An excerpt from Brian Doherty’s new book Ron Paul’s Revolution in the National Post:
Paul is a remarkably successful politician made of contradictions. Though a longtime Republican congressman, he’s built his reputation on such wildly liberal stances as ending the drug war, halting wars in the Middle East and scuttling the Patriot Act. Despite this, in 2010 and 2011 he’s won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the seedbed of young right-wing activists.
He’s got traditional conservative bona fides, too. He’s for ending the income tax and killing the Internal Revenue Service, and for stopping illegal immigration; he also thinks abortion should be illegal. Despite this, right-wing politicians and thought leaders from Giuliani to Bill O’Reilly to the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol deride and despise him.
Paul’s appeal is a curious mixture of populist and intellectual. He attacks the elite masters of money, banking and high finance at the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. But his philosophy on politics and economics was forged through decades of self-driven study of abstruse libertarian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and the Nobel Prize–winning F. A. Hayek.
He’s a staggeringly successful politician by some measures — the only congressman to win a seat as a nonincumbent three separate times. He continues to be re-elected to the House election after election, almost always by a higher margin than the time before. He does this while violating most traditional rules of politics. He doesn’t strive to bring home the bacon. His 14th District in Texas is highly agricultural, rife with rice and cattle farmers, but he always votes against federal agriculture subsidies. In a district with 675 miles of coastline, struck violently in 2008 by Hurricane Ike, he votes against flood aid and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — even calling for the latter’s abolition on national TV. He vows to never vote for any bill for which he doesn’t see clear constitutional justification. Yet by some people’s standards of a “successful legislator” he’s a bust — nearly every bill he introduces never even makes it out of committee.
