(Here is a note in a bottle, thrown out onto the ocean, from someone inside the conspiracy. I hope it is found.)
So, if the Ron Paul Movement has struck a chord, then why did he not do better in the race for the GOP nomination?
1.) Well, because it is a movement that has just started and it takes some a little bit longer to catch on than others.
2.) Because some already had a favorite going into the debates and were not listening to any of the others anyway.
3.) Because most didn’t watch the debates at all.
4.) And finally, ah hem, because there is an establishment conspiracy to keep Ron Paul’s campaign from embarrassing the Republican Party.
Oh yeah, I know, conspiracy theories are not allowed and conspiracies do not actually exist. Although, if that were true the word itself would not exist and you would not know what I am talking about. In fact we all conspire and have conspired since the first grade and some of the conspiracies become known, like the tobacco industry fudging its figures on cancer or the recent expose of the KGB planting false scientific information in the west about a so called “nuclear winter.”
No, I am not suggesting that a bunch of 80 year old Knights of Malta met at a secret location in Manhattan and voted to bring down Ron Paul to fulfill some 1500 year old promise to a French King. Or even that the Masons did it. Or even that the GOP drafted a secret memo. What I am saying is that he has been the subject of numerous meetings of GOP establishment figures and they have exchanged ideas and techniques for keeping him and his minions at bay. I know because I was accidentally and spontaneously in the middle of just such a conversation.
Last week I appeared on a number of television programs and ended up in “the green room” with a couple of GOP luminaries. One of the party’s most famous and powerful Senators and a former governor who came within a hair of becoming the vice president. You can guess which television network it was. We each had a book to promote.
Anyway, somehow they got into a discussion of Ron Paul and how his supporters had the nerve, the gall, the cheek to show up at “their” respective Republican State Conventions and practically take over. Each man described to the other how through parliamentary maneuver and outright theft they had recently blocked the Paulistas from embarrassing the GOP by winning “their” delegates to the national convention. They passed these stories back and forth with great gusto and laughter and genuine appreciation for the political skill of the other.
“Well,” I interrupted, “Why was all that necessary in the first place? Who are these people? Why are their ideas so popular? And why block them? Shouldn’t the party welcome such activists into the process? Is the party so insecure that it has to cheat to protect itself? And what will the people who got cheated think about the GOP? Is this a lost opportunity? Maybe the GOP got cheated?”
You would have thought I was questioning the Virgin Birth. They turned on “the green room idiot” and patronizingly explained to me how the nomination belonged to McCain now and good soldiers had to rally around the standard bearer.
“Yes, yes,” I said, “But anyone active enough to show up at a State Convention knows that too. So what is driving their activism? If they can’t win, why are they still fighting? Could they be true believers?”
There was an embarrassing silence in the green room.
“Well,” cough, cough, the Senator ventured kindly, “They have tapped into a strain of libertarianism that has been underrepresented in recent years.”
And then the two giants, men I both admire, ignored me, “ the green room idiot,” and turned to each other to exchange hilarious Ron Paul stories about how he had wandered off the range voting his own way time and again, seemingly oblivious to the inherent needs of the Party. It’s called voting your conscience or even voting on principle instead of “Party.” It is a quaint constitutional notion, quite old fashioned.
There is no question that Ron Paul is seen by the GOP as “the crazy uncle in the attic.” But now that he has escaped and is out and about and is talking publicly almost anyone who hears him thinks that he is right and the rest of the GOP are the crazy ones, or at least the wrong ones.
I had one more question for my distinguished friends. “If Ron Paul is such a fringe figure and we are the mainstream of Republican political thought, then why is his book on the New York Times bestseller list, and ours not?”
Hmmm, now that was a thought for the conspirators to take home. Can’t the GOP get into those bookstores and stop the sales? Or maybe rewrite the rules about who gets on the list and who doesn’t? Or is this bestseller business only a Liberal Democrat-New York Times conspiracy devised to embarrass the Republican Party? Or maybe Victor Hugo is right about the force of an “idea whose time is come.”
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