RUNNING WITH RON PAUL  print   email
By JOSH JOHNSON   
Wednesday, 31 October 2007

We talk to the black-sheep Republican to find the man behind the stickers.

 

ImageEven a casual observer of the 2008 presidential race has likely seen the name Ron Paul. The diminutive Texas Republican congressman’s name and likeness are widely distributed by legions of rabid supporters who put stickers on everything from their cars and signs along hiking paths to massive billboards atop their cars. Though the obstetrician is 72 years old, he also has more Internet presence on youthful websites like YouTube than any other candidate and has had held the esteemed top ranking as a search term in the blogosphere.

Although the viral marketing has given his campaign name recognition, arguably the most common question about him still is, “Who is Ron Paul?” And even a shallow scratch on the surface of the answer reveals surprises. For one, Paul is a Republican who thinks the United States should pull out of Iraq immediately. He despises the Patriot Act and the War on Drugs.

But before you see these as liberal views, consider that he also wants to immediately abandon the United Nations. He is pro-life. Radical views like this abound with Paul, and his free and unwavering expression of them has led to winning polls following debates and given him a reputation of honesty and integrity.

Paul is certainly a long-shot candidate for the presidency, but his campaign’s momentum has surprised everyone, including himself. Most of his eight-million-plus dollars has come from individuals’ online donations, and he’s running to win.

 

On Sunday, October 28, Paul was in Cheyenne, Wyoming for a rally and fundraiser, and the Chronicle, along with a handful of other reporters, spoke with Paul, hoping to get a glimpse of the man behind the stickers.
 

How did you attract such a young base of supporters, and what do you expect they’ll do on Election Day?
Ron Paul: What we’re expecting is that they all get registered, and they’ll all vote. Then we’re going to change the rules: We’re gonna have voting only on the Internet, and we’re gonna win.

No, it’s pretty amazing. We always had the intention that the Internet would be a good way to spread our message and maybe raise some money, but it didn’t come about the way we thought it might. It was all spontaneous. It was that our message came out, and people read about it almost faster than we could put it out. The people who read it loved it, and they started organizing: the Meetup groups, Facebook. It struck a chord with so many young people. They more or less created the campaign.

I guess the other question is, Why? Well, only the young people can tell me why. They’ve liked the message. They like the idea of personal liberties. They like the foreign policy of not inheriting a war that never seems to end. I think young people are more aware of what’s happening financially than a lot of people give them credit for. Some are paying Social Security, and they know they’re not going to get that [back]. The government’s not doing a very good job of doing anything, whether it’s the war or taking care of people after hurricanes.

Though you’ve raised enough money to make yourself competitive with perennial candidates like John McCain, your polling numbers place you at the bottom of the pack. Your supporters contest that you are more popular than polls can accurately describe, so why this discrepancy?
RP: That’s a good question. Maybe the people who are really energized by the campaign aren’t at home listening to land-based telephones, and that’s how all polling is done.

Essentially, all polling is done on Republican primary voters of two years ago, which was a lousy year for Republicans. Not many people turned out. And the people who are supporting our campaign are basically those who are just joining in the process, or they dropped out for the last five or six or seven years, and they’re just now coming back. They’re not on the rolls. None of them are being called.

In 1988, you ran for president as a Libertarian. You’ve since stated that you will never again run as a third-party candidate. Do you think there’s a problem in the system that prevents third-party candidates from being viable?
RP: Huge problem. And it’s disgusting when we’re so arrogant that we think we can go around the world and justify war and say we’re going to teach them about democracy. I hate the use of force to spread any kind of message, but it’s so preposterous to think that we should do it when we haven’t cleaned up our house here. If we had a very good system, people would want to copy us.


But I did it in 1988 and spent most of my money trying to get on a ballot. I never got in a debate. The laws are too biased. The two major parties don’t want the competition. The people who are waking up are realizing that whether you have Democrats or Republicans, policies never change. Are the Democrats offering a different foreign policy? Not really. They’re saying troops couldn’t possibly come home before 2013. They don’t take any options off the table when dealing with Iran. Neither one talks about monetary policy. So there’s no change.

