Media Criticism

Any good politician thinks about their short term prospects especially during an active campaign. If John Kerry had said he was building the Democratic Party for 2008 while running for president in 2004, he would have been creamed at the polls. Many politicians simply fail to realize that their place in politics is to compact the snow that will eventually become a massive snowball. Ron Paul fits into this camp with his grassroots campaign in 2008.

I think that Ron Paul has been receiving enough attention in the press based on the competition in the Republican field. There are plenty of candidates beyond Romney and Giuliani so why should Paul get more attention? The media has only begun to realize that Paul’s campaign is different from that of other candidates in the Republican AND Democratic fields. The problem for Ron Paul is that the media won’t help him in the short term. Ron Paul stories revolve around the shock of the candidate actually beating people financially on a quarterly basis. His aim should be a reform of the Republican Party back to roots laid down by people like Bob Taft in the 1940s: isolationist and libertarian.

His platform is appealing to Americans frustrated with the Bush Administration’s love affair with bureaucracy. Bush is not a traditional Republican but a tinkerer that benefited from a terrible attack on American soil six years ago. Paul would reorganize and decrease the size of government, recommit the country to the gold standard and draw back our influence in the world to reflect concerns over domestic defense. I think the gold standard idea is unrealistic in the modern economy but everything else sounds great to me. The problem is that as much as the American people complain about big government and overreaching presidents they are used to these malformed institutions.

Ron Paul will continue to gain supporters as the Republican debates continue into the primary season. Fred Thompson is a Reagan conservative that fails to realize that the Cold War is over, Mitt Romney is a stuffed suit and Rudy Giuliani is not desirable to a) conservatives, b) religious conservatives and c) libertarians. The problem is that Ron Paul does not fit the ridiculous form that we apply to each president. His frank manner is great to distinguish him in debates but Americans find it difficult to support people that speak common sense to power.

Since a reformed Republican party seems unlikely in the next generation, I am hoping that Ron Paul leaves the Republican Party and takes the mantle of the Libertarian Party in 2008. The major problem for parties like the Libertarian Party is that they get little press. If Paul is able to accomplish anything in the early primaries, he can bolt the party once partisan drones chose their leader. He will have run ads in the early primary states, built a following among independents and gotten his name in every major newspaper for months before the primaries even start. I hope that someone emerges from the Democrats to run as an independent to throw the two-party system into array and show Americans how fundamentally flawed our system is.