the Austrian school of free market economics, through all of his 10 terms in Congress and in between. (He has served in Congress three times: from 1976 to 1977, from 1979 to 1983, and from 1997 to the present. He ran for president as a Libertarian in 1988.) What?s news is the self-styled Ron Paul Revolution?his mass of self-coordinating supporters. The candidate?s critics invented the term ?Paulistas? to mock those supporters as wild-eyed radicals. Many of them then claimed the word for themselves, adopting it as a badge of honor.

Four years ago, Howard Dean?s Democratic campaign offered an earlier example of a grassroots mass movement that came pretty much from nowhere, beholden to no power structure, decentralized in how it got information and in how it organized itself to act. But the Ron Paul Revolution adds a twist: This movement is passionately dedicated to a smaller, less activist government.

As this is written, before a single primary vote has been cast, it?s difficult to predict this movement?s future, especially when you remember how Dean?s campaign imploded after the Iowa caucus. But Paul?s backers are confident their man will at the very least be a new Goldwater. He might not win the presidency, they say, but he will reignite excitement about small government in his party and his country, and thus might help reverse the last half century and more of government growth and activism in both domestic and foreign policy.

In the last weekend of October, after months of following Ron Paul action on the Internet and locally in Los Angeles, I tagged along with the Ron Paul road show in Iowa. Over the course of just 24 hours stretched over two days, I saw Paul talk to more than 500 college kids in Ames, more than 700 assorted Des Moines citizens, hundreds of state GOP activists, and a dozen Des Moines area pastors. I saw a skilled politician with a diverse and disproportionately young band of backers?supporters who stretched far beyond a traditional Republican Party base, who loved their man and his message with an enthusiasm undaunted by whatever his electoral prospects turn out to be.

?Dr. Paul Cured My Apathy?
On the Friday evening before Halloween, Paul is scheduled to speak at Iowa State University in Ames. To get from Des Moines to Ames, I hop on the Constitution Coach, a former school bus owned by Dave Keagle, a Christian homeschooling father of seven. Keagle?s wife, Christa, and their children are on board, along with a dozen or so other Paul supporters. The bus is painted red, white, and blue, with slogans summing up Paul?s message: ?Taxpayer?s Best Friend.? ?No Amnesty.? ?No NAFTA.? ?No National ID.? ?No Patriot Act.? ?Pro-Gun Owner.? ?Life.? ?Liberty.? ?Freedom.? Christa tells me Paul is the first candidate her family has ever been able to get behind 100 percent, with no reservations. She was also impressed with how Paul was able to relate to and remember the names of all her kids on a previous Iowa campaign swing.

I talk to John Carle Jr., a 43-year-old self-employed CPA who dabbles in real estate, and his wife, Meredith, a Korean orphan brought to America as a child. Like most of the Paulistas I meet, he?s fresh to politics, with no history of activism or enthusiasm for any candidate from any party. He?s not a part of any existing Republican base: He?s a disaffected independent who thinks he?s finally found a politician who ?oozes integrity? and ?is inspiring the best in people.? Paul?s the only candidate he trusts on post-9/11 civil liberties issues. ?If they can pick anyone off the streets and send them to a secret camp,? Carle says, ?I don?t wanna be part of that country.?

Carle, who has a firm grasp of the candidate?s positions, explains his love for Paul in measured terms. He gets emotional only once, choking up for a beat as he repeats his favorite of the fan-made signs you see at Paul rallies: ?Dr. Paul Cured My Apathy.?

The talk at Ames draws an overflow crowd of more than 500 college kids. There are a few longhairs, a few punks, but it?s overwhelmingly a conventional gang of well-groomed Midwestern youth who happen to be wearing hundreds of ?Ron Paul Revolution? T-shirts. The event got no free local or campus press. The crowd was gathered almost entirely through Meetup and Facebook, another online social networking site.

?I hear you?ve got a revolution going on,? Paul begins, ?and it?s being led by the young people.? Then he recites his first big applause line: He?s not much for passing laws, but he might consider one requiring the next election to be held on the Internet.

Those are the only explicit nods to the crowd?s youth and online activity. From there on, it?s all classic Ron Paul: Get rid of the income tax and replace it with nothing; find the money to support those dependent on Social Security and Medicare by shutting down the worldwide empire, while giving the young a path out of the programs; don?t pass a draft; have a foreign policy of friendship and trade, not wars and subsidies. He attacks the drug war, condemning the idea of arresting people who have never harmed anyone else?s person or property. He stresses the disproportionate and unfair treatment minorities get from drug law enforcement. One of his biggest applause lines, to my astonishment, involves getting rid of the Federal Reserve. Kids have gathered, not just from Iowa but from Wisconsin and Nebraska, in classic hop-in-the-van college road trips, to hear a 72-year-old gynecologist talk about monetary policy.

He wraps up the speech with three things he doesn?t want to do that sum up the Ron Paul message. First: ?I don?t want to run your life. We all have different values. I wouldn?t know how to do it, I don?t have the authority under the Constitution, and I don?t have the moral right.? Second: ?I don?t want to run the economy. People run the economy in a free society.? And third: ?I don?t want to run the world.?We don?t need to be imposing ourselves around the world.?

