Can Ron Paul Win?

Andrew Sullivan makes a good case for Ron Paul with his endorsement here. Especially the last part:

I feel the same way about him on the right in 2012 as I did about Obama in 2008. Both were regarded as having zero chance of being elected. And around now, people decided: Why not? And a movement was born. He is the "Change You Can Believe In" on the right. If you are an Independent and can vote in a GOP primary, vote Paul. If you are a Republican concerned about the degeneracy of the GOP, vote Paul. If you are a citizen who wants more decency and honesty in our politics, vote Paul. If you want someone in the White House who has spent decades in Washington and never been corrupted, vote Paul. 

Oh, and fuck you, Roger Ailes.

And while I share some of the same misgivings about Paul that Sullivan has, stated here:

Let me immediately say I do not support many of his nuttier policy proposals. I am not a doctrinaire libertarian. Paul's campaign for greater oversight of the Fed is great, but abolition of it is utopian and dangerous. A veto of anything but an immediately balanced budget would tip the US and the world into a serious downturn (a process to get there in one or two terms makes much more sense). Cutting taxes as he wants to is also fiscally irresponsible without spending cuts first. He adds deductions to the tax code rather than abolish them. His energy policy would intensify our reliance on carbon, not decrease it. He has no policy for the uninsured. There are times when he is rightly described as a crank. He has had associations in the past that are creepy when not downright ugly.

Despite this, I am coming around to the idea of voting for him in the Georgia primaries. Although I consider myself politically left-of-center, I am a registered independent in the state of Georgia. I did this because Georgia's closed primary process bans members of the opposite party from participating and because frankly the Democratic Party has done enough to earn my membership. I've studied Paul closely since the 2008 campaign due to his uniqueness within the Republican Party. He's sort of a hard guy to wrap your arms around. He's one of the few Republicans today honest about the problems facing this country. When it comes to such issues as foreign policy, the military-industrial complex, the drug war, marriage equality, and the Patriot Act; I am in fully agreement with him. I find his emphasis on decentralizing power away from the federal government and back towards state and local governments as something that could help this country bypass the gridlock that plague Washington these days. Yet when I look at some of his proposals for fixing said problems I start to cringe. He's proposed eliminating the Federal Reserve, all federal student aid, the Department of Energy, Commerce, Interior, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and the TSA. These moves would most certainly do more harm than good. His stance on immigration would leave the door open for more Arizona-type laws to get passed. The racist and bigoted newletters that came out of his office during the early 90s deserve further explanation as well.


Yet, despite all of his weirder policy proposals, you can't say that Paul lied or pandered to the electorate. He's trying to get elected by trying to have an honest conversation with Americans, which is more than we can say for the current front runners: Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Paul is the only GOP candidate to realize that policing the world isn't America's job, nor a job that it can afford. When asked during last week's debate whether he would attack Iran should they obtain nuclear weapons, Paul steadfastly refused, the only candidate to do so. I may not agree with with all of Ron Paul's beliefs but I can at least say that I half-agree with him, which is more than I can say about the rest of the field (save Gary Johnson and Jon Huntsman). Dr. Paul may not be right about the prescriptions but he's right about the diagnoses. And an honest debate between Barack Obama and Ron Paul about the serious issues facing America might be what this country needs right now. 


Part of me wants him to win the GOP nomination for this reason, the other part of me wants him to win for purely selfish, anarchist reasons: so I can watch the GOP establishment (AKA Fox News) freak out at the prospect. Before Ron Paul was nothing more than a political curiosity. But now, with him holding the lead in the polls in Iowa, and placed 2nd in New Hampshire, he now has to be taken seriously. His fund raising has been excellent, he's got an great ground operation, and his well-made attack ads have been pummeling Gingrich and Romney. He's using essentially the same strategy that propelled Barack Obama to the Presidency in 2008. I am under no illusion that Ron Paul will win the nomination, we still have a long way to go. But we've seen what a win in Iowa can do (Obama in 2008), if he rode momentum from that  victory and pulled off the upset in libertarian-leaning New Hampshire, all bets are off.