Not to get too into the weeds, but it sounds like you would fall onto the side of the spectrum where Ron Paul is also seen as an "apologist" of sorts. I know several libertarians who also fall into this camp, and would view Ron Paul as "better-than-Rand-but-no-Rothbard" type.
For what it's worth I respect the libertarian point of view and find it fascinating, despite disagreeing with some of the basic premises (but that's where the fun debates are).
First, he's not as savvy at manipulating the media with soundbytes as people like John McCain and Newt Gingrich. He always has a provocative answer to questions, though, so he's a regular on some news shows.
Second, his supporters are extemely loyal, but he's not that influential in his own party. In Republican presidential primaries, he rarely rose above 10% of the vote. His supporters lean libertarian and haven't traditionally been able to elect their candidates like the social conservatives and business conservatives have. He's probably not in the top 20 most influential people in his own party. Just off the top of my head, he's behind Limbaugh, Hannity, McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, O'Reilly, Perry, Cruz, Rubio, Gingrich, Santorum, Jindal, Rand Paul (his son), and Cornyn. He's probably also less influential than folks most people have never heard of like John Thune, Jim Lankford, Roy Blunt, Jan Brewer, Reince Preibus, Rick Scott, Sam Brownback, and John Kasich.
Third, his newsletters from the 80's and 90's are pretty racist and nasty. (The newsletters called Martin Luther King Jr. a pedophile among other things.) He has said lately that he didn't write or review those newsletters and has disavowed them.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/98883/ron-paul-i...
Edit: I meant Roy Blunt the U.S. Senator, not Roy Blount the humorist.
I'm just asking because when I was in high school I shook Roy Blunt's hand at some dumb "geography bee" or whatever. b^)
Do I think MLK was? No. Do I think there are secrets in his files that would be embarrassing to him and his kin? Oh sure, there are no saints, and everyone has a couple of skeletons. The assertion in this thread what that he was a pervert - that does not inherently equal pedophile it likely means pervert by the standard of the time - which by todays standards would be merely kinky.
[Ron Paul's] newsletters called Martin Luther King Jr. a pedophile among other things.
There is generally a feeling that Congress should be addressing issues that the people are concerned about. How, do you determine what concerns the people? You look through the insane prism of the media.
PS: Full disclosure, I supported Ron Paul in both his runs for president.
He doesn't provide the offensive soundbytes that the media wants; his points tend to provoke actual thought, which is the like poison to the contemporary American voter.
His fanbase is among some of the strangest.I kept on hearing variants of "I voted for Obama in 2008 but would love to vote Ron Paul 2012".
That's his big problem. For example, on the problem of health care affordability, he had a very interesting suggestion. Change the income tax deduction for medical expenses to an income tax credit. This was a shockingly progressive/left-wing suggestion. It is essentially proposing that, at least for people with income tax, that the government pays for your health care up to the amount of your income tax. Most people would still need to buy insurance, but they could get by with a high deductible policy to cover catastrophic situations. For most of their health care, the tax credit would be enough.
And in the same speech to Congress where he tossed out that idea, he blamed the high costs of health care on our focus on science-based medicine. We need, according to Paul, to make it easier for homeopaths and other quacks to practice, so the competition can drive the cost down.
From there, Supreme Court precedent told the states they couldn't keep blacks from voting, couldn't segregate them, couldn't ban interracial marriage, etc. Every time the states tried to oppress this or that group, they put their sovereignty on the line and the Supreme Court took some of it away. Consider when the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, took a stand against federal court ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama. President LBJ sent federal troops down to Alabama to enforce integration. From a state autonomy standpoint, it was a huge blow, as the federal government asserted its supremacy. The governor of Alabama was forced to step aside on the property of a state university as National Guardsmen escorted black students inside against his will and that of Alabama voters: http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/race/061263race.... This continued through the 1960's and 1970's. The state courts were put in their place when the federal courts started aggressively supervising their procedures, to deal with their tendency to fail to give fair trials to black defendants.
