Ron Paul: The Little Engine That Could
While the national print media dismisses him and television ignores him, Ron Paul continues to chug on down the track seemingly oblivious to what everyone else expects him to do. Returns now in from the Pennsylvania Republican Primary show that Ron Paul, virtually unknown except by word of mouth, actually won 15.9 percent of the vote. In Juanita County, Paul took about a third of the votes, stunning when you consider that he is out of the race and has admitted it.
The questions are why? How?
Isn’t it all over? Isn’t John McCain the Republican nominee? And not just in theory too. He has actually locked up the delegate count. In Pennsylvania there were no votes for Republican stars, Mitt Romney or Rudolph Giuliani. Paul even beat out the Evangelical Christian choice, Mike Huckabee, who is formally out of the race now. And Ron Paul did all of this without big name endorsements, without money for television ads, without mailers, without any attention from national or local media. What’s going on here?
The answer is that the Ron Paul philosophy of government is so right, so logical, invokes so much common sense that most people who hear it support it even if he and his ideas don’t have a chance. The people who are voting for Ron Paul are voting with their heads not their hopes. It is much more than a protest vote, it is a vote of contempt for the political bankruptcy and hypocrisy in both parties.
Look at the blogs. This just amazes me. These people know the issues better than the journalists covering the campaign. While the journalist are fixated on the presidential horse race the Ron Paul masses are chewing on why the government does what it does and what it should be doing instead and how to fix it all. And most important of all, the Paulists and their Blogs keep challenging the “why.” They are not just debating how to solve the social security problem, they are debating what its purpose should or should not be in the first place. They are not just discussing the national debt and settling the details of the budget, they are discussing what the role of government should be and how the corruption of that role will always lead back to the same financial challenges.
This is truly an intellectual revolution. Small, under the radar screen, but resolute. They keep coming and they keep winning converts in spite of the fact that it is all over. They don’t seem to care what the pontificating celebrities on television have to say. In Pennsylvania they turned out by the tens of thousands. Apparently they were just scoping out the polling booths and voting for Ron Paul as a rehearsal for that moment four years from now when they expect to be pulling the lever for a winner. Or perhaps they don’t even care about that either. They may just be voting because the ideas make sense. And that in itself is its own reward.
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