Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is surprising the mainstream.
Texas Congressman Ron Paul has garnered considerable public interest since last spring, despite being virtually ignored by big media, leading to a sobriquet of “the internet candidate.” Having recently set fund-raising records, and now surpassing candidates with vastly greater mainstream media visibility in mainstream media’s own polls, the candidate is becoming impossible to ignore.
Paul’s outlook is highly distinguished from that of regulars in either his own Republican or the Democratic party. Paul ran as a Libertarian in 1988. He favors reversal of the Supreme Court Roe versus Wade decision which eviscerated individual states’ legislative powers regarding abortion. He advocates abandoning the income tax, to be replaced by even-handed tariffs, on imports.
President Paul would seek to overhaul American foreign policy, preferring consistent trade policies world-wide and domestically-controlled diplomacy, over partisan alliances or membership in internationally-controlled agencies. He would use military power only in extremis. Hence he presently advocates timely military withdrawal from Iraq.
Paul is a medical doctor who served as an Air Force flight surgeon and who practiced privately for many years specializing in obstetrics and gynecology. He opposes bureaucratic interference in patient-doctor decision-making, is against socialized medicine, and would reform malpractice and insurance codes to the end of restoring affordable care of high quality. He advocates strongly for personal property rights, and for personal dignity and self-determination, would eliminate whole agencies of federal regulation, and is specifically opposed to a national smoking ban.
Ron Paul’s growing strength reveals growing dissatisfaction with politics as usual in the censorious era of “political correctness” ideology. As such he has also been called the “tea party” candidate, recalling the event in Boston, which heralded American colonists’ ultimate break with the tyranny of the British crown. Conventional wisdom that Ron Paul’s fundamental divergence from the dual-party mainstream made him a marginal and inconsequential candidate has bowed before his obvious popularity.
If Congressman Paul’s electability still remains questionable his emergence as a serious factor removes all doubt about widespread public disgust with the social and political mainstream. No political party and no candidate loom so large as does the popular will for true freedom and justice. A resurgence of popular will against tyranny is showing itself in many ways, not just in the USA, but around the globe. Whenever cultural corruption comes to rule, the campaign against it inevitably begins anew.
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