Time Magazine: The Revenge of the Nerd

Joel Stein from Time.com writes about Ron Paul's campaign (pilfered from www.ronpaulforums.com):

It sometimes seems as if someone is playing a cruel practical joke on Ron Paul. He goes to a college and delivers the same speech he's given for the past 30 years of his political career, the one espousing the Austrian school of economics. Only now the audience is packed with hundreds of kids in RON PAUL REVOLUTION T shirts who go nuts — giving standing ovations when he drones on about getting rid of the Federal Reserve and returning to the gold standard. After a speech at Iowa State last month, when nearly half the crowd had to stand because there were only 400 seats, a hipster-looking student worked his way through the half-hour-long line to shake Paul's hand. This was surely it — the moment when the straight faces would break and Paul would be wedgied up the flagpole. "When you see Bernanke," the kid said, "will you tell him to stop cutting rates when gold hits 1,000?"

The piece goes on with a quote by the ubiquitous pollster Frank Luntz:

"His supporters are the equivalent of crabgrass," says GOP consultant Frank Luntz. "It's not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff. They just like him because he's the most anti-Establishment of all the candidates, the most likely to look at the camera during the debates and say, 'Hey, Washington, f____ you.'"

Quite the potty mouth Frank has, I wonder where he got that from? Oh yeah:




F___ you, Frank!

Luntz is correct of course, the anti-Washington sentiment is what's driving Ron Paul's campaign. Why shouldn't people be angry? Pick any issue, Iraq, the border, government spending, the erosion of our civil liberties and I'll show you something that the government has screwed up. The Democrats took back Congress in '06 IMO, specifically to stop funding the war in Iraq and what happened? Nothing. Even at a recent Dem debate, none of the "top tier" could make a commitment to bringing the troops home within the time frame of their first term in office. Amnesty keeps getting brought up again and again for illegals and it's only through vocal opposition by bloggers and other concerned citizens that keeps killing it.

The real test comes in less than 3 months in New Hampshire.