The Google world headquarters, in Mountain View, California, has
become a point of pilgrimage in these early days of the presidential
campaign season. Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Bill Richardson, and
John Edwards have all flown in for appearances at the tech-nerd
Valhalla, known to employees as the Googleplex and set on acres of
well-groomed, well-wired land just south of San Francisco. The
candidates ostensibly come for chats with the big brains who have
brought the nine-year-old company to the top of the new-media
heap—and who, in the process, have changed the way presidential
contenders push their messages. But the candidates also want a chance
to loosen the wallets of some famously well-compensated and idealistic
internet pioneers, and they crave the online exposure that comes when
Google posts their interviews with company executives on YouTube.
Of all of the presidential candidates who have made the pilgrimage
to Mountain View thus far, none has caused quite the stir that
Republican Congressman Ron Paul did when he arrived at Google in early
July to talk about his unique brand of conservatism. It’s a
conservatism so iconoclastic and, in some ways, so old school, that it
is barely recognizable in the context of the Bush era, and it
constitutes a radical departure from what the rest of the Republican
presidential candidates are saying these days, even as they try to
distance themselves from the unpopular president. Angry and accusatory,
Paul’s critique of the country’s Republican leadership has the good
fortune of being very much in step with the dismay that voters, liberal
and conservative alike, now feel. Not surprisingly, he’s proving quite
popular, especially online, where well-delivered complaint is king.
Paul’s conservatism includes strident opposition to the Iraq war,
reverence for the Constitution, contempt for the USA PATRIOT Act, a
willingness to criticize evangelical Christians, a relatively hands-off
social policy, and a position on taxes that essentially amounts to
ending most of them. On the stump, he pummels America’s foreign policy
in language that you won’t hear from any front-runner, Republican or
Democrat, offering critiques of the “military industrial complex” and
issuing warnings that America is being done in by its hubris. While
he’s clearly upset about the direction of the country, his tone is
always earnest, and his delivery much closer to confident serenity than
shouted complaint—which, as he no doubt knows, makes it harder
for his opponents to cast him as just another furious crank risen to
fringe-candidate status. A day after his Google interview, Paul told a
large, cheering crowd at a nearby rally in a Mountain View park: “If
you have governments that are doing the right thing, you don’t have
governments running empires.”
Because of such statements, and because of some of his more paranoid
followers—who could be found at the Mountain View rally passing
out scare-pamphlets about the impending union of the U.S. and Mexico,
or wearing T-shirts that read, “9/11 was an inside job”—pundits
have tended to dismiss Paul’s candidacy as nothing more than a
laughable footnote to the larger race. But as a reminder that
candidates are not their fringe followers, and that pundits are not
always the smartest people in the room, it’s worth considering how some
of the country’s best and brightest technology minds responded to
Paul’s pitch at Google.
The auditorium where the interview took place was so full of
professional Silicon Valley types, dressed to the casual side of
business-casual and multitasking on their laptops and Blackberries,
that an overflow room had to be opened. Google employees in far-off
offices watched a live online simulcast of the interview and submitted
far more advance questions than they had for any previous candidate.
Within two weeks, the YouTube tape of Paul’s Google appearance had
received about 140,000 views—almost four times as many views as
Clinton’s Google appearance, which had been up on YouTube for five
months, and eight times as many views as McCain’s, which had been up
for two months.
None of this was surprising to Vijay Boyapati, a 28-year-old Google
software engineer who works at the company’s Kirkland office, lives on
Capitol Hill, and, when he found out Paul would be appearing at the
Mountain View headquarters, immediately dropped about $400 on a plane
ticket to San Francisco.
Boyapati wanted some face time with Paul. Though he could have easily
stayed in Kirkland and watched the live webcast, he felt it was
important to tell the candidate in person about the strong fan base he
has developed here in Washington. So excited was Boyapati about this
prospect that during the question-and-answer period in Mountain View he
turned into one of those fawning audience members who have to be
reminded by the moderator (in this case one of Boyapati’s superiors) to
actually ask a question rather than just gush. “You have a tremendous
amount of support up in the Evergreen State,” Boyapati told Paul. “And
you would receive a reception that you won’t forget, so please come
up.” Paul was noncommittal about his travel plans, but nevertheless, at
a fundraiser later in the day, Boyapati maxed out his contribution to
the presidential hopeful, writing a check for $2,300.
