Ron Paul

A deluge of polls on the day before the March 4 primaries shows mixed results:   read more »

Okay, so it’s not exactly a new stump speech. Or even a speech, really. (Heck, are these people even celebrities?) In any case, this ethanol-scented clip features singer John Mayer getting into a tiff with former Mac spokesman Justin Long. Whatever about? Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, of course—a politician Mr. Mayer is game to go to the mattresses for.

Mr. Long, who has somehow leveraged his Apple gig into a real acting career, insists that he and Mr. Mayer are just loudly agreeing (“We’re saying the same thing!” he shouts), but the cuddlesome crooner doesn’t seem to see it that way. “What Ron Paul wants to do...,” he shouts over and over, before being shoved further from Mr. Long and his curiously large posse. “What about Condoleezza [Rice]?” Mr. Long then asks Mr. Mayer, while someone (also famous?) jumps on his back. “No, not [drag performer] RuPaul,” Mr. Mayer hollers back, before adding: “Ron Paul! Read the constitution.”

With Barack Obama's bandwagon picking up speed, Hillary Clinton's sympathizers have been pushing a new caricature of their opponent: the cultish figure who seduces the weak-kneed masses with vague and meaningless but oh-so-warm-feeling generalities.

"There was something just a wee bit creepy," Time's Joe Klein, a Bill and Hillary stalwart, recently wrote, "about the mass messianism…of (Obama's) Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign."  read more »

Eliot Spitzer, with family, voted early this morning at P.S. 6 on the Upper East Side, where two other voters complained that the voting machines were broken, and there was confusion as to how to fill out a paper ballot.

Elaine Mack and her husband, Stephen, told me and other reporters that they had to fill out paper ballots.

"They're antiquated," she said about filling out papper ballots, and added, "There's no privacy."  read more »

On the night of Jan. 7, NBC’s Jay Leno interviewed Republican candidate for president Ron Paul on the Tonight Show. During the course of the interview, Mr. Leno noted that Mr. Paul had recently been “screwed over” by FOX News execs, who had decided not to invite Mr. Paul to participate in the Republican Forum the night before.  read more »

It's true that Rudy Giuliani hasn't seriously contested any of the first five primary and caucus states (at least not since he dropped $2 million on television ads in New Hampshire) and that he has long touted Florida, which will vote on January 29, as his campaign's first true test.

Still, it's noteworthy just how awfully Rudy has fared in the lead-off contests. Last night, he finished with 2 percent of the vote in South Carolina, a state where he'd been running near the top of polls just a few months ago. And yesterday afternoon, he won just 1,910 votes in Nevada -- good for four percent.  read more »

Mitt Romney has won the Nevada caucuses, but it really shouldn't mean much.

He was the only candidate --besides Ron Paul -- to sink significant time and money into the state, where he enjoyed at least one built-in advantage, thanks to Nevada's sizable Mormon population.  read more »

Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who doesn't embrace the idea that the United States has an obligation to provide economic, military and diplomatic support to Israel.

This could be taken as an extension of Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy, which calls for all nations to be treated neutrally—no foreign aid and no "entangling alliances," as he frequently argues.

Paul's critics contend that his approach would expose Israel to a mortal threat from hostile neighbors. And his views have also been invoked by critics to charge that he is anti-Semitic, or, at the very least, that his campaign has become a magnet for people who hate Jews.  read more »

The Fox News debate is underway and Ron Paul is nowhere to be found.

The broadcast began without an explanation for his exclusion and comes after a week of stonewalling by Fox, which refused to answer questions from the news media, the Paul campaign and even the New Hampshire Republican Party, which withdrew its sponsorship of the debate yesterday when it became clear that Paul would be left out.  read more »

Downtown Manchester.

At the Ron Paul headquarters in Concord this afternoon, 16 volunteers were phonebanking.

"We're not getting anyone who says 'I don't know who Ron Paul is,' the situation we were in four or five months ago," said a young volunteer named Chris. "We're looking to place well, in what they call the top tier."  read more »

After playing his usual punching bag role in last night's Republican debate, Ron Paul found himself surrounded by his most devoted and fervent friends on Sunday afternoon.

The occasion was Paul's keynote address at the annual convention of the Free State Project, a group of libertarians who are essentially trying to colonize New Hampshire. The group's goal is to convince 20,000 people to move to the state within five years. Others have pledged to follow the initial settlers if the 20,000 threshold is met.

Paul, whose was preceded at the podium by the President of the John Birch Society, entered to a raucous standing ovation and spoke for about 45 minutes.  read more »

The twenty-odd reporters waiting for Rudy Giuliani in a Radisson hotel room on the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border are talking Ron Paul. One reporter has a bet going that Paul will get more than 11 percent in the primary. Nobody present is willing to take the other side of that bet.

It's the first surprise to ever grace a spin room--that horrible place where, after the debate, each candidate's staff and supporters repeat talking points until reporters either bleed from the ears or relent.

After the Republican debate this evening, candidate Ron Paul came in to antispin the room himself--and he drew the biggest crowd. While the mayor of Manchester, Frank Guinta, shilled for Giuliani, right behind him Paul took all comers. Hillary Clinton should steal that personal touch from his playbook as she kicks for attention tonight.

John Koblin meets twins who blog, discovers that a Ron Paul party distracted Times reporters on deadline, and witnesses an interesting moment involving Hillary Clinton, Bill O’Reilly and a girl with red hair.

Yesterday's Times report from Iowa was produced to an Allman Brothers soundtrack.  read more »

Choire talks to some Paul revolutionaries.

They haunt the streets of Manchester and lurk outside Hillary Clinton rallies--so let's meet the Ron Paul supporters!