Paul does not mention abortion or immigration?areas where his views are more conventionally conservative and not of great appeal to this age group. He?s against abortion and thinks the fetus is a human life deserving of state protection, but he also thinks that like all such crimes against persons, abortion is a matter for states to decide without federal interference. He thinks that border defense is a legitimate function of government, and that government has been doing a bad job of it. He wants tougher border enforcement, including a border wall; he wants to eliminate birthright citizenship; and he wants to end the public subsidies that might attract illegal immigrants. Paul?s style of libertarianism includes a populist streak of distrust for foreign forces overwhelming our sovereignty, whether through the United Nations, international trade pacts, immigration, or a feared ?North American Union? between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

On the ride back to Des Moines, I meet, among other Paul fans, Bryan Butcher, a 50-year-old high school teacher and part-time drummer for a belly dancing troupe. He?s a pony-tailed former Marine who had thought of himself as a ?social liberal? and an Obama fan. ?I feel we do need to take care of people,? Butcher says. But Ron Paul has helped him see that ?the socialist idea of government taking care of people hasn?t helped, that people need to take care of people, and that?s the smart way to go.?

The Paulistas delight in their independence and fervor. At a press conference after the Ames talk, a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter asks the candidate about all the Paul signs he sees around Pittsburgh. ?You guys must have a big operation there,? he says.

?If we do,? Paul says with a small smile, ?we don?t know about it.?

?You Are Friends for Life?
Iowa and New Hampshire, which hold a caucus and a primary respectively in January, are the early-voting states where the campaign is concentrating most of its unexpected largess and where the unaffiliated revolutionaries are concentrating their energy. But more New Hampshire than Iowa. Iowans are perhaps too staid for the revolution.

I?m on Des Moines? downtown drinking strip after Paul has spoken at a state GOP dinner, sitting with two Paul staffers and two Paul fans. A tipsy young Romney supporter approaches us. She actually likes Ron Paul, she grants. She could even call him her second choice. But Ron Paul fans? They?re outside agitators, she insists, almost scary in their intensity. Iowans don?t appreciate their shouting, chanting style of campaigning, or their insistence on sticking their huge, silly ?Ron Paul Revolution? signs in places they do not belong, often violating both propriety and the law.

I ask Jan Mickelson of WHO-AM, a leading Des Moines talk radio host who describes himself as a Christian libertarian and a Paul admirer, where the classic Iowa Republican ?values voter? stands on Paul. He first notes, with a mixture of admiration and disquiet, that Paul partisans are ?crawl-over-broken-glass zealots. Fiercely devoted. Passionate. Wherever he appears they appear, wherever he?s on TV they watch, whatever poll they can participate in, they respond. If you get on their right side, you are friends for life. If you nuance even a little bit your support for him, they come at you.?

Iowa Republicans, Mickelson says, have ?two impulses? toward Paul. ?They find the limited government message very attractive,? he says. ?They find his war policies confusing and irritating. They don?t understand how you can be a constitutionalist for limited government and be against the war and not be aiding and abetting both Al Qaeda and Moveon.org.?

So New Hampshire is where the Paulistas are hoping for a surprise victory. It?s happened before for radical outsiders with populist appeal: Pat Buchanan scored the state in 1996. (And see what it got him.)

Vijay Boyapati, an Australian immigrant, was a software engineer for Google who was running a 100-member Google-internal pro-Paul listserv. (Paul filled two rooms to overflowing at a July talk on Google?s campus in Mountain View, California.) Boyapati quit his job in November to devote all his energy to his project Operation: Live Free or Die. His goal: Recruit a thousand Paul supporters to relocate to New Hampshire for a weekend or even for weeks?he plans to rent a house and give up a whole month himself?doing retail canvassing and campaigning to push Paul over the top there.

The official campaign has ponied up more than $1 million for TV commercials in the Granite State. The three ads focus on Paul?s personal integrity, on his opposition to national ID cards and other civil liberties violations, and on his support for a noninterventionist foreign policy. In one spot he notes that ?both parties have put their pet schemes ahead of our rights??a direct blow against his own party.

In the age of Bush Republicanism, Paul barely qualifies as a party man in good standing. But in New Hampshire independents can register and vote in the Republican primary on Election Day. And in the Iowa caucus, any legal voter can show up and vote for Paul. That?s good news for a campaign that must rely on support beyond the Bush-era GOP faithful.

?We Want to Have a Peaceful Revolution?
The inventor of the phrase ?Ron Paul Revolution,? and the designer of the T-shirt logo in which the evol in revolution looks like the word love backward, is 46-year-old Ernest Hancock, a longtime activist in the Arizona Libertarian Party and a radio host. The logo recycles an image he developed for his own (losing) 2006 bid for secretary of state in Arizona. ?We want to have a peaceful revolution, so the love is effective in portraying a revolution, but not violence,? says Hancock, known among Libertarian Party activists for always staking out hard-core, no-compromise stances. The logo, which is not an official campaign symbol, is immensely popular among Paul fans, dotting the nation wherever Paulistas can show up in T-shirts or put up stenciled signs or banners.

Hancock says that when he first heard rumors that Paul might be running, back in January 2007, ?I called [campaign chairman] Kent Snyder and said, ?All I need to know is if this is for real.? When he said yes, I said, ?Thanks, have a nice day, you?ll never hear from me again.? ?

Hancock spends most of his time these days crossing the nation, showing locals how to make Ron Paul Revolution signs economically, how to find used banners and billboard pieces for cheap or free and print on the back. He advises activists on how and where to hang them. Hancock?s an anarchist, but he has learned to love the federal highway system for the opportunity to reach a captive audience on the cheap by hanging banners off overpasses.

