Author Topic: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul  (Read 26152 times)

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Universe Prince

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #30 on: December 17, 2007, 02:51:36 PM »

Paul is going to need more than 24,000 new voters to defeat Hillary Rotten Clinton.  That's not going to cut it.

[...]

Elections are about turning out your base and pulling in independents. All 5 top GOP would do that against Hillary.


Would they? Last I checked, the candidate getting the press for attracting independents, disaffected Republicans and disaffected Democrats was not Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. It was Ron Paul. And frankly, Ron Paul's message is not all that different than George W. Bush's was in the 2000 campaign. So I confess I have a hard time believing that given a choice between Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton that the Republican Party base would stay home or vote for Clinton. Granted this is only my opinion, but the candidate with the best chance to beat Clinton is Paul. Ron Paul is not only motivating people to want to vote, he is reaching and persuading Democrats who are not happy with their party. In a direct head to head, Clinton would lose. And I have serious doubts than any of the other Republican candidates can achieve that.
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Amianthus

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #31 on: December 17, 2007, 03:00:14 PM »
Most of the Perotistas I know would not have voted at all, and have not voted since.
The few that did would have voted for Clinton.

My experience is the opposite. And most of the people I know that voted for Perot, voted for Bush previously, and went on to vote for Dole and Bush. (Guess I just know more people that actually vote...)

So, I guess my Perot voting associates would outnumber your Perot voting associates in an election. Possibly enough to have given Bush a majority of the popular vote in the '92 election - after all, Clinton didn't receive a majority of popular vote in that election, either.
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R.R.

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #32 on: December 17, 2007, 06:43:15 PM »
Quote
Would they?


Yes, that's why I wrote it. A majority of independents and Republicans are not going to vote for Hillary under any circumstance. She is doomed.

Any Republican, even Ron Paul, will defeat Hillary Rotten Clinton.

Universe Prince

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #33 on: December 17, 2007, 06:54:49 PM »

Yes, that's why I wrote it.


Yet, I'm still skeptical.
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Religious Dick

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #34 on: December 17, 2007, 07:10:28 PM »
Quote
Would they?


Yes, that's why I wrote it. A majority of independents and Republicans are not going to vote for Hillary under any circumstance. She is doomed.

Any Republican, even Ron Paul, will defeat Hillary Rotten Clinton.

Don't follow the polls very closely, do you?

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/party_affiliation/partisan_trends

If both parties do an equally good job of bringing out their bases, the Pubies are pretty well screwed...
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R.R.

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #35 on: December 17, 2007, 07:15:32 PM »
Quote
If both parties do an equally good job of bringing out their bases, the Pubies are pretty well screwed...

Not with Hillary as the Democrat nominee.

Xavier_Onassis

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #36 on: December 18, 2007, 08:49:57 AM »
The incompetence of the Republican Party has been monumental. They have supported the lunatic ideas of Juniorbush, his destruction of our rights, his borrow from the Chinese and squander in Iraq policy and his utter stubborn ignorance for seven long years.

NO way they are going to win.

Let Ron Paul take his money and try for a third-party victory, because there is no way that the same idiots who have sucked up so mightily to Juniorbush and his demented pal Cheney for seven years are going to pick Paul as a nominee.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #37 on: December 18, 2007, 08:48:35 PM »

Paul is going to need more than 24,000 new voters to defeat Hillary Rotten Clinton.  That's not going to cut it.

[...]

Elections are about turning out your base and pulling in independents. All 5 top GOP would do that against Hillary.


Would they? Last I checked, the candidate getting the press for attracting independents, disaffected Republicans and disaffected Democrats was not Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. It was Ron Paul. And frankly, Ron Paul's message is not all that different than George W. Bush's was in the 2000 campaign. So I confess I have a hard time believing that given a choice between Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton that the Republican Party base would stay home or vote for Clinton. Granted this is only my opinion, but the candidate with the best chance to beat Clinton is Paul. Ron Paul is not only motivating people to want to vote, he is reaching and persuading Democrats who are not happy with their party. In a direct head to head, Clinton would lose. And I have serious doubts than any of the other Republican candidates can achieve that.


"In a direct head to head, Clinton would lose."


Fair to say, but debatable. 

But the debate now must include, imho, factoring in the media.

The media asks the questions, and they determine what they are, and most importantly, how they are to be used.

Any candidate for president might sooner lose to the media moderator than to the person he/she is debating.

In assigning odds to Paul and Clinton, I would put Paul at ten to one to incur agenda abuse.


Religious Dick

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #38 on: December 20, 2007, 08:34:47 AM »

December 20, 2007, 6:00 a.m.