Boyapati is right that Paul has a large and enthusiastic following
here in Washington. On the social-organizing site Meetup.com, there are nine different Ron Paul
groups for the Seattle area alone, with nearly 600 members between
them. That’s more than the entire Seattle area Meetup membership for
Clinton, Edwards, McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney combined. To
Paul’s advisers and strategists, this is all part of a broader
phenomenon. Ever since Paul began appearing in the Republican debates
and announcing that his party had “lost its way,” they’ve watched their
candidate’s popularity explode. His campaign’s YouTube videos, mostly
long clips of Paul’s various speeches, are among the most viewed of
this election season. Nationally, Paul now has more Meetup groups than
any other presidential contender, out-drawing even Democratic internet
darling Barack Obama.
No matter what Paul says, it seems to break his way, tapping the
wide current of voter frustration that crosses party lines. In a debate
in South Carolina in May, Paul sparked what for any other candidate
would have been a catastrophic confrontation over 9/11 with former New
York Mayor Rudy Giuliani—and came away with a head-turning
fundraising quarter.
In that debate, in response to a question about his Iraq war
opposition, Paul suggested that America’s recent foreign military
interventions—which he has almost uniformly opposed, and which he
has suggested are largely about oil—were in some measure
responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001. “If we think that we
can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred,” Paul said,
“then we have a problem. They don’t come here to attack us because
we’re rich and we’re free. They come here to attack us because we’re
over there.”
Giuliani pounced on this statement, interrupting the debate to
demand a retraction from Paul, and saying, “That’s really an
extraordinary statement.” Indeed it was, in that it ran counter to the
Republican theme that Americans have been under attack by people who
simply, in Bush’s words, “hate our freedoms.” Paul shrugged off
Giuliani’s comments, declined to retract his statement, and went right
on talking about “blowback” and other perils that he sees in recent
U.S. foreign policy. And instead of torpedoing Paul’s chances, the
exchange seemed to have the opposite effect. When the second
fundraising quarter ended in June, Paul’s campaign had $2.4 million in
the bank, more than the floundering campaign of Iraq war defender John
McCain had on hand, and due in large part to online contributions.
Like many of Paul’s followers, Boyapati, the Google engineer, sees
himself as more Libertarian than Republican. Boyapati recently became a
U.S. citizen after emigrating from Australia, and he’s never voted
before, except in this year’s advisory vote on what to do about the
Seattle Viaduct (he voted no on both the rebuild and the retrofit
“because both involved taxes”). Studying the Constitution in order to
become a citizen made Boyapati even more furious about the Iraq war and
the USA PATRIOT Act, and he intends to do all he can to help Paul get
the Republican nomination so he can vote for him next November.
He’s part of an effort to convince Paul to come to Seattle’s
Hempfest later this summer (Paul has been a critic of federal drug
laws). He’s offering to pay half the $200 price for Google employees
who are willing to buy magnetic advertisements for Paul and put them on
the side of their cars. He’s crossing his fingers that Paul will score
a momentum-confirming second-place finish in the Iowa straw poll on
August 11, as some observers have predicted. And, like many, Boyapati
believes there is good precedent for a continuing rise in political
support for a politician like Ron Paul—a guy who is plain spoken
about his antiwar positions at a time when his party has become sick of
war double-talk.
Democrats, who in general turned on the war much earlier than
Republicans, experienced just such a phenomenon in the last
presidential election. “I sort of feel like Ron Paul is Howard Dean on
steroids,” Boyapati told me.
Whether or not he is the Republican Howard Dean, Ron Paul has
already proven to be a singular political character. Born in western
Pennsylvania and raised in an observant Lutheran family, Paul was
something of a youth athlete, playing football and baseball until a
knee injury sidelined him. These days, at 71 the oldest Republican in
the presidential race, he still appears to be in good shape, as spry as
any of the other conservative contenders.