And if the banners get torn down within hours? ?So freaking what?? he says. ?Two hundred thousand people saw it.? And, uh, is any of this illegal? ?I don?t know,? he says. ?I don?t care.? Well, Ron Paul is on record as supporting civil disobedience.

Hancock?s crusade is not the only guerrilla effort on Paul?s behalf. Meetup groups are organizing a campaign to send thousands of handwritten pro-Paul letters to Iowa voters. A strange variety of viral videos infects YouTube, many of them featuring unofficial Ron Paul campaign songs. The range of styles in these Ron Paul ballads reflects the eclecticism of the Ron Paul Revolution: from wan old-school folk to ?90s-style jazzy trip-hop, from sprightly garage rock to straight Sinatra steals. Some lyrical samples, from the trip-hop number: ?We need Ron Paul/For the long haul/Cause he?ll stop all the wars/Where the bombs fall.? From the garage pop tune: ?Ron Paul!/He?s got brains and he?s got balls/Ron Paul!/Who you gonna cast your vote for next fall?/Ron Paul!?

An Eclectic Revolution
As a very successful politician, Ron Paul knows how to sell what?s appropriate at any given moment, within the bounds of his principles. This talent helps forge a movement that appeals across gaps that standard political analysts might think unbridgeable, such as the one between pot-smoking libertine college kids and evangelist pastors.

When Paul speaks to those pastors in Des Moines, he talks about border security, sovereignty, and the North American Union, topics missing from the college talk. He tells of witnessing a casual abortion in medical school, and how much it disturbed him. But even to this audience he stresses that preventing abortion must ultimately be a cultural, spiritual, and family matter, not something solvable through top-down federal action.

Afterward, a couple of pastors tell me they?re ?less libertarian? than Paul but plump for him anyway. The ?leave us alone? message has wide appeal; as Nate Howe, an L.A.-area computer security worker in the banking industry and an organizer with the local Meetup group, tells me, a recent Hollywood fundraiser found ?Ron Paul talking to someone who?s very accomplished in business and then a kid next to him with a Mohawk, and both are saying, ?I like this guy; he?s saying go live your life, and if you don?t hurt anyone, the government shouldn?t bother you.? ?

I hear variants of this from many Paulistas. They recognize their scene?s eclecticism but see no reason that, whatever your personal values or lifestyle, you can?t get behind the man who wants to leave you alone.

There?s one strain of the Paul movement, though, that often alienates his other supporters and potential supporters. Ranging from John Birchers to 9/11 Truthers, they?re the type whose distrust of government is enmeshed in elaborate, complicated, and implausible conspiracy theories. To the extent those people have a favorite candidate, it?s apt to be Ron Paul. One big reason: He shares their refusal to believe the government always has good intentions.

My friend Phil Blumel has been active for the last decade in Florida GOP politics and has been following Paul closely for two decades.

He?s a big Paul supporter and has been encouraged at how many rank-and-file Republicans seem open to his message. He understands Paul?s appeal to the conspiratorial types, though he doesn?t share their interests, and doesn?t think Paul really does either. ?I?ve heard him speak 40 times, and you can never really tell that he actually believes in any particular conspiracies,? Blumel notes. ?But he speaks in a language such that conspiracy nuts believe that he does. Me not being a conspiracy nut, he speaks vaguely enough that I can listen and it doesn?t sound like he really buys it.

?That?s a political skill,? Blumel jokes, ?triangulating between the sane and the insane and keeping them both on board.? As an enthusiastic supporter of the campaign who nonetheless disagrees with Paul?s stances on immigration and sovereignty, Blumel has been pleased that as the campaign has gained traction, Paul has emphasized issues with more mainstream appeal: war and the economy.

With that traction has come a wave of ?Who Are the Paulistas?? media stories. The ultimately dismissive, if often amused, spirit of many of them is summed up by an anecdote in one of the articles. After noting some Paul fans? penchant for wearing costumes, including colonial era garb, Time?s Joel Stein describes how, after a New Hampshire rally, a staffer for fellow GOP candidate Tom Tancredo ?walked up to a guy in a shark costume and asked him if he was a Ron Paul supporter. ?No. They?re all nuts,? replied the shark. ?I?m just a guy in a shark suit.? ?

While left-leaning writers such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon and John Nichols at The Nation have been Paul defenders, the right-wing press has frequently featured bitter animus against him. For example, the conservative columnist Mona Charen scoffs that Paul ?might make a dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians.? At The Weekly Standard?s website, Dean Barnett writes, ?If you?re the kind of person whose neighbors call you a crank, you probably see Ron Paul as a kindred spirit. And chances are he?s with you on the subject for which you?ve achieved your notoriety in crankdom.?

In my interviews with dozens of Paul supporters from across the country, I encountered not a single nut or dedicated conspiracy theorist. In fact, they all evinced a general belief in free markets and the Constitution that should, in theory, make them welcome members in good standing of the American right.

The Revolution?s Future
Most of the current Ron Paul Army has mustered in only with this campaign. Most of them had never heard of him, or thought of themselves as libertarians, before six months ago. The predominance of newbies bothers Jorge Besada, an economics fan in a Hayek shirt who shipped in from Nebraska to hear his man talk in Ames and Des Moines. Without a solid grounding in the verities of Austrian economics, Besada worries, Paul supporters won?t be optimal sellers of the freedom message. Too many of Paul?s positions, whether his hard-money stance or the larger questions of how free markets and free people will function and achieve social goals without constant government management, require a sophisticated economics background to really get, he fears.