I bumped into Ron Paul in the lobby of the Des Moines Marriott earlier today and asked him if he was surprised about the rapidly receding public profile of the Rudy Giuliani campaign.

“I’m surprised he even got any attention at all in the beginning,” Paul said.

Paul, of course, has a history with the former mayor going back to a G.O.P. debate in South Carolina, when Giuliani called Paul’s suggestion that American foreign policy was partly to blame for Sept. 11 “absurd.”  read more »

Fox News Channel has listed almost every presidential candidate as appearing in the Republican forum it is holding two nights before the New Hampshire caucus. But they have not listed Ron Paul.

Paul's supporters aren't happy, and Fox hasn't been forthcoming with an explanation. But according to CNN, Fox's justification is that they are inviting only candidates polling in double-digits.

That explanation probably won't, and really shouldn't, appease the Paul campaign.  read more »

Speaking of Ron Paul ... blogger Ben Fritz catches NBC's Tim Russert making an embarrassing error during his interview with the Republican presidential candidate on last Sunday's Meet The Press.

At one point, Mr. Russert asked his guest: "You say you're a strict constructionist of the Constitution, and yet you want to amend the Constitution to say that children born here should not automatically be U.S. citizens."  read more »

This is from over the wekend, but deserves some attention nonetheless, since it's a spat that's clearly not over.

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul said Saturday that Fox News, which has excluded him from an upcoming presidential debate, is "scared" of him.

According to The Boston Globe, Mr. Paul told a crowd at a New Hampshire diner: "They are scared of me and don't want my message to get out, but it will. They are propagandists for this war and I challenge them on the notion that they are conservative."  read more »

Congressman Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate with lots of internet and financial support but not much sway in the polls, is looking for delegates from two congressional districts in the city.

Here's an email that went out on Christmas Eve:  read more »

This story happens during every campaign. The press – or a rival campaign – review’s a candidate’s list of donors, find one who is objectionable on some level, and then demands that the candidate return the donation and disavow whatever it is about the donor that is objectionable. And usually candidates play along.

But Ron Paul isn’t. And while the headlines that result – “Paul Keeps White Supremacist Donation” – are damning, his reasoning is, at least, refreshingly different.

At issue is a $500 check that Paul received from Don Black of West Palm Beach, who runs a web site whose slogan is “White Pride World Wide.” Black is one of tens of thousands of donors who chipped in to Paul’s campaign – which was launched on a shoestring, exploded in popularity, and raked in more than $12 million in one day last weekend.

Until alerted by the media, Paul said, he had never met nor heard of Black. But he’s keeping the cash. Paul’s logic: If the guy thinks he’s buying any influence, he’s wasted his money. (Plus, he noted in a TV interview yesterday, this makes $500 less that Don Black has to spread his own message.)

Actually, this whole flare-up calls to mind an episode of “The Wire” from last season. In it, Norman Wilson, the black deputy campaign manager for a mayoral candidate, stands by while his boss is greeted by an elderly white voter on the street. The voter tells the candidate, who is white, that he’s supporting him because the blacks – although he uses a different term than this – are ruining his city. The candidate says nothing. As he recounts the exchange later, Wilson is asked by his wife if he was offended that his candidate hadn’t spoken up.

“A vote’s a vote,” Wilson said, “and I never throw one back.”

After grabbing more than $6 million in a single day, Ron Paul has run his fourth quarter fund-raising total to nearly $20 million, making him the cash king on the Republican side. Just as impressively, the money bonanza has come from small-dollar donors – the average "Tea Party" contribution was, according to the Paul campaign web site, about 100 bucks – a clear sign of deep grassroots support.

But he is still not going to win the Republican nomination, or even come all that close.  read more »

In case you missed it, Steve Kornacki has a piece today looking at the way a suddenly in-demand Ron Paul is getting curtain calls on the national networks.  read more »

An invitation to appear on one of the Sunday morning talk shows is a privilege that every presidential candidate—even Duncan Hunter—is afforded at some point.

The no-shot curiosities—like Mr. Hunter or Mike Gravel—usually show up early in the campaign for their perfunctory segment or two in a nationally-televised hot seat. Ron Paul was supposed to among this class of candidates, and for a while it seemed that his Sunday morning exposure would be limited to being told by George Stephanopoulos over the summer that he had zero chance of winning the presidency.  read more »

It’s become understandably fashionable to liken the Ron Paul phenomenon to the outbreak of Howard Dean-mania that swept the Democratic grassroots four years ago. But there is less common ground than one might think.  read more »

Money talks, and the quirky 72-year-old Texas Congressman just raised a ton of it—more than $5 million between July and September.  read more »

Mr. Paul will not end up in the White House, but that doesn’t mean that the 71-year-old congressman from Texas isn’t a surprising force in the 2008 race.  read more »

Frank Luntz, who has parlayed the media’s mistaken belief that the Contract with America had much to do with the Republican revolution of 1994 into 13 years (and counting) of notoriety, seems to be popping up in the wake of every presidential debate these days.  read more »

Thank God for the Ames Republican Presidential Straw Poll.

It’s probably not the healthiest expression of democracy – the right to vote costs 25 bucks, with campaigns typically gobbling up chunks of tickets and handing them out to participants who might not be anywhere near Iowa come next January’s caucuses – but it sure gets the job done. After the last competitive straw poll, in the summer of 1999, three candidates were forced from the race, reducing an unruly G.O.P. field to a more manageable size.  read more »

How poorly is fundraising going for the Republican presidential contenders? Libertarian fringe candidate Ron Paul is in third place among the candidates in terms of cash-on-hand, with $2.4 million. George Stephanopoulos, who might want to have a frank conversation with his booker, will have an "exclusive interview" with Paul on Sunday's edition of "This Week."

The only question I have is, how much did Rudy pay him to stay in the race?