Liberty! Liberty!
Why I?m for Ron Paul.

By John Derbyshire

You can waste a lot of time in my line of work, noodling around on Internet search engines to not much effect. If the matter is sufficiently pressing (translation: remunerative), when the Internet has comprehensively failed you, you can head to your library. If that fails, you can head to the nearest university library; and if that fails, to some mega-resource like the New York Public Library. If the matter isn?t that pressing, you give up and think of something else to write about.

I got into one of these whirlpools a few months ago, at the time of the Scooter Libby conviction. The thing I couldn?t get past was Libby?s being the vice president?s chief of staff. Why (I wondered) does the vice president need a chief of staff? Or even a staff? Where is that in the Constitution? Yes, this is going to be a Ron Paul piece. Patience, please ? I?ll get there.

My touchstone in these matters is of course our late, great vice president, Calvin Coolidge. From Claude M. Fuess?s mesmerizing biography:

    As Vice President of the United States, Coolidge occupied a position which paid him a salary of $12,000 a year. In addition to this, he was allowed his own automobile and chauffeur, his own secretary, page, and clerk, and his private telegraph operator. His chief duty was to preside over the Senate; and he was entitled to a room in the Senate office building but also to one in the Capitol, directly behind the Senate chamber. In the Senate proceedings he had no vote except in case of a tie. He was also ex officio President of the Smithsonian Institution. His actual duties, beyond these, were not numerous, and he had plenty of time to himself.

(Pop quiz: From which of the three branches of government does the vice president draw his salary?)

That, of course, was then (1921), and this is now. The office of vice president has expanded some in the past 86 years. Wikipedia gives an outline account of the process. For quite some time, though, the Vice Presidency remained a poor stepchild of the federal-legislative apparatus. Presidential biographies fill in the details. When Richard Nixon moved from the Senate to the vice presidency in 1953, for example, his staffing allowance dropped from $70,000 as a Senator to less than $48,000 as veep. Nixon seems to have held on to all 13 of his senatorial staff members somehow; but he never appointed anyone chief of staff.

So to the present. Scooter Libby was of course the current vice president?s chief of staff until he resigned. David Addington now fills the post. And ? how many other persons are on the vice president?s staff?

Try finding out. That was the whirlpool I bailed out of those months ago. (Can you bail out of a whirlpool? Whatever.) I see I still have some scattered notes from my inquiries. The United States Government Manual for 2007/08, published by the Office of the Federal Register, lists 17 names under ?Office of the Vice President,? with titles from chief of staff to executive assistant.

That can?t be the whole story, though. Only three of those names have titles containing the phrase ?national security? ? four if you include ?homeland security? ? yet we know that in 2004 Dick Cheney had 14 staff members dealing with national security. (Al Gore had managed with five.)

There are 40 names listed on the Legistorm website; the overlap between this list and the one in U.S. Government Manual is only six names. So: how many people are on the vice president?s staff? I repeat: Try finding out. What?s his staff allowance? Same answer.

What has been the value-added in advancing from Silent Cal?s chauffeur, secretary, page, clerk, and telegraph operator, to Dick Cheney?s battalions of assistants to deputy assistants? You don?t need to sign on to leftist Cheney-pulls-the-strings hysteria to believe that it was in part the research and counsel supplied by all those busy beavers on the vice president?s payroll that gave us the misbegotten Iraq war. Cal?s telegraph operator performed better service to his country.

No offense to the current vice president, who seems to me to be a very charming and capable man. (I still cherish the recollection of his 2000 debate with Joe Lieberman ? the one that made everyone say: ?Ah! Here are the grown-ups at last!?) This isn?t personal, nor even really political; it?s systemic. How did the office of the vice president get so much power? And so many people? Heck, even the vice president?s wife has a chief of staff! Where is that in the Constitution?

* * * * *

Which brings us back to Ron Paul, and the appeal thereof. How on earth did we arrive at this point of vast, bloated, and secretive government, in which the wives of inconsequential federal officials (the office of the vice presidency used to be a byword for inconsequentiality ? ?bucket of warm p***,? etc.) have chiefs of staff, whose actual staffs and actual budgets are undiscoverable by a reasonably intelligent citizen?

The other day I got an e-mail from a reader. I get lots of e-mails from readers, of course, but this one stood out. A man?s death, said China?s Grand Historian, may be lighter than a feather, or heavier than Mount Tai. I feel kind of the same way about reader e-mails. This one landed in my in-box with an almighty house-shuddering thump. It?s from a reader in the Mile High City.