There are no survey data about the Paul movement, but certain rough generalizations seem valid. They are not an unwashed rabble of weirdos, as Paul?s right-wing critics like to say; most are either college students or adult professionals, though usually not rich. They generally support Paul all the way. (Those with Libertarian Party backgrounds are likely to differ on immigration and abortion.) The war issue is important to them, but so are the larger matters of civil liberties and fiscal conservatism. They imagine themselves continuing the fight for these ideas in some capacity after the election, but they often aren?t sure how. Many, though, promise that any future candidate for any office pushing the Paul line will have their support. And some promise to be those future candidates.

Some Paul fans with more political experience, both Republican and Libertarian, are working to keep the revolution alive even if their candidate fails to take the nomination. In Florida, Paul partisans are encouraging their comrades to join county GOP executive committees and reshape the party from the bottom up in Paul?s image. In Alabama, a Paul organizer sees single-issue freedom-oriented grassroots groups already arising from the activists Paul has energized, including campaigns dedicated to gun rights and to fighting a national ID card.

There is a lot of clamor among Libertarian Party higher-ups and activists to get Paul (who remains a lifetime member of the party) to seek its nomination if he fails to get the Republican nod. Many insiders agree that it would be his for the taking at the party?s May convention. One downside for the L.P., which most seem willing to overlook, is that laws in a handful of states (including Paul?s home state of Texas) would bar him from the presidential ballot because of his campaign in the GOP primary. Paul continually denies that he?ll make a third-party run, but his denials are always couched in terms of not thinking about it or planning it, as opposed to categorically denying that he would ever under any circumstances do it.

Whatever his future plans, Paul insists this revolution is about his message, not him. But small hints of a cult of personality hover around some of his fans? devotion to the candidate. Almost all the supporters I talk to stress their trust in him and often assume he?s probably right about most things, even issues they haven?t put a great deal of thought into.

These Paulistas are what hopeful libertarians have fantasized about for decades: a disaffected but engageable mass of Americans, many of them hidden among the 45 percent or so who tend not to vote. They support an argument advanced by David Boaz of the Cato Institute and David Kirby of the America?s Future Foundation, who estimate, based on detailed polling data, that 9 to 14 percent of Americans hew to a roughly libertarian political ideology?and that this group has been shifting away from the GOP during the current Bush administration.

Such Americans represent a deep, natural well of libertarianism waiting to be tapped. And Ron Paul has hit a gusher in a year when every other Republican stands for big government and war, and when YouTube and Meetup are a private, self-selected national TV network and town hall for 24-hour Ron Paul. But when he?s gone?

I ask Paul, as he shakes hands and chats with every one of the 100 or so fans in his hospitality suit after the Iowa GOP dinner, about the future of the Ron Paul Revolution. First he admits to being as shocked as anyone by what?s happening. For years, he resisted calls to run again for president. He thought it was too early in the long-term libertarian educational project for such a campaign to get anywhere.

?Even if I said, ?OK folks, we didn?t make it, let?s all go home??I don?t think it would happen,? he says. ?I?ve been laboring in these fields for 30 years and wasn?t reaching many people and thought maybe my role is only to lay the foundation with a few speeches, voting the right way, setting a standard. I don?t know what will happen. Something amazing could happen in Iowa and New Hampshire, and that will decide a lot. But many of my supporters indicate they will be running for office. They understand my positions, and it would be pretty neat to see a bunch of new members go to Congress with these views.?

If something like that happens, Paul?s connection with Johnny Rotten and punk rock may be deeper than it first appears. It has often been said that early punk precursors like the Velvet Underground and the Ramones may not have sold many records themselves, but that everyone who bought one formed his own band to carry on the spirit. Even if Ron Paul doesn?t get that many votes, his voters may end up running for office themselves. It would be a fitting legacy for a very do-it-yourself political movement.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This is Burning Man (BenBella) and adicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs). He first wrote about Ron Paul for The American Spectator in 1999.
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Republican reaction to Ron Paul's performance in Iowa turns deadly -- Ann Coulter goes on hunger strike, dies minutes later
Written by bob42
New York, NY (AP) Ann Coulter, political commentator and best-selling author, collapsed shortly after completing a Fox News interview where she vowed to go on a hunger strike until Ron Paul dropped out of the Republican primary.

A spokesman for AnnCoulter.com promised further details as they became available but would only comment, "I don't think Ann would have wanted us to think that her untimely death was related to Ron Paul's astounding results in Iowa. She never was much on eating anyway."

A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment on Coulter's collapse, but did say that their decision to exclude Ron Paul from an upcoming televised forum was final, regardless of any "allegedly official results" from Iowa.

Reaction to Paul's strong showing in Iowa was significant, but somewhat less severe among other prominent political pundits:

    * Bill O'Reilly's entire Talking Points Memo consisted of a single graphic of a Zogby Poll taken in June 2007 in the background, while O'Reilly placed fingers in both ears and repeated, "I can't hear you, I can't hear you" for six minutes.


    * The three major networks canceled all Sunday political programming after several talking heads exploded during live coverage of the Iowa Caucuses.