When he was a young man, Paul helped to pay for his undergraduate
studies at Gettysburg College with money he’d saved delivering
newspapers, mowing lawns, and selling lemonade. His politics are
grounded in experiences like that, experiences of self-determination
and private action. When he was accepted to Duke Medical School, he
noticed that the school offered loans to students at only 1 percent
interest if they couldn’t afford tuition. The arrangement made good
sense to him, and it’s something he points to when he explains his
current opposition to the modern, government-financed student loans,
which he sees as needlessly taking the place of private agreements
between schools with big endowments and students in need.
Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president for global communications
and public affairs, conducted the interview with Paul in Mountain View
and made a point of bringing up Paul’s position on student loans during
the event—a position that led Paul, as a father, to pay for the
entire higher education of all of his five children, three of whom went
through medical school, so that they wouldn’t have to accept government
money. Schrage asked how many employees in the Google
auditorium—a youngish crowd, lots of different races—had
relied on student loans to get through school. A huge number of hands
shot up. Paul joked: “The philosophical question is, do I lose all your
votes because I don’t support student loans, or do I get your votes
because I don’t want you to pay social security?”
He then explained the deeper reasoning behind his opposition to a
wildly popular program like federal student loans. “The moral
question,” he said, “is, why should people who don’t get to go to
college subsidize your education [with their taxes]? I mean, it’s just
not fair.” That’s pure Paul: seeing his political philosophy through to
its logical conclusions, even if it might seem like career suicide. He
starts with an unflinching premise—in this case, a severely
limited view of the role of the federal government in evening out
social inequities—and lets everything else proceed from
there.
After finishing medical school at Duke, Paul enlisted in the Air
Force. He was a flight surgeon and, as he told the New York Times
Sunday Magazine recently, the experience changed him: “I recall
doing a lot of physicals on army warrant officers who wanted to become
helicopter pilots and go to Vietnam,” he said. “They were gung ho. I’ve
often thought about how many of those people never came back.”
Paul didn’t protest the Vietnam War, but he came to see it as
illegal and unnecessary and uses it on the stump as an example of how
foreign military interventions—which, as he always reminds, the
founding fathers warned against—don’t work. So it’s not just the
Iraq war that Paul opposes. He has been opposed to almost every
American war or foreign military action since Vietnam, with the
exception of the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, which he initially
backed as a way of going after Osama bin Laden.
Paul now regrets that position, saying it didn’t accomplish its aim,
and he has recently reintroduced in Congress his own post-9/11 solution
for getting bin Laden: “letters of marque and reprisal” that would
encourage private individuals, rather than the U.S. government, to go
after the terrorist mastermind. As a blogger for The Politico recently
noted, letters of marque and reprisal went out of fashion in the
mid-1800s—the blogger called Paul’s whole idea “wacky.” But Paul
doesn’t care. He has an evident nostalgia for simpler times, and a
strong sense that new problems like international Islamist terrorism
don’t necessarily require new solutions. When Paul reintroduced his
“marque and reprisal” legislation last month, he noted that despite six
years of the federal government trying to catch him, Osama bin Laden is
still at large.
In the air force, Paul was stationed in southern Texas. After he
left the service he made his home there, working as an
obstetrician—but, consistent with his political views, refusing
to take Medicare or Medicaid. “It’s all stolen money,” he told the
Austin American-Statesman in 1996. “The government steals it
from one group to give to another. That’s coercion. I don’t want to
deal with the government.”
Paul made his first run for Congress in 1974, using the slogan
“Freedom, Honesty, and Sound Money.” He didn’t win, but two years
later, in a special election, he did, taking the seat representing
Texas’s 22nd District, an area just south of Houston. Since then, he’s
been a Congressman, on and off, for 10 terms, with breaks for running
for the U.S. Senate (in 1984, unsuccessfully, against Phil Gramm) and
for president (in 1988, also unsuccessfully, as a Libertarian against
George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis).
In Congress, as in other areas of his life, Paul has practiced his
beliefs with an unusual rigor. In keeping with his strict
constitutionalist ideology, he’s proudly earned the nickname “Dr. No,”
voting against any legislation that he feels was not expressly
authorized by the founding fathers. He was against Congressional medals
for Rosa Parks and Pope John Paul II, for example, for this reason.