    Mr. Derbyshire,

    I saw your post on The Corner that one hundred dollars of the now nearly $16 million dollars Ron Paul has raised this quarter are yours. I?m up to $150 dollars, in twenty five dollar increments, plus another thirty something dollars for yard signs. I donate online and man, do I love hitting that send button.

    The first vote I ever cast was for Ronald Reagan in 1984. Today, I look at the Huge Government Republican establishment in Washington D.C., and read its enablers ? and I have no idea who these people are, or what happened to the GOP I signed on with.

    I?m in construction and get paid by the hour, so a twenty five dollar donation to Dr. Paul is roughly one pre-tax hour of my labor.

    So here?s the deal: for every two weeks that Ron Paul is in the race, he gets the fruit of an hour of my time and effort. And every time another member of the conservative intelligentsia disparages Dr. Paul?s campaign for a limited and constitutional government, it will just make hitting the send button that much sweeter.

I don?t know that I can say any more about my reasons for supporting Ron Paul than my reader said right there. I, too, like my reader, have no idea who these people are, and don?t even seem to be able to find out (see above). Probably they are all, like Dick Cheney, very nice people, taken as individuals: but that they are all toiling away in anything I recognize as the national interest, I cannot believe.

To the degree that I can say anything more, I have already said it implicitly, in columns like this one, and this one, and yes, this one. From the first of those:

    As the elites pull away from the rest of us, and the rest of us become more atomized and disorganized ? ?a heap of loose sand? in Sun Yat-sen?s memorable phrase about the late-Imperial Chinese ? we may be headed for the kind of intractable elite-commoner hostility predicted by Michael Young in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy. I don?t think it is fanciful to see an element of this in the current widespread anger towards the political class ? the president?s approval ratings down in the 30s, and Congress?s even lower.

Some of that is anger at particular policies ? Iraq, the immigration bill. Much, though ? a rising proportion, I believe ? is systemic: a feeling that the elites are now running the show for their own interests, Latin-America-style, with not much regard for ours. As [one of my readers] correctly observed: ?The low paid politician has vanished. The surest route to wealth is politics, followed closely by government service.?

Here is Paul Johnson in Modern Times:

    Like FDR, he [i.e. John F. Kennedy] turned Washington into a city of hope; that is to say, a place where middle-class intellectuals flocked for employment.

What I am seeking is an anti-JFK ? a candidate who will transform our nation?s capital from a city of hope for middle-class intellectuals, into a city of despair for them. The despair of those intellectuals, I am increasingly convinced, is the hope of our nation. Looking at all but one of the Republican candidates (and, it goes without saying, all but none of the Democratic ones) I see nothing in prospect but a new draft of office-seeking intellectuals, primed and eager to bring us new expansions of federal power, new pointless wars, new million-strong reinforcements for the Reconquista, new thousand-page tax loopholes, new inducements for idleness and crime, new humiliations for the saps who follow rules and obey laws. Sadly and reluctantly at last, I include the S.O.B. in that ?all but one.?

* * * * *

From Kimberley Strassel?s piece in the Dec. 14 Opinion Journal:

    Paul rallies heave with voters waving placards and shouting ?Liberty! Liberty!?

Are those supporters crazy, as some colleagues tell me?

Perhaps they are, to be shouting for liberty in 2007, after decades of swelling federal power and arrogance, of proliferating taxes, rules, and interests, of gushing transfers of wealth to politically connected elites from working- and middle-class grunts, of the college and teacher-union scams, of the metastasizing tort-law rackets, of ever more numerous yet ever more clueless intelligence agencies, of open borders and visas for people who hate us, of widening cracks in our sense of nationhood (?Press one for English ??), of speech codes and race lobbies and judicial impositions.

If those people are crazy, though, I want to be crazy with them. I?m for liberty, too. That?s why I?m for Ron Paul. And why do we have 75,000 soldiers in Germany?
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZWIzYWI4NTBjYTc3NGE1OGEwYWMyZjE1NDZjOWVmMDQ=
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Plane

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #39 on: December 20, 2007, 01:19:09 PM »

In assigning odds to Paul and Clinton, I would put Paul at ten to one to incur agenda abuse.



I agree.
How did this come to be?

Religious Dick

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #40 on: December 21, 2007, 08:50:13 AM »
Financial Post

Friday, December 21, 2007
Waiting for Ron Paul

He unites activists who think Washington is out of control

Martin Masse,  Financial Post  Published: Friday, December 21, 2007

Reuters

Many things about Ron Paul are unconventional. The 10-term Republican congressman from Texas is polling in single digits among likely Republican primary voters, behind several better-known front-runners. Most mainstream commentators still dismiss him as an oddity with no chance to win the nomination, let alone the presidency.