    * Missing for hours, Sean Hannity was finally found under his desk at FoxNews HQ, curled into a fetal position and whispering to himself, "He's NOT a Great American, He's NOT a Great American..."


    * An inside source at the EIB network who identified himself only as "Snerdly" confirmed that Rush Limbaugh had finally Googled Ron Paul.




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A Rogue CIA
Inside Report by Robert Novak
Monday, December 24, 2007
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WASHINGTON -- Outrage over the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes is but one element of the distress about the agency by Republican intelligence watchdogs in Congress. "It is acting as though it is autonomous, not accountable to anyone," Rep. Peter Hoekstra, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told me. That is his mildest language about the CIA. In carefully selected adjectives, Hoekstra calls it "incompetent, arrogant and political."

Chairman Silvestre Reyes and other Intelligence Committee Democrats join Hoekstra in demanding investigation of the tape destruction in the face of the administration's resistance, but the Republicans stand alone in protesting the CIA's defiant undermining of President Bush. In its clean bill of health for Iran on nuclear weapons development, the agency acted as an independent policymaker rather than an adviser. It has withheld from nearly all members of Congress information on the Israeli bombing of Syria. The U.S. intelligence community decides on its own what information the public shall learn.

Intelligence agencies, from Nazi Germany to present day Pakistan, for better or for ill have tended to break away from their governments. The OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the CIA's World War II predecessor, was infiltrated by communists. While CIA tactics were under liberal assault in Congress during the Watergate era, current accusations of a rogue agency come from Republicans who see a conscious undermining of Bush at Langley.

The CIA's contempt for the president was demonstrated during his 2004 re-election campaign when a senior intelligence officer, Paul R. Pillar, made off-the-record speeches around the country criticizing the invasion of Iraq. On Sept. 24, 2004, three days before my column exposed Pillar's activity, former Rep. Porter Goss arrived at Langley as Bush's hand-picked director of central intelligence. Goss had resigned from Congress to accept Bush's mandate to clean up the CIA. But the president buckled under fire from the old boys at Langley and their Democratic supporters in Congress, and Goss was sacked in May 2006.

Goss's successor, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, restored the status quo ante at the CIA and nurtured relations with congressional Democrats in preparation for their coming majority status. Hayden, an active duty four-star Air Force general who lives in government housing, first antagonized Hoekstra by telling Reyes what the Democrats wanted to hear about the Valerie Plame CIA leak case.

There is no partisan divide on congressional outrage over the CIA's destruction of tapes showing interrogation of terrorism detainees. Hoekstra agrees with Reyes that the Bush administration has made a big mistake refusing to let officials testify in the impending investigation.

Republicans also complain that the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluding that Iran has shut down its nuclear weapons program was a case of the CIA flying solo, not part of the administration team. Donald M. Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, on Dec. 3 "took responsibility for what portions of the NIE Key Judgments were to be declassified." In a Dec. 10 joint article for the Wall Street Journal, Hoekstra and Democratic Rep. Jane Harman (a senior Intelligence Committee member) wrote that the new NIE "does not explain why the 2005 NIE came to the opposite conclusion or what factors could drive Iran to 'restart' its nuclear-weapons program." (Six days later on "Fox News Sunday," Harman called the NIE "the best work product they've produced.")

Hoekstra is also at odds with Hayden over CIA refusal to reveal what it knows about the Sept. 6 Israeli bombing of Syria's nuclear complex. Only chairmen and ranking minority members of the Intelligence committees, plus members of the congressional leadership, have been briefed. Other members of Congress, including Intelligence Committee members, were excluded. The Intelligence authorization bill, passed by the House and awaiting final action in the Senate, blocks most of the CIA's funding "until each member of the Congressional Intelligence committees has been fully informed with respect to intelligence" about the Syria bombing.

In a June 21 address to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Hayden unveiled "CIA's social contract with the American people." Hoekstra's explanation: "The CIA is rejecting accountability to the administration or Congress, saying it can go straight to the people."

To find out more about Robert D. Novak and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Robert D. Novak is a nationally Syndicated Columnist.

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House Sends President An Energy Bill to Sign

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2007; A01

A year of rhetoric, lobbying, veto threats and negotiations ended yesterday as the House of Representatives voted 314 to 100 to pass an energy bill that President Bush is to sign this morning. The bill will raise fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, order a massive increase in the use of biofuels and phase out sales of the ubiquitous incandescent light bulb popularized by Thomas Edison more than a century ago.

Lawmakers said the energy bill will reduce America's heavy reliance on imported oil and take a modest step toward slowing climate change by cutting about a quarter of the greenhouse-gas emissions that most scientists say the United States must eliminate by 2030 to do its share to avert the most dire effects of global warming.

"It is a national security issue, it is an economic issue, it is an environmental issue, and therefore a health issue," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "It is an energy issue, and it is an moral issue."

White House press secretary Dana Perino gave credit to Bush, saying he "pushed Congress to pass this legislation all year." But congressional Democrats said they had withstood veto threats by the White House as well as heavy lobbying by automakers and coal companies before ultimately preserving much of what they wanted in the legislation.

The bill's centerpiece is the boost in the minimum fuel-efficiency standard for passenger vehicles, the first to be passed by Congress since 1975. It requires new auto fleets to average 35 miles a gallon by 2020, a 40 percent increase from today's 25-mile average. By 2020, the measure could reduce U.S. oil use by 1.1 million barrels a day, more than half the oil exported by Kuwait or Venezuela and equivalent of taking 28 million of today's vehicles off the road.