You consider yourself a noninterventionist, which is to say we should not intervene with other countries’ affairs. But in a world where people want to do us harm as a result of our foreign policy, how does a noninterventionist address this threat?
RP: Well, you have to change the foreign policy and ultimately, that will change [terrorists’] attitudes. But in the meantime, you treat it for what it is and try to keep it in perspective. This is a police matter. They attempted to blow up the towers in the early nineties, and they were caught, and they were arrested and convicted under current laws. They didn’t need the Patriot Act. They didn’t need to violate the civil liberties of every single American citizen.

We’re dealing with a few people. Of course, since we’re doing the wrong thing, there are a lot more enemies out there now. But it’s still not a country. Terrorists don’t have a political base; they don’t have a government. They have no military. We were attacked by people with razor blades. And to think that we have to get so hysterical by declaring World War III — it’s way out of proportion with what we need to do, despite how devastating September 11 was.

They do not like us [in the Middle East]. If the Chinese were occupying this country and wanted to impose their way of life on us, none of us would like it. It would unify us against the invaders. And I think this is what happens when we’re overseas.

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Ron Paul
Many reasonable people argue that we are now morally obligated to assist Iraq in finding stability. What will Iraq look like if we pull out immediately, as you propose?
RP: I think it will get better. The danger of terrorism would diminish, but not overnight. I think eventually they’ll work out their problems. If we came out of the Middle East, I think moderate Arabs would probably work out a much better deal with Israel. They would have a different motivation.

I think the lessons of Vietnam are worthwhile to look at. In the sixties, [the line was] we had to stay there; we had to win. We lost sixty thousand troops, but we had to use up another sixty thousand, because if we’d left there would’ve been a domino effect, and the Communists would take over all Southeast Asia. So we left humiliated, and there was some pretty good chaos immediately afterward, but after twenty years of the French and the Americans trying to tell the Vietnamese what to do, they ended up being unified. The war stopped and all of a sudden, instead of becoming Communist, they became Westernized. We achieved in peace what we couldn’t achieve in war.

As sympathetic as I am, I cannot further tax the American people to rebuild Iraq. I would say the best thing to do is work out something where the wealth they have — the oil — would be used to do that. But as bad as it is, as responsible as we are, I can’t say, “Keep digging this hole.” I frequently make the comment that we as Americans were taxed to buy weapons, to buy bombs, to go over and bomb their infrastructure, and now we’re being taxed to rebuild them. At the same time, we’re running out of money here, and our bridges are falling down. I would say that we have to quit, and we ought to take care of our own bridges.

You voted against the Iraq War Resolution. Are you a pacifist?
RP: No, but some of my heroes are. I would much prefer the approaches of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, in which they practiced civil disobedience, than I am having this missionary spirit, to go over with guns and tell people what they should do.

No, a true pacifist never resists. I believe in a strong national defense. I think our national defense is diminished because of what we’re doing. We’re in greater jeopardy, and we should defend ourselves, but I’d never go to war as president without consent of Congress. It’s ironic that, if president, I would demand Congress live up to its responsibilities. Congress is every bit to blame for this war as the president.

You call yourself the most conservative member of Congress. But you’re old-school. You’ve never voted to raise taxes, and you would like to severely downsize, if not abolish, federal agencies like the Department of Education and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But without FEMA, what would happen when disasters, like the recent fires in Southern California, strike?
RP: Local people should help out. Local governments should help out. Even [National Guard] units should help out. But I think if a Guard unit is over in Iraq, they’re not very helpful. These houses that burned down, I bet you 95 percent of them have been insured. That’s the way the system is supposed to work. Insurance is supposed to rebuild them. People who take risks should suffer the consequences, and they should buy insurance. 

The worst natural disaster we ever had was in 1900 and happened in my district. It was in Galveston, Texas. And as bad as it was, there was no FEMA, no federal government intervention, and they took care of it themselves. They raised money and built a seawall that still stands. They raised the city, and they did it efficiently.

New Orleans is still not rebuilt. The other day, a news commentator said, almost bewildered, “You know, they’ve been doing this for a couple of years, and there’s only about a third of the city that’s been rebuilt, and it’s all been rebuilt by private owners.” Amazing that the private owners took it upon themselves to rebuild it. And how many billions of dollars did we spend? Like fifty billion? And we bought trailers that were never used, and we passed out checks, two thousand dollars apiece, to anybody who was supposed to have been injured by the flood. And lo and behold, people came from all around and got in line and got checks. Now they’ve discovered they shouldn’t have. And now the government is sending out letters saying, “Please return the two thousand dollars.” The whole thing is absurd. Central economic planning doesn’t work.

