Perhaps the strongest argument to made against Ron Paul is his supporters. They seemingly, and contradictorily, want to make him into a demagogue. I want to be clear that what I want to elect him for is for what he will NOT do, not what he WILL do. It is commonly assumed that because the government is a certain size–usually expressed as a percentage of the GDP, as if there were any correlation–that it must perforce remain about that size moving forward.
What Ron Paul is proposing is not so much abolishing Federal agencies like the TSA, so much as NOT continuing them. He is proposing NOT continuing large scale deficit spending, which everyone else seems to assume is inevitable. He is proposing NOT continuing on-going large scale military conflicts around the world.
All any true conservative wants is to be left alone to pursue their own interests and passions as free from governmental interference as is consistent with public order. This means, logically, that our ideal President is someone like Calvin Coolidge, who slept 12 hours a day, if memory serves, since he didn’t view the job of the President as DOING things, but rather preventing others–Congress–from doing things that were counterproductive. Silent Cal got tricked by the Fed, which had its own agenda, and in large measure even then made its own decisions, which being slow and insidious were hard to measure in their effects. But that is what we want.
We want a President who will discontinue a whole lot of stuff, then go sit on a reclining chair in Boca Raton or wherever, and watch sports or write books, or play with his grandkids.
What Ron Paul’s fans seemingly want is a Savior, of the sort they wanted in Obama. Plainly, Paul is the only INTERESTING candidate in the race, but everyone around him needs to up their game.
Here is a case in point: http://www.infowars.com/ron-paul-vs-the-rest/
Watch the videos. They made me cringe. In the first one, you had people chanting slogans, differing only in the words from “Hey ho, X has to go”. In the second, he screwed up the narration several times–which is something that easily could have been fixed before releasing the video–and had goofy music on there.
This is a race for the President of the United States, the most powerful elective office on the planet. This is not some college game. Ron Paul is not some colorful new British band that only the cool kids know about.
He is the only one proposing a serious package to halt and reverse the tremendous decline in our freedoms and economic well being that have beset us ever since Herbert Hoover. To the extent he surrounds himself with silly people, it hurts him. I am not proposing he reject his biggest fans, but rather that his biggest fans raise their game and overall sobriety to the levels required for him actually win the nomination, which is plainly a long shot.