The bill will also have sweeping impact in areas beyond the automobile industry.

For farmers and agribusiness, it is a windfall, providing more support than perhaps even the farm bill. It doubles the use of corn-based ethanol -- despite criticism that corn-based ethanol is driving up food prices, draining aquifers and exacerbating fertilizer runoff that is creating dead zones in many of the nation's rivers.

The law will also require the massive use of biofuels using other feedstocks, creating an industry from technologies still in laboratories or pilot stages whose economic viability is unproven. The law says that at least 36 billion gallons of motor fuel a year should be biofuels by 2022, most of it in "advanced biofuels," not a drop of which are commercially produced today.

Although the bill does not include any costs for the biofuels mandate, a fivefold increase over current production, it is likely that current subsidies for those fuels will be extended. If so, the mandate could cost the federal government as much as $140 billion over 15 years.

Bush and congressional supporters of the bill say the expanded use of biofuels will help cut U.S. dependence on oil imports by replacing 20 percent of the motor fuel now being used. Moreover, they argue, ethanol produces fewer greenhouse gases.

One portion of the bill sets new efficiency standards for appliances and will make the incandescent bulb -- invented two centuries ago and improved and commercialized by Edison in the 1880s -- virtually extinct by the middle of the next decade. The bill will phase out conventional incandescents, starting in 2012, with 100-watt bulbs, ultimately ceding the lighting market to more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

The commercial building industry could also be transformed by new incentives for energy-efficient windows, equipment and design. The federal government is supposed to make all of its buildings carbon-neutral through energy efficiency and clean energy use by 2030.

"The General Services Administration is the country's biggest landlord," said Andrew Goldberg, chief lobbyist for the American Institute of Architects. "This will help transform the marketplace for systems and equipment that make buildings more energy efficient and reduce the reliance on fossil fuel."

Not everyone was happy at the end of a year of haggling and lobbying. To secure passage for the bill, congressional leaders dropped a tax package that would have reduced breaks for the biggest oil and gas companies and extended breaks for wind and solar projects.

"We're pretty disappointed," said Rhone A. Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which sought an extension of the investment tax credit that expires at the end of next year. "Clearly the most important provisions for us were left on the cutting-room floor." Resch said that because of long lead times for big solar projects, "we will see the U.S. market for solar start to shrink rapidly by the second quarter of next year."

But many environmental groups and lawmakers were elated. "This bill is a clean break with the failed energy policies of the past and puts us on the path toward a cleaner, greener energy future," said Carl Pope, director of the Sierra Club.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who proposed raising fuel-efficiency standards in 2001, 2003 and 2005, said that the energy bill would help the United States escape the "vicious whirlpool of imported oil, exported dollars and military obligations all spinning out of control." He added that "with this bill . . . we are getting serious about our oil addiction."

Two years ago, a Markey amendment on fuel efficiency failed by an 87-vote margin, closer than his earlier efforts. But this year Democratic leaders made an energy bill a top priority. And Bush, in his State of the Union address, endorsed a similar boost in gasoline mileage standards and urged Americans to break their "addiction" to oil.

Soaring prices for oil and petroleum products and growing public concern about climate change also encouraged lawmakers to back higher fuel-efficiency standards. While U.S. automakers lobbied heavily for lower mileage targets, they were facing a broad coalition that included not only environmentalists but people like FedEx chief executive Fred Smith and retired general and Marine Corps commandant P.X. Kelley.

"I think between process, policy and politics it all came together and we have an energy bill no one could have envisioned six months ago," said Phyllis Cuttino, director of the Pew Campaign for Fuel Efficiency.

Cuttino said that the Pew Campaign, founded in April, would close its doors in mid-January.

? 2007 The Washington Post Company
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The Grand Old Party Is Up for Grabs

Three roads to a new Republican vision

Jesse Walker | December 17, 2007

Here's a quick snapshot of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. The closest the party has had to a frontrunner is a big-city mayor from a deep-blue state; he's a pro-choice adulterer who used to shack up with some gay guys. His chief rival is a tax-hiking governor who says our "responsibility to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions" is a "moral issue" and who denounces pro-market conservatives for their "greed." (He also thinks the world was created in less than a week, but in this party that isn't a disadvantage.) Another major candidate is trying to convince the voters that he's under fire for his Mormon beliefs, when the real reason no one trusts him is the pervasive suspicion that he has no beliefs at all. And the best man in the bunch is widely derided as a nut?not because of his frequently radical policy prescriptions, but because he opposes the most unpopular policy identified with the modern Republican Party.

And here's the weirdest thing of all: No one knows who's going to win. A party that prefers to coronate its standard-bearers at least a year before the primaries is about to head into the Iowa caucuses without a clear-cut frontrunner. The race is open, and it's open at a time when the party knows it has been doing something terribly wrong but can't agree on what mistakes it has been making. It isn't just the nomination that's available. The GOP's political vision is up for grabs.

The primary within the primary. The biggest battle in the Republican field right now isn't the fight for Iowa or New Hampshire. It's the contest to be the candidate of the party's social conservative wing. At a time when even the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani has managed to pick up the endorsement of a prominent right-wing evangelist?an aging Pat Robertson, whose declining lucidity is on sad display every day on The 700 Club?it's clear that this faction has no favorite. What it does have, despite Robertson, is a near-unanimous disdain for Giuliani. The two men who began the campaign as Rudy's biggest rivals, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, have been assiduously courting the Christian right. But they have a history of statements and stances that put social conservatives on edge.