He is also against federal flood insurance because it makes people
who choose not to live in flood-prone areas pay the costs for people
who do (even though residents of his current district, along the Gulf
of Mexico, benefit greatly from such insurance). He’s against federal
gun-control laws, and he thinks handguns on planes (in the hands of
both passengers and pilots) could have prevented 9/11. He’s against the
federal death penalty because he feels the federal government has been
inept at implementing it, but he allows that states should be able to
have it if they want. He’s against the military discharging people
solely on the basis of sexual orientation, and in general thinks we
should be talking less about sexuality and more about equal rights for
all individuals.
What’s he for? He’s for getting rid of the Federal Reserve, along
with most federal departments—including the National Science
Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency—and for
returning to the Gold Standard as the underpinning of U.S. currency.
He’s for pulling out of the United Nations and stopping the efforts to
create a national I.D. card. And, most importantly to his fans, he’s a
Republican in favor of getting out of Iraq.
Even though his supporters may not agree with all of his positions,
Paul has become an alluring figure, in his district and around the
country, especially for those who share his nostalgia for simpler times
and his almost apocalyptic view of America’s future, morally,
politically, and financially. (“I think we’re on the verge of the
collapse of a very big bubble, and that is the dollar bubble,” he told
the rally in Mountain View, standing in front of a backdrop that
featured a giant picture of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.)
Voters also clearly gravitate toward his candor and consistency; just
as people once respected Bush’s stubbornness, even if they disagreed
with him on some big issues, many now seem to like Paul’s unwavering
connection to his core beliefs, and his willingness to follow those
beliefs wherever they lead, even if they lead him into disagreements
with people who might otherwise want to vote for him.
It’s a rare attribute in an era filled with adjustable
politicians.
Also alluring is his simplicity, which seems unshaken by the
increasing complication of the times. Paul often uses the phrase “not
complicated” to refer to his ideas. “Our problems are great, but the
solution is not complicated,” he is fond of saying. Or: “My solution
for Iraq is not complicated… We just marched in, we can just march
out.” Or: “Almost every answer can be found in our Constitution.”
Simplicity is part of his cachet, and he knows it. Speaking at Google
about the “amazing” and “spontaneous” growth of his campaign, Paul
explained, “We’ve touched a nerve with a lot of people who say, ‘That
makes sense!'”
Of course, it’s much easier to create rhetoric that makes sense than
it is to create sensible government policy. Another popular fringe
candidate, Democrat Dennis Kucinich, tends to favor the same type of
“that makes sense” rhetoric, and has been criticized for wooing voters
with “the simplicity of the demagogue.” One could level the same charge
against Paul, and in fact the two candidates share so many overlapping
attributes—against NAFTA, against the war, in favor of simple
America-first solutions—that some have suggested they run
together on an independent ticket, with Paul in the top slot and
Kucinich as the vice presidential candidate. It’s not going to happen,
but it does say something about how far out of the Republican
mainstream Paul is that he’s now come to overlap, in people’s minds,
with a candidate who believes deeply in “the starlit magic of the
outermost life of our universe.”
When I arrived at the Google campus for the Paul event, I parked
behind a 1958 Airstream trailer sporting Texas plates and festooned
with hand-painted Ron Paul signs. Later, I found its owner, Debra
Murphy, 45, a divorcée from just outside of Houston who has been
traveling the country in search of a new direction. Murphy has no TV in
her trailer; she found out about Paul while driving through Oregon
listening to NPR, and then used her Verizon wireless PC card to look
him up on the internet. She considers herself a Republican (she excuses
her one past Democratic vote, for Jimmy Carter, by saying: “I was
18″).
Standing outside the trailer in silver flip-flops and moonstone
earrings, Murphy told me about how she came to be a Paul fan. “I’d
never heard of him, and I’m from Texas,” she said. “When I started
looking him up, I couldn’t believe it. He’s so honest and he’s always
voting his principles.” She watched him on YouTube. She read political
message boards and dived into discussion groups. She gave up on the
thoughts she’d been entertaining of voting for Kucinich (she liked his
opposition to the war). Through her wireless internet connection, she
became convinced Paul was the right antiwar answer and promised to give
him $100 a month for as long as she can afford to.
