Ron Paul’s Raucous Army

By Matthew Hinton

AUSTIN – It’s hard to look out of place at a Ron Paul rally. Hundreds of “Paulheads” congregated beneath the tower at the University of Texas last Saturday, bringing every variety of outside-the-box accessories with them: long hair, arm-swallowing tattoos, signs proclaiming “The Answer to 1984 Is 1776.” Other signs called for an investigation into Sept. 11 and a growling parade of motorcycles drowned out the jam band accompanying the rally.

The only person who might have looked out of place was Ron Paul, a slight, twangy, white-haired doctor turned congressman in a neat, yellow dress shirt. Paul spent the first minutes of his speech chronicling the whereabouts of his prodigious offspring (Paul has five children and 18 grandchildren). On the surface, he seemed like the last person to mold a coherent movement out of supporters whose most striking similarity is their aversion to conformity.

Then again, if the mildly off-kilter reputation of Paul’s presidential campaign is what has kept large blocs of voters away, it’s perfectly suitable for its devotees: the geek leading the freaks, all the way to the White House. Or something like that.

“I think there are some people voting for him as a protest vote,” said Sherri Greenberg, a former Texas state representative who tracks politics in the state as a government lecturer at UT. Though Paul is running as a Republican, she said, he was the Libertarian Party candidate for president in 1988 and has all the markings of a third-party insurgent.

“He is a niche candidate,” Greenberg said, “And he’s just not able to get outside of that niche.”

That niche has been good to Paul. He’s been a competitive fundraiser despite a near-total absence of corporate backing, enough to make him the only candidate still in the race without a penny of campaign debt. With no attempt at national organization, his supporters set a new standard for Internet populism. Last week, he told the crowd gathered under the Tower that fellow congressmen often want to know how a West Texas obstetrician who earned the nickname “Dr. No” for opposing almost every facet of the federal government managed to inspire the largest mass political movement in the short history of the ‘net.

“I tell them, ‘Get a platform worth supporting,’” said Paul, elicting a raucous response from his fans.

But as rabid and persistent as his cadre of supporters have been, that platform has gained virtually no support from anywhere else. Asked if the congressman has even a slim hope of carrying his home state Tuesday, Greenberg doesn’t hesitate: “No. None whatsoever.”

When it comes to campaign finances, Paul has never been able to run neck-and-neck with his party’s biggest wigs. Before his success elbowed the toughest competition off the ballot, however, neither was the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, whose money troubles had rendered his campaign a sinking ship last summer. Rudy Giuliani had raised nearly $64 million by the time he bowed out in January, according to monthly campaign finance reports tracked on the watchdog site OpenSecrets.com, and Mitt Romney’s coffers filtered more than $105 million (a third of which came from his personal fortune) before the former Massachusetts governor stepped down following a McCain landslide on Super Tuesday. Through the end of January, the latest official numbers showed the McCain campaign just rounding the halfway point of Romney’s previous fundraising efforts.

While Paul’s fundraising, though impressive, didn’t rank among the heavy hitters, he did soundly beat his Web-based competition. The grassroots networks backing the congressman formed meet-up groups for volunteers, created a strong presence on YouTube and Facebook, flooded blogs and message boards, overwhelmed online polls on major media sites and mobilized a broad base of financial support at an exponentially stronger rate than his opponents. Paul was second in fundraising only to Romney in the fourth quarter of 2007, drumming up $20 million largely on the strength of online “money bombs,” one-day floods that dumped millions of dollars into the campaign in early November and again in December. Those surges helped Paul nearly double McCain’s total between October and December, and triple Mike Huckabee’s intake.

That number is not the result of a couple wealthy backers, either: a full 61 percent of Paul’s campaign money has come from donations of $200 or less, a substantially greater percentage than any other major candidate. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have each attracted thousands of donations of $4,600, the maximum legal contribution; John McCain has had over a thousand big money donors. Paul has had 16.

As it turns out, though, votes have not followed donors in nearly the same proportion. Even after the end-of-year surge, Paul hasn’t fared any better than third place in a single primary; in 11 Republican primaries on Super Tuesday, he finished fourth or fifth in 10 of the contests. He hasn’t matched his initial share of eight percent in New Hampshire – known as one of the most libertarian-friendly states in the union – in any subsequent vote.

The caucus states have been much kinder to Paul, usually bumping his share of votes into the double digits. His greatest support has come from the Northwest: he topped 20 percent in Washington and North Dakota, finishing third in both caucuses, and garnered 25 percent in Montana, good for one of two second-place finishes (another Western caucus state, Nevada, was the other, though Paul earned just 14 percent there, miles behind runaway winner Romney). Those showings have earned Paul a paltry 21 delegates to date, just 1,011 behind McCain and 226 behind the other polarizing Republican upstart, Huckabee.

“Either they reject his message and/or they think he has no chance of winning, and probably both,” Greenberg said. “For whatever reason, he has not proven to be the factor some people thought he might be.”

In many ways, his failure to catch on among Republicans was inevitable. Although the party’s base still tacitly supports lower taxes and less government, and the campaign circulates literature with a picture of Paul and conservative icon Ronald Reagan from 1976, Paul’s libertarian fundaments lead him in some decidedly un-Republican directions. He wants to abolish most of the federal government, including the Department of Education, the Federal Reserve and the IRS, and withdraw from every international organization, up to and including the United Nations. The kicker: as commander-in-chief, Paul would advocate an end to all American military involvement overseas – not just in Iraq, but everywhere. He voted against invading Iraq and against the Patriot Act. Pro-life, pro-guns and anti-immigration can’t offset what most of the country, left and right, views as radical, untenable military isolationism.

Paul’s supporters see a disconnect between their movement and the general population, but it’s not ideological. It’s informational. In fact, “Disconnect isn’t the word” where the media is concerned, according to Mitchell Stein, a mechanical engineer in Austin who started RonPaulVoteCount.com to counter any discrepancies between exit polls and official vote counts.

“The media is always trying to smear him. There’s always something negative. They downplay his significance, they raise the idea he has no chance to win,” said Jeff Johnston, a UT student who volunteered to sign up voters at Saturday’s rally. “And most people depend on the mainstream media to make their decisions.”

Given the perceived bias, Johnston considers Paul’s campaign a success, or at least more successful than he expected. He had always been apathetic before, he said, but Paul’s hard lines on monetary policy and strict adherence to original intent in interpreting the Constitution sparked his awareness of politics – no other politician had ever appealed to his interests before. If the so-called “Freedom Movement” can touch him, Johnston figures, maybe there are millions more waiting to be turned on by whatever attention or success “Dr. No” can muster.

“I don’t think he’s failed,” Johnston said. “He’s still attracted an impressive following. The genie is out of the bottle.”