So for the so-cons, who hold enormous power until the end of the primary season, Giuliani is unthinkable, but neither Romney nor McCain is a comfortable alternative. On the other hand, they don't want to line up behind someone like Alan Keyes or Tom Tancredo, even if that means denying us the sublime joy of a Keyes-Obama rematch: To get nominated, you have to be plausibly electable. With that in mind, I predicted last spring that the party would nominate a man who embraces the social conservative agenda while exuding a personal charm that might appeal to swing voters in the general election. There was one tiny problem with my prediction -- just a typo, really. I referred to this candidate as "Fred Thompson," but apparently his name is spelled "Mike Huckabee."

That said, Huckabee's victory in the primary-within-the-primary is far from assured. If he stumbles, so-con support could still go to Thompson, to Romney, or even to a resurgent McCain. Meanwhile, Rudy himself can't take advantage of the divisions in his rivals' ranks, because he made a deliberate decision to focus his attention on the later primaries. And by the time those come around, he might be too weak to win: He has been bruised by scandals and is falling in the polls.

The economic agenda. Huckabee and Romney may be bidding for the social conservatives' support, but the interesting differences between them lie in their economic opinions. Romney is a classic K Street Republican: more pro-business than pro-market, but committed in theory if not always in practice to limiting the government's role in the economy. Huckabee's rhetoric is strikingly different, calling on the state to do more to help the disadvantaged. He favors a few free-market fads like the Fair Tax, a gimmicky proposal to replace the income and payroll taxes with a national levy on consumption, but those are anomalies. Like John Edwards on the Democratic side, he is frequently called a populist; like Edwards, he would be better described as a progressive. His pitches do not call to mind a prophet in bib overalls demanding power for the people. They suggest a speechwriter brainstorming programs that might appeal to the soccer moms.

Romney might not believe in anything, but he pays lip service to the standard Republican values. If this becomes a Giuliani-Huckabee contest, that means the Republicans will jettison either the social views that have been identified with the party for the last three decades or the economic views that have been identified with the party for the last three decades. Meanwhile, the dark horse in the race would jettison the international views that have been identified with the party for most of the last five decades.

War! Ron Paul is a libertarian congressman from Texas with a strong commitment to a non-interventionist foreign policy. He has enough money to stay in the race for as long as he'd like, and he has a devoted band of followers who aren't likely to jump to any other candidate. His opposition to the Iraq war is deeply unpopular with both the Republican establishment and the hawkish Republican base, and that makes it extremely unlikely that he'll win the nomination. But he is also the only candidate who speaks for the 30 percent of the party that wants to bring the troops home (and one of the few candidates whose free-market rhetoric reflects actual pro-market positions). That makes him an important barometer of dissent within the party, and among independent voters as well. The more he succeeds, the more he forces the other candidates to reconsider their assumptions about what the electorate will tolerate.

And people keep underestimating him, which magnifies the impact of his successes. He will probably do well in New Hampshire and in much of the west. And he might do well in less libertarian territories as well: As of Friday, he has been polling in double digits in South Carolina.

Huckabee's economic program marks a shift from the traditional Republican rhetoric, but it's the natural next step after Bush's ballooning budgets and "faith-based" welfare spending. Giuliani's social views are a cleaner break with the old Republican platform, but they aren't far from the tolerant course the country has actually taken in the three decades since Reagan was elected president. Paul's foreign policy, by contrast, would be a radical contrast with the reigning Republican assumptions of the last eight years. He is returning to themes that were briefly resurgent in the '90s but haven't been part of the standard conservative playbook since the days of Robert Taft. If he inspires more Ron Paul Republicans to run for office, he too could push the party in a different direction, if not this year than in the years to come. And if the GOP refuses to listen to what he's saying, it's not clear whether that will be worse news for the non-interventionists or for the faltering Grand Old Party.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.
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    Dear Mr. Secretary-General,

    Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by ?government ?representatives. The great ?majority of IPCC contributors and ?reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.

Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:

?         Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.

?         The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.

?         Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is "settled," significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/wg1_timetable_2006-08-14.pdf) to consider work published only through May, 2005, these important findings are not included in their reports; i.e., the IPCC assessment reports are already materially outdated.

The UN climate conference in Bali has been planned to take the world along a path of severe CO2 restrictions, ignoring the lessons apparent from the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, the chaotic nature of the European CO2 trading market, and the ineffectiveness of other costly initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Balanced cost/benefit analyses provide no support for the introduction of global measures to cap and reduce energy consumption for the purpose of restricting CO2 emissions. Furthermore, it is irrational to apply the "precautionary principle" because many scientists recognize that both climatic coolings and warmings are realistic possibilities over the medium-term future.

The current UN focus on "fighting climate change," as illustrated in the Nov. 27 UN Development Programme's Human Development Report, is distracting governments from adapting to the threat of inevitable natural climate changes, whatever forms they may take. National and international planning for such changes is needed, with a focus on helping our most vulnerable citizens adapt to conditions that lie ahead. Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems.

Yours faithfully,

[List of signatories]

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/open_letter_to_un.html

WSJ.com  OpinionJournal

PEGGY NOONAN
The Pulpit and the Potemkin Village
Would Reagan survive in today's GOP? And is Mrs. Clinton in for a fall this winter?