Despite that, he has won more than half of all straw polls held locally across the country. Soft-spoken and an obstetrician by trade, he is inspiring a devotion worthy of a rock star. His supporters have an overwhelming presence on the Internet and seem intent on proving the Hayekian notion that a decentralized, spontaneously emerging order is more efficient than any type of top-down organization.

This past Sunday, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, they -- not Paul's official organization, but volunteer supporters -- raised $6-million on the Internet, breaking an all-time record for single-day fundraising. With $18.5-million amassed so far this quarter, he could end up with more cash on hand than any other Republican candidate when caucuses and primaries begin in early January.

Philosophically a libertarian, Paul brings together disaffected fiscal conservatives, antiwar and pro-civil liberties left-wingers, and a vast array of people who believe the U.S. government is out of control. Although personally a social conservative, he gets support from brothel owners in Nevada and vows to put an end to the war on drugs. And his economic beliefs promise nothing short of a revolution.

Paul has been studying the most uncompromising branch of free-market economics, the one propounded by the Austrian School, for more than 30 years. That sets him apart in a political and academic world where supply-side, monetarist and other neoclassical ideas usually dominate free-market discourse. From an Austrian viewpoint, these are hopelessly muddled creeds that have made their peace with big government, and especially with what for Austrians is the central issue of government manipulation of the money supply.

His decision to first run for office in the 1970s was spurred by Nixon's decision to take the U.S. off the gold standard. He's been writing articles and books and giving speeches about the evils of government intervention and fiat money ever since. These themes resonate more than ever at a time when the greenback is sinking, financial bubbles are bursting, the country is drowning in bad debt and a credit crisis is in full bloom.

Whether one agrees with him or not, Paul is so serious about economic theory that he has become some sort of standard bearer for nerds in politics. David Frum, an unpaid Rudy Guliani advisor, was far off the mark when in this paper last Saturday he accused Paul of not having the faintest idea what he was talking about and being "too lazy or too arrogant to learn."

A Ron Paul administration, though not in the cards, would turn conventional political and economic thinking upside down.

All of a sudden, all those on the left who have been denouncing the American empire and its military adventures would find an ally in the White house. Ron Paul not only wants to bring back U.S. troops home from Iraq, but also those stationed in Europe and Asia. Cutting the half-trillion dollars a year military budget is a central part of his plan to put the country's finances back on a sound economic footing.

Paul never voted for a tax increase or for spending that he deems unconstitutional, which includes pretty much everything contained in federal budgets nowadays. He wants to abolish the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service. He would also eliminate the Departments of Education, Commerce, Energy and Homeland Security, get rid of corporate and agricultural subsidies, foreign aid, and a host of other programs. He would allow young people to opt out of Social Security and Medicare and let these two massive unfunded entitlement programs for the elderly slowly disappear.

The effect on the U.S. economy of such policies would be tremendous. Ottawa would have to react, or else we could lose the little competitive advantages that fiscal prudence has earned us over the last decade. Reducing the lowest income tax bracket from 15.5% to 15% will not do it. And who knows how far the loonie would fall back again if hard money and sound finances were to prevail south of the border?

Ron Paul policies would also threaten what has been a fundamental feature of Canadian economic policy for the past two decades, free trade -- or rather, relatively free managed trade -- with the United States. Paul's idea of free trade is to get the government out of the way, not to create more international bureaucratic structures that are not accountable. That would raise interesting debates. Would the NDP and the Council of Canadians denounce the threat of genuine free trade and launch a campaign to save NAFTA?

However many votes Paul ultimately gets, we shouldn't wait for an U.S. politician to force those reforms on us, especially one who wants to do away with Yankee imperialism. Freedom is a universal, not an American value. Free markets work everywhere. Why not get rid of all this government deadweight of our own volition, and for our own good?

--- - Martin Masse is a public policy consultant in Montreal.

Copyright ? 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=188154
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Xavier_Onassis

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #41 on: December 21, 2007, 11:01:04 AM »
However many votes Paul ultimately gets, we shouldn't wait for an U.S. politician to force those reforms on us, especially one who wants to do away with Yankee imperialism. Freedom is a universal, not an American value. Free markets work everywhere. Why not get rid of all this government deadweight of our own volition, and for our own good?

=======================================================
How does this clown propose the people do away with the IRS and all that, if not through some US politician?

Does he suggest armed combat? Perhaps a Canadian politician?

I don't tend to regard my Social Security, that I have been paying into, for 38 years, to be "deadweight".

