Ron Paul’s Rise Hurts the GOP and Helps Obama
The greater Ron Paul’s success, the better chance the Democrats have of using his crackpot notions to characterize all of the GOP.
Few of Ron Paul’s enthusiastic supporters actually expect their curmudgeonly, 77-year-old champion to win election as president of the United States, but they nonetheless plan to give him their votes in Republican primaries in order “to send a message” to the GOP and the nation at large.
But what, exactly, is the message that impassioned Paulestinians mean to convey if, as expected, the controversial congressman places first or second in the upcoming Iowa caucuses and goes on to show surprising strength in subsequent contests?
Any honest assessment of Ron Paul’s unconventional campaign suggests that whatever successes it manages to achieve can send only two signals, both of them disastrous to Republican prospects and the conservative cause.
First, and most obviously, increased attention to the perplexing Paul phenomenon only serves to strengthen the core argument for Barack Obama’s reelection: that today’s Republicans have become a wild and crazy bunch, harboring oddball, irresponsible notions that place them far outside the American mainstream and make them untrustworthy when it comes to the serious business of governance.
Leave aside the recent publicity for Dr. Demento’s 20-year-old newsletters, studded with outrageous racist and anti-Semitic comments—which the candidate now claims he never read, but which appeared over his signature, and for which he received generous payment from eager subscribers, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars at the very least.
Much more recently, in the midst of this latest of his three campaigns for the presidency, he has endorsed the outrageous doctrine of “nullification”—suggesting that states have the right to reject federal laws or regulations they dislike, and disregarding well-established constitutional law that was settled by Andrew Jackson in the 1830s and Abraham Lincoln (along with 300,000 dead Union soldiers) during the Civil War.
Every additional vote cast for the Mad Doctor in the primaries, every additional delegate he secures, will only help Team Obama.
Association with 9/11 conspiracy theorists has destroyed the credibility of numerous figures in public life–even forcing the resignation of Van Jones, perhaps the most loathsome left-wing loony in the Obama administration. But Ron Paul has flirted with such paranoid delusions for years, appearing regularly on the freakazoid radio show of arch-conspiracist Alex Jones (who accuses George Bush and the New World Order of planning the extinction of the human race) and telling one of his senior congressional aides (Eric Dondero) shortly after Sept. 11 that “the attacks were coordinated with the CIA, and that the Bush administration might have known about the attacks ahead of time.”
When leading GOP strategists acknowledge that the Republicans can only build long-term success for their party by reaching out more successfully to blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, Dr. Paul reemphasized just a few weeks ago his opposition to the celebrated Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which most Republicans in Congress enthusiastically supported at the time).
In his most recent book, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (published in 2011), Paul singles out Zionism as one of those “essential issues”—and suggests that the national liberation movement of the Jewish people somehow affects “our freedom” negatively. He also associates himself with the hateful, laughably ahistorical Palestinian doctrine of “Temple Denial”—refusing, apparently, to accept Biblical accounts of the two Jewish temples that flourished in Jerusalem over a period of nearly 900 years beginning with King Solomon. In his book, Dr. Paul goes out of his way to note “that Jerusalem (Palestine), through many centuries, was under Jewish rule for only about 170 years … Dozens of other regimes occupied the land for much longer periods of time. For instance, Muslims ruled Jerusalem for 1,191 years.”
Concerning more recent history, Paul’s former congressional aide and long-time campaign worker Eric Dondero recently wrote a piece for LibertarianRepublican.net in which he attempted to defend his former boss against charges of anti-Semitism and racism relating to his newsletters. But he frankly allowed that “Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist….I can tell you straight out, I had countless arguments/discussions with him over his personal views. For example, he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII…When pressed, he often brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks beforehand, or that WWII was just ‘blowback’ for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such.”
These eccentric, detestable views may play little role in the Republican primary campaign but David Axelrod, James Carville, and other Democratic operatives will make them a major focus of their ferocious efforts to depict the GOP as a haven for whack-jobs, religious kooks, cranks, losers, greedy-one-per-centers, and anti-American extremists. Every additional vote cast for the Mad Doctor in the primaries, every additional delegate he secures, will only help Team Obama in using his prominence in the nomination fight to discredit the entire Republican Party
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