Federalism is dead because the states pissed away all of their political capital trying to oppress people.
Any thoughts on how effective Kansas' proposed "allowed discrimination of gays" for private business owners will hold up, if enacted? My thought is that, despite there being a ton of bad precedent regarding the Commerce Clause, private business owners should not be required to obey the 10th amendment, just as Facebook isn't obligated to respect my First amendment right, though I find it curious that they put the 10th up against the 1st, such that only those of a "sincerely held faith" may choose to discriminate, as I think it should be allowed for all private business owners.
However... wouldn't it be nice if the Supreme Court ruled that:
1. All of the Constitutional rights must be protected by states & localities as well.
2. The Commerce Clause is legitimate.
And left the rest to the states? No significant Federal control of drug laws, drinking age, blah blah blah...
I would be so happy.
For instance, according to the Supreme Court, the states are bound by the part of the First Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise of religion.
Paul thinks that establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise of religion should be a state issue. He tried two or three times to introduce federal legislation that would have stripped the federal courts (including the Supreme Court) from hearing cases in this area, which would de facto make that part of the First Amendment no longer apply to state and local government.
He has a similar belief in regard to the privacy rights that the Supreme Court has found implicit in the Constitution. His bills that tried to gut the First also strip federal jurisdiction over any case involving a right of privacy.
If his bill had passed, it would have actually made it legal for states to establish or restrict religions, and it would have brought back into force sodomy laws, bans on birth control, and other such laws that were found Unconstitutional due to violating privacy rights.
Most states, I believe, have prohibitions against establishment of religions, or restrictions on the free exercise of religion, so the damage would be limited in that regard. The first state everyone thinks of is Utah, thinking it would establish Mormanism as the state religion, but Utah is one of the states whose Constitution has a clause similar to the First Amendment. Texas could be a problem. It has a provision in its Constitution that holders of political office must acknowledge the existence of a God, and so in theory an atheist would not be able to legally hold office in Texas if Paul had his way.
Edit: here was one of his bills on this: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.958.IH:
Note that HN's URL recognition misses the last character, so you'll need to add it manual, or copy/paste, rather than just clicking.
The counterpoint is typically along the lines of "well since he is in the federal politics game, what he thinks about how states can treat people is irrelevant".
That's not the badge of honor some might think.
He had very different ideas about the division between federal and state power than the mainstream. Americans are more or less over the idea of federalism, as demonstrated by the popularity of Social Security, Medicare, highways, etc. On both sides, they mostly just want the federal government to tell states what to do. So when Ron Paul comes along opposing things like the Department of Education, he gets viewed as wildly out of the mainstream.
He is only really liked by the libertarian base. Everyone else finds his ideas range from simply too impractical through to the downright crazy.
(this is coming for someone who has voted for him)
I doubt it's as small as you think. He won Iowa (although that wasn't made clear until after the elections). He did well in several of the caucuses.
Watching Ron run for president opened my eyes to the vote corruption that takes place in our country. Especially in the caucasus.
One example I recall is how Ron was clearly going to win a caucus and so the majority of the other republicans decided to group together so that votes could vote for a coalition instead of letting Ron win. That was strange. (This was in 2008, I forget the state).
Then, in Nevada, where Paul won the majority of the delegates, Romney supporters formed their own state party, called “Team Nevada”. The RNC then bypassed the official state party in order to organize for Romney and send all funds to Team Nevada.
In Maine, they cancelled the vote due to a snowstorm, when only 84% of the votes were counted and Romney was leading by 200 votes. Of course, they never counted Washington county, which was Paul's strongest in 2008.
The point is, the corruption is never ending. For that reason, you really have no idea how many people support Ron Paul (and the ideas of the constitution) if you are guessing from votes and media reports.
In fact, perhaps spending a lot of time around Paul, Romney conceeds several times that Ron Paul is actually popular. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx1JWMr5cVk
Honest/serious question.