Republicans need to get behind Ron Paul now

August 10, 2007 -- If Rudy Giuliani thinks he’s the only Republican candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton, as was reported in the London Telegraph recently, then he must not be aware of what New York City firefighters are saying about him, or what his own ex-aides are saying about him, or even what his own daughter is saying about him.  It’s exactly this obliviousness towards reality that has characterized much of the Bush presidency, and with Giuliani we can expect more of the same.  This is especially alarming in light of the fact that Giuliani has appointed one of the leading lights within the neoconservative movement, Norman ‘bomb Iran’ Podhoretz, to be his foreign policy advisor, despite the fact that the neoconservative cause was overwhelmingly rejected in the elections last fall.  The only reason Giuliani has managed to maintain his frontrunner’s position in the campaign is 1) because he’s got more money than everyone else, and 2) because a large portion of the country still thinks of him as “America’s mayor,” “the hero of 9/11,” etc., when in actual fact he’s an arrogant, incompetent idiot, whose election to the U.S. presidency would be a disaster of untold proportions for the country.   

Moreover, if Giuliani wins the nomination, his Democratic opponent, whoever it happens to be, will murder him.  He or she will have a vast array of contentious issues to choose from, whether it’s failing to provide radios to New York City firefighters, or sending their dead bodies off to the landfill, or his soap-operish romantic life, not to mention his adamant support for the Iraq war and Bush’s disastrous policies in general.  Clinton, I’m sure, is praying for Giuliani to win the nomination: she knows that if he does so, she’ll have all sorts of powerful political groups on her side, from the firefighters to the 9/11 families.  Nothing could be more disastrous for the future of the Republican Party than a Giuliani nomination. 

Which is why Republicans, if they care about their party, need to get behind Ron Paul.  If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, as looks increasingly likely, she will have a much more difficult time with Paul, who, unlike Clinton, opposed the Iraq war from the start, and unlike Giuliani, has the ideological kudos to appeal to Christian conservatives.  The only thing that’s keeping Ron Paul from breaking into the mainstream is the contention that he’s not mainstream, a barrier that’s not helped by the continual insistence in the corporate media that he cannot win, as George Stephanopoulos said point blank to his face during an interview on ABC last month and journalist Christopher Caldwell wrote at the end of an otherwise admirable profile of Paul in the New York Times recently.

The oddest thing about calling Ron Paul eccentric is that he’s running on a constitutional platform, which leads one to wonder whether behind these rather fatalistic comments about his chances of winning the election lurks a deeper fatalism about the relevance of the U.S. Constitution.  At any rate, from a conservative standpoint, Paul’s positions aren’t eccentric in the slightest: as he’s repeatedly pointed out, they are completely in line with traditional Republican values over the last 100 years, limited government, fiscal conservatism, a foreign policy of non-intervention, the rule of law, respect for the Constitution, etc.  What’s a deviation from that tradition is Giuliani’s brand of republicanism, which is indecipherable from the neoconservative brand of conservatism – expansion of the military industrial complex, nation-building, foreign wars of conquest – and which, when you get right down to it, isn’t really conservatism at all, since it encourages the growth of the federal government at the expense of individual rights. 

As Paul’s campaign well knows, this Saturday’s straw poll in Ames, Iowa, will be a litmus test of his chances of winning the nomination, which is why it’s important for Paul’s supporters in Iowa to get out the vote.  At the very least, a Paul nomination would yield an incredibly interesting presidential race, since at heart it would be a fundamental debate about what the United States actually is, whether it’s a Republic or some other form of government.  A Giuliani nomination on the other hand will yield only soulless sound bites and talking points, with no real disruption to the status quo of rampant militarism and irresponsible spending.