Ron Paul has no chance of ever being a nominee of a major party, let alone president.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

Religious Dick

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #42 on: December 22, 2007, 08:31:45 AM »
Print ThisGo BackGo to CBSNews.com Home
Surprising Ron Paul Sparks A Movement
PLYMOUTH, N.H., Dec. 21, 2007(CBS) His progress has been as gradual as a tortoise on ice, but Ron Paul can no longer be dismissed as the favorite of the fringe, reports CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds.

Unlike other candidates consigned to the periphery, Paul has refused to go away. He is now in a tie for third in Iowa with supposed top-tier hopefuls.

And in live-free-or-die New Hampshire, he believes his anti-Iraq war, anti-tax, pro-freedom message with its libertarian tinge may resonate.

"People are flocking to the campaign," says Paul. "Maybe they've been starved for a campaign like this."

Paul's trip to Plymouth was promising: one woman told Reynolds that he was following the next president.

"Absolutely! No doubt," she says.

Paul's supporters are fervent - almost feverish - both on the ground and online.

He has used the Internet to drum up the bulk of an eye-popping 18 million dollars in this quarter alone from what he says are frustrated members of both parties and first-time voters. If money talks, Ron Paul is shouting.

"I am surprised," Paul says. "But I'm disappointed that I am surprised. Why shouldn't this be a popular message? Why was I pessimistic?"

He adds: "Why do we assume that everybody wants the status quo? And evidently they don't."



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Religious Dick

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #43 on: December 22, 2007, 08:38:40 AM »
National Post

Saturday, December 22, 2007
Rooting for Ron Paul

National Post  Published: Saturday, December 22, 2007

Ron Paul makes a pretty odd sort of 21st-century JFK. He's a slight-built, goofy-grinned 71-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist from Texas, a man old enough to have delivered milk as a teenager to Honus Wagner's doorstep. In interviews, the congressman comes off a little like your less cuddly but more interesting grandfather. He believes the U.S. should return to a gold-backed currency, wipe out the Federal Reserve and most government agencies, pull out of NATO, and eliminate federal income taxes. At live events, he projects extraordinary charisma. When he starts talking in his bedside-manner voice about the harm done by the blind, senseless War on Drugs, he can move a listener almost to tears.

Even on the libertarian end of the political spectrum, some would consider him pretty hard-core -- a borderline anarchist who has devoted his life to destroying the U.S. federal government as we know it. But if you're looking for a modern candidate who seems to have the Kennedy-like ability to weld disparate social elements into a game-changing campaign, you'll have a hard time making a stronger choice this year than Ron Paul.

He is a Depression-era country boy who has somehow built what may be the strongest Internet following of any 2008 candidate for the presidency -- at any rate, it is the loudest. Cheques from gun-control opponents who admire his strong Second Amendment stance flow into his coffers alongside equally large cheques from peaceniks impressed by his stance against the Second Gulf War. He's an "isolationist" who has thousands of expatriate and libertarian supporters in Europe. By some accounts, his following amongst active-service soldiers abroad towers over those of other Republicans.

In most official polls of Republican voters, either nationwide or in early primary states, he has yet to crack double digits -- yet he now holds the all-time U.S. political record for fundraising in a single day, raising $6-million on Dec. 16, and he has summoned up an astonishing $18-million in the fourth quarter of the calendar year.

Will all this money and energy amount to anything in the end? Republicans on the ground in New Hampshire, which holds the country's first primaries Jan. 8, are warning the national leadership that it is impossible to guess. Congressman Paul may actually be stronger with independent voters than with Republicans, and those independents make up more than 40% of the electorate in the tiny New England state.

It's the same terrain on which John McCain delivered a surprise 49%-30% hiding of George W. Bush in 2000, and where Pat Buchanan edged out Bob Dole in 1996 with his appeal to the "pitchfork-wielding peasants." In other words, it's a playground for "mavericks," and nobody fits the description better than Dr. Paul.

Looking on the Republican race as Canadian outsiders, we're rooting him on -- if not to win (which he won't), then to at least grab his party's bloated, big-spending Bush-ite establishment by the lapels and slap it around a little.

Notwithstanding Dr. Paul's eccentric-- and, many would argue, dangerous -- views on foreign policy, the GOP does occasionally needs a reminder of its roots in limited government and the Constitution. Ron Paul won't be the next president, but the next president will have to take notice of what he has achieved by means of nothing more than patience, plain speaking and stubborn integrity.

Copyright ? 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=191721
I speak of civil, social man under law, and no other.
-Sir Edmund Burke

Plane

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Re: GOP Can Learn from Ron Paul
« Reply #44 on: December 22, 2007, 12:14:39 PM »
Quote
"... the GOP does occasionally needs a reminder of its roots in limited government and the Constitution. "


Yes!