Endorsing the nutcases

I am a media junkie.

I am beginning to realize this for the first time, but I eat media like candy. I have a voracious appetite for it. And I don't mean entertainment news or the latest celebrity gossip. I am an information whore. I will hop on Google News and quickly scan the top headlines on Christmas Day just in case something happened while Santa was flying around the world. In the three weeks of having fast internet at my parents' house (instead of the sluggish wait fifteen minutes to load a one minute movie back at my apartment) I have taken advantage of watching YouTube after YouTube movie of candidate speeches, debates and commercials. I think Wikipedia (while not the most accurate source in the world) is great in making learning and knowledge more accessible and fun for people around the world.

So for the longest time, I have sneered and mocked Ron Paul and his grassroots campaign, mainly because the mainstream media (especially conservative mainstream media) seems to hate him. They portray him as a right wing nutcase who wants to destroy the Department of Education and abolish the income tax and he would totally dismantle the government and so forth and I laughed at his honky foolishness.

Then the Iowa caucuses came and went. My man Barack Obama won for the Democrat side, and Huckabee won the Republican side, and the interesting side note in one of the articles popped up, saying Ron Paul won 10% of the vote, and only came in fourth, above supposed front-runner Rudy Guliani. Finally, curiousity got the better of me and I typed in Ron Paul in Google News and YouTube and went to seeing what this man said.

While watching and reading, I began having a stream of flashbacks of my high school years, specifically my senior year. It was the year 2003. Two years had passed since the Twin Towers attack. I was involved in my high school newspaper as a vocal, brash, pretentious, outspoken editorial columnist and cartoonist. I considered myself an "old school" conservative. As the country geared up for war, I vehemently and vocally opposed everything about it - how it all felt so rushed, how the Bush Administration never seemed to answer any question directly, and especially how Congress rolled over and let the White House walk all over them, giving up one of their most important constitutional powers - the right to declare war.

I was raised to be a political animal, what, being a product of the grown up Seattle counter-cultural revolution. But to me, it was more than just civic duty or something I should pay attention to. Politics was a passion, democracy was more than just a nebulous ideal that my Democratic friends would invoke from time to time to augment their rhetoric in some fallacious way. To me, it was town meetings, it was state legislatures and city councils, it was electoral campaigns for mayors. It was covering what happened in local meetings between school districts and parents, voters and state governments, silently taking notes for stories to publish on subjects like mandatory advanced placement classes for graduation or the reason why teachers' salaries were so low. As an aspiring editorial cartoonist and budding journalist, mine was the legacy of liberty, bringing down corrupt administrations and destroying infamous people such as Boss Tweed with the stroke of a pen or brush. As one of the younger generations, I was inherently distrustful of bigger federal governments, espousing states rights and a more accountable small government, of a more strict interpretation of the constitution, of the importance of law, order, precedence and maintaining civility and legitimacy in politics today. I would yell at classmates in the middle of my AP government class. I was passionate and on fire.

And I could feel that same passion rising again. Sure, Ron Paul wants to dismantle the Department of Education, but only because he believes that education should be accountable to parents and local governments, not Washington beauracrats. He does want to abolish the income tax, but he wants to cut government spending. He thinks the war in Iraq was wrong, voted against it in the first place and wants to pull out military troops as soon as possible. He thinks staying in there is just a ploy to save face and thinks honor and respecting the military is admitting we made a mistake and getting them out of harm's way. He has a keen grasp of history, which only supports his arguments with real life occurances that already happened.

In short, he was me five years ago, except now running for president. My pining that the Republican party has lost sight of what it stood for suddenly has an answer, and I never expected it to be in the form of a Texan congressman.

I can understand why Ron Paul supporters are so enthusiastic. Ours - a smaller government, more states rights, non-interventionalist foreign policy people - is a demographic and group that have been misaligned and mistreated and forgotten by the current Republican party since the takeover in 1994. Yet we make up the base, core, old fashioned and traditional principles of the Republican party. This constant ignoring has shrunk the Republican base as we felt disillusioned by politics and eventually dropped out, taken over by apathy. Now all that's left are the evangelical religious right, evidenced by the fact that Gov. Huckabee won the Iowa elections - an essentially unelectable candidate voted in on the sole principle that he is a Southern Baptist preacher.

But suddenly, we have a spokesperson again. We finally have someone who we can rally behind. After more than a decade, we're finally getting our voice heard in the political scene.

The fact that Ron Paul, despite being essentially ignored by the mainstream media, has done that well in Iowa is phenomenal, as well as his grass-roots campaign raising money and breaking records while doing it without his staff even lifting a finger. Should the media start covering him again, I would daresay that he could win the party nomination. The old school conservatives can take our party back again.

Right now, my support is still behind Obama, but should it be him against Ron Paul, I'd have to do some serious thinking. I will admit, it feels good to finally have a reason to be passionate about politics again.