First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Judging by the sounds of the laughter of the other Republican candidates directed at their rival, Ron Paul has now reached the second of Mohandas K. Ghandi’s four stages. It is still unlikely that he will win the nomination of a party which has proven it doesn’t deserve him, but it is far less unlikely than it was back when Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain were still considered “electable” by most political observers. The candidates, never a particularly bright lot, may be laughing, but as the neocons and party leaders turn to Fred Thompson in desperation, more intelligent observers are not.
“Why is there so much cheering for Ron Paul?”
– Andy McCarthy, National Review, Sept. 5, 2007
The reason there is so much cheering for Ron Paul is that he is the only Republican who has staked out popular positions on the two most significant issues of the 2008 election cycle. He is anti-occupation and pro-border control. No amount of Bush administration spin is going to change the fact that “the surge” is strategically irrelevant, that the neocon’s Democratic World Revolution is a total failure and that Mexico is being allowed to invade the United States. In short, Ron Paul is the only Republican whose positions on the two primary issues are different than Hillary Clinton’s stance on them, and, more importantly, are more credible and more popular than Hillary Clinton’s. He is the only Republican whose nomination can realistically be considered a potential impediment to what otherwise looks like a Democratic landslide. The Gay Old Party’s leadership, which is far more interested in propositioning interns and policemen than the Constitution, hates Ron Paul and quite rightly feels threatened by him. But their incessant spreading of fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding his candidacy is no more believable than a Microsoft treatise on Linux. In fact, I surmise that most of the top Republicans would prefer a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton presidency to a Paul one. This may be why they have drafted the sluggish, uncharismatic Thompson; Giuliani, Romney and McCain are so obviously unelectable that none of them can even manage to put themselves in a position to get run over by Hillary in November.
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