But aren’t states and citizens dependent on these agencies? What would a transition away from federal agencies look like?
RP: Let them keep their money. You’ll have more money, not less, if you’re not sending it up to Washington. If you wanted to transition, say, the highway system without changing the federal highway tax, just have one person there with a computer and say, “Well, Wyoming sent more than seven billion dollars in gasoline tax.” Write a check and send it back to them.

This whole idea is that it goes into a pot and doesn’t get spent on highways but gets spent on something else. But then if you want a highway over here, you better have political clout. The whole thing is bizarre. Every state would be better off if the money was just left there. Then it wouldn’t all be politicized.

As a physician, you did not accept Medicare or Medicaid. You see this as socialized medicine and feel that taxpayers are not responsible for paying fellow citizens’ medical bills. If president, how would you solve the crisis with America’s health system?
RP: Get rid of managed care. Managed care created this corporatism that we have. Corporations run medical care, and they’re the ones who make most of the money. Patients come up shortchanged. Doctors don’t like it. Hospitals are going broke. We put mandates on hospitals that they have to take care of illegal aliens, and hospitals are closing.

Managed care came about with the change of the tax laws in the 1970s, and we created a middleman, a third-party payment system. And that’s why in Washington, this multibillion-dollar industry is lobbied by the drug companies, the HMOs, all the management companies. Boy, they invest a lot of money. Actually, the American Medical Association joined in the lobby. They’re always lobbying for more managed care. They don’t lobby for patient rights.

The big issue is that everybody is saying, “Well, it’s a mess now,” but unfortunately if we don’t have a significant change in attitude in the campaign, we’re going to end up with socialized medicine. Look at the other countries that have socialized medicine. How long do you have to wait in line to get a doctor? It’s a real mess.

And we put so many prohibitions in choices today. If you want alternative medicine, insurance won’t pay for it, and the government won’t pay for it. Nutritional products would be available if we had a freer market, but the drug companies want to take over all that and have a monopoly on it.

You are for free trade with other nations but not for trade agreements like NAFTA, something you call “managed trade.” You even extend this to lifting sanctions — which you call a form of war — on countries like Cuba. But you’re not for amnesty for migrant workers crossing the border illegally into the U.S. The border patrol is one federal agency you would likely not abolish. But are the problems at our border a result of NAFTA?
RP: A lot of people argue that [NAFTA] literally increases illegal immigration. I think our economic policies and other things we do are probably more important than just NAFTA. I think it’s more our trade policies and our welfare system that causes these problems of illegal immigrants, because we reward it. As long as you reward it and subsidize illegal immigration — that means easier citizenship, tiding them over with free medical care and free education — then why not come?

Besides, we do have some labor problems. I think our welfare system contributes to that. Some people who can get six or seven dollars an hour by not working, why work? You can’t totally solve the immigration problem until you deal with welfare. But in the meantime, I think we have to protect our borders and deny automatic citizenship.

What do you think the government’s role should be in promoting renewable sources of energy?
RP: The government should just get out of the way and let price determine it. They shouldn’t prohibit certain forms of energy, like nuclear. I don’t think we’ve had a nuclear plant in like 25 years, and it’s the cheapest and the safest.

The politicians and bureaucrats have no idea what the best form of fuel is. And if they subsidize one form of fuel, like ethanol, they might make a mistake. A lot of people claim we have made a mistake: It costs as much energy to create a gallon of ethanol as it does for gas. Brazil is more efficient by using sugarcane, but we don’t subsidize sugarcane. One of the greatest sources of ethanol is hemp, but of course hemp is illegal in this country for some bizarre reason, so the Canadians grow the hemp. When Washington comes up with a program for energy, there are incredible subsidies for corporations. They may have a few good suggestions about deregulation, but then they’ll also have funds in there to give to the giant energy companies. It shouldn’t be that way.

When first in Congress, you continued to practice medicine, delivering more than four thousand babies. When was the last time you delivered a baby?
RP: Probably ten years ago. When I was in Congress the first time, managed care was not complicated, and the rules in Congress weren’t complicated. Now, for some reason, if I go and earn money delivering a baby on the weekend, that’s a conflict of interest. I’m prohibited from doing that. But if I have a lot of money coming from an investment in Halliburton or something like that, that’s okay. That’s alright.

 
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