Friday, December 14, 2007 12:01 a.m.

What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge.

The Republican race looks--at the moment--to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress.

Mike Huckabee is in the lead due, it appears, to voter approval of the depth and sincerity of his religious beliefs as lived out in his ministry as an ordained Southern Baptist. He flashes "Christian leader" over his picture in commercials; he asserts his faith is "mainstream"; his surrogates speak of Mormonism as "strange" and "definitely a factor." Mr. Huckabee said this summer that a candidate's faith is "subject to question," "part of the game."

He tells the New York Times that he doesn't know a lot about Mitt Romney's faith, but isn't it the one in which Jesus and the devil are brothers? This made me miss the old days of Gore Vidal's "The Best Man," in which a candidate started a whispering campaign that his opponent's wife was a thespian.

Mr. Huckabee has of course announced that he apologizes to Mr. Romney, which allowed him to elaborate on his graciousness and keep the story alive. He should have looked abashed. Instead he betrayed the purring pleasure of "a Christian with four aces," in Mark Twain's words.

Christian conservatives have been rising, most recently, for 30 years in national politics, since they helped elect Jimmy Carter. They care about the religious faith of their leaders, and their interest is legitimate. Faith is a shaping force. Lincoln got grilled on it. But there is a sense in Iowa now that faith has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such things as executive ability, professional history, temperament, character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary, tertiary.

But they are not, and cannot be. They are central. Things seem to be getting out of kilter, with the emphasis shifting too far.

The great question: Does it make Mr. Huckabee, does it seal his rise, that he has acted in such a manner? Or does it damage him? Republicans on the ground in Iowa and elsewhere will decide that. And in the deciding they may be deciding more than one man's future. They may be deciding if Republicans are becoming a different kind of party.

I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I'm just not sure he'd be pure enough to make it in this party. I'm not sure he'd be considered good enough.

This thought occurs that Hillary Clinton's entire campaign is, and always was, a Potemkin village, a giant head fake, a haughty facade hollow at the core. That she is disorganized on the ground in Iowa, taken aback by a challenge to her invincibility, that she doesn't actually have an A team, that her advisers have always been chosen more for proven loyalty than talent, that her supporters don't feel deep affection for her. That she's scrambling chaotically to catch up, with surrogates saying scuzzy things about Barack Obama and drug use, and her following up with apologies that will, as always, keep the story alive. That her guru-pollster, the almost universally disliked Mark Penn, has, according to Newsday, become the focus of charges that he has "mistakenly run Clinton as a de facto incumbent" and that the top officials on the campaign have never had a real understanding of Iowa.

This is true of Mrs. Clinton and her Iowa campaign: They thought it was a queenly procession, not a brawl. Now they're reduced to spinning the idea that expectations are on Mr. Obama, that he'd better win big or it's a loss. They've been reduced too to worrying about the weather. If there's a blizzard on caucus day, her supporters, who skew old, may not turn out. The defining picture of the caucuses may be a 78-year-old woman being dragged from her home by young volunteers in a tinted-window SUV.

This is, still, an amazing thing to see. It is a delight of democracy that now and then assumptions are confounded, that all the conventional wisdom of the past year is compressed and about to blow. It takes a Potemkin village.

A thought on the presence of Bill Clinton. He is showing up all over in Iowa and New Hampshire, speaking, shaking hands, drawing crowds. But when he speaks, he has a tendency to speak about himself. It's all, always, me-me-me in his gigantic bullying neediness. Still, he's there, and he's a draw, and the plan was that his presence would boost his wife's fortunes. The way it was supposed to work, the logic, was this: People miss Bill. They miss the '90s. They miss the pre-9/11 world. So they'll love seeing him back in the White House. So they'll vote for Hillary. Because she'll bring him. "Two for the price of one."

It appears not to be working. Might it be that they don't miss Bill as much as everyone thought? That they don't actually want Bill back in the White House?

Maybe. But maybe it's this. Maybe they'd love to have him back in the White House. Maybe they just don't want him to bring her. Maybe they miss the Cuckoo's Nest and they'd love having Jack Nicholson's McMurphy running through the halls. Maybe they just don't miss Nurse Ratched. Does she have to come?

It is clear in Iowa that immigration is the great issue that won't go away. Members of the American elite, including U.S. senators, continue to do damage to the public debate on immigration. They do not view it as a crucial question of America's continuance. They view it as an onerous issue that might upset their personal plans, an issue dominated by pro-immigration groups and power centers on the one hand, and the pesky American people, with their limited and quasi-racist concerns, on the other.

Because politicians see immigration as just another issue in "the game," they feel compelled to speak of it not with honest indifference but with hot words and images. With a lack of sympathy. This is in contrast to normal Americans, who do not use hot words, and just want the problem handled and the rule of law returned to the borders.

Politicians, that is, distort the debate, not because they care so much but because they care so little.

Hillary Clinton is not up at night worrying about the national-security implications of open borders in the age of terror. She's up at night worrying about whether to use Mr. Obama's position on driver's licenses for illegals against him in ads or push polls.

A real and felt concern among the candidates about immigration is a rare thing. And people can tell. They can tell with both parties. This is the real source of bitterness in this debate. It's not regnant racism. It's knowing the political class is incapable of caring, and so repairing.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.

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