WTF Paul?
FreedomDemocrats flagged two items the other day about Ron Paul. The first is a mailing from the Campaign for Liberty asking people to rate three issues (very important to not important). One was gun rights, one was stopping RealID, and the other was “Saving Unborn Babies from Abortion”. This raised an eyebrow. Everybody knows Paul is pro-life, but he’s generally steered clear about being too adamant about it, normally noting his personal opposition but leaving it up to states to make policy. Every once in awhile, though, he makes appeals for the pro-life vote, and fair enough. Still, that’s bound to ruffle some feathers amongst his normal coterie of supporters (one can, of course, be pro-life and libertarian, but most aren’t).
The second item is a mailing Paul sent out to supporters in Alaska urging them to vote for Don Young in his primary. Young is running against a small government conservative of the Club for Growth sort, and the primary thing Paul wanted to point out, aside from that they’re friends, was…
Don and I have served together in Congress for many years, and I consider him a friend. Don has been an outspoken voice against environmental extremists over the years and has strongly opposed the types of federal regulatory overreach advocated in the name of environmentalism.
FD notes, not unfairly:
Ron Paul is very quickly burning any and all credibility he has as a figurehead of the small government movement within the Republican Party. He’s backing a pork-barrel and Mike Huckabee-endorsed Republican over a small government conservative, Sean Parnell, backed by the Club for Growth. Almost all of the scenarios discussed here at Freedom Democrats for the resurgence of true small government conservatives depended on an alliance of sorts between the Club for Growth and the Ron Paul Revolution. Now, we instead have growing signs of an alliance between Mike Huckabee’s Christian conservatives followers and the Ron Paul Revolution. This is sham limited government conservatism.
I had a similar moment not with the newsletters, but in New Hampshire when, for some oddball reason, illegal immigration was being pushed as a wedge issue, including using all the familiar Tancredo tropes. It was disappointing because it was so transparently a political ploy, and it was throwing in with elements of the right that frankly weren’t very consistent with his message.
What people don’t quite understand about Ron’s inner circle is the tension between what is clearly their base of support—the young, the tech savvy, the anti-war, the small l libertarian—and what is clearly the agenda of most of Ron’s longtime friends and advisers, which is largely made up of socially conservative libertarians, the elements for whom regular libertarianism is too libertine, and who appear to believe that the only way to legitimacy is by banging that drum and showing Republican voters how anti-immigrant and anti-choice their candidate really is. This used to drive me nuts when I was on the ground for them; their cadre of loyal foot soldiers who believed they were righting for one thing, and a very small but very influential group of ivory tower campaign flaks who kept trying to re-steer things a different way for opaque and grade school understanding of GOP politics reasons. I get the impression that on this, Paul himself is fairly wishy-washy, which often leads to one side getting their way for awhile, then the other, etc. As the campaign is more or less over, the only ones really left are those long-term folks, which means that the social conservative agenda is ascendant once more. I agree with FD—trying to marry the Ron Paul movement to social conservative Christianicity with the idea that that’ll achieve legitimacy is asinine, and undercuts a lot of the promise of the campaign.
It’s sad that they don’t seem to quite understand what it was they achieved, and some even appear to resent it a little.