Murphy is, to put it mildly, an alienated Republican. “We were
getting sucked in to the whole neocon thing, but now we realize,” she
told me. “I was for the war in the beginning because I was scared out
of my mind. But now I realize it was just hype… I want us out of the
war. I voted for Bush twice, and I’m embarrassed. He’s really let us
down. I’m ashamed of what my country has become.”
This seems to be the dominant sentiment driving Paul supporters,
this anger at being misled and let down by Bush. Many of them once
believed in the president. Now, their fury at where he’s taken the
country is so powerful it overwhelms everything else.
For example: Murphy is pro-choice. Paul is opposed to abortion and
doesn’t like Roe v. Wade. He says it’s because of his
experience delivering so many children, and also because he believes
the federal government shouldn’t be telling states what to do. That
doesn’t matter to Murphy; she’ll support him anyway.
Another example of this phenomenon: Paul is opposed to the “Net
Neutrality” movement, something that Google strongly supports; he says
the solution is to have no government regulation on the internet rather
than to have regulations (which Google supports) that would be designed
to protect consumers from the whims of powerful and wealthy internet
gatekeepers. This didn’t suppress the enthusiasm of the crowd that
gathered for Paul in the Google auditorium, nor did it suppress the
enthusiasm of Boyapati, the Google software engineer who works in
Kirkland.
Still another example, and perhaps the best because it highlights
how radical Paul’s positions can be relative to the more mainstream
people who are now starting to support him: Paul is still a
global-warming skeptic, calling fears about the problem “overblown” at
a time when even Bush has recognized the reality of climate change.
Paul’s solution to all environmental problems is essentially to do
nothing and hope the market works everything out. Schrage, the Google
executive, sounded skeptical of this approach and pointed out that
market forces created the global-warming problem in the first place.
“Climate change seems like something that wouldn’t, indeed hasn’t, been
an issue that’s been well addressed by market forces today,” Schrage
told Paul. “Seems like the perfect example of a market
failure—that the external costs of pollution don’t get absorbed
by companies—and thus a natural place where some sort of
collective action, government intervention, might be appropriate.”
Paul disagreed, and suggested that a greater respect for private
property in America, and a greater appreciation for how what one person
does on his or her private property affects the environment on another
person’s private property, could somehow reverse environmental
problems. When Schrage pointed out the international nature of the
climate-change problem—the fact that factories in America can
ultimately affect the weather in India—Paul answered:
“If there is manmade pollution…”
Which was one rather big if.
He continued: “If there is man-made pollution, it might be in China
and I know I’m not willing to tax you or send troops over there to
close down plants.”
This reluctance to force international change is consistent with
Paul’s philosophy of a limited role for the federal government, but
it’s worth pointing out the drawbacks of consistency: By that same
limited-federal-government logic, Paul would not have sent federal
troops to help integrate southern schools during the civil rights era,
and would not want federal agencies to investigate violence against
abortion clinics.
After his swing through California, I asked Paul, over the phone,
about this problem—the way his strict adherence to an
anti-federal-government, pro-local-control ideology can seem at best
naive, and at worst callous, when it comes to big global problems or
historical injustices in this country that have warranted federal
intervention in the past.
Take abortion: Paul supports a state’s right to do whatever it wants
on the issue without any interference from the federal government. Is
it fair to young American women, who have no control over which state
they happen to be born in, to potentially live under wildly different
laws on abortion? A certain percentage of women inevitably end up with
very good reasons for needing abortions—incest, rape, danger to
the mother’s health—and a certain percentage of women aren’t able
to afford to travel the distance they might need to in order to get to
a state with different laws.
“I’m looking at it from a constitutional viewpoint,” Paul told me.
“I don’t think we have a choice. Yes, there would be differences, but
that’s the way it was intended. Say your state wants to legalize
medical marijuana and Texas doesn’t. I don’t think the federal
government should come in and tell your state what to do. It’s not
perfect, but that’s the magnificence of the system we have.”
Magnificence, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Marginalized
segments of society are less likely to think of unfairness as
magnificent.
Paul likes to say that freedom is popular—in fact, the phrase
has basically become his campaign slogan—but the kind of freedom
he’s talking about can be indifferent and blind to history, just like
the free market he venerates. It’s not clear that the people, in
Washington and elsewhere, who are now jumping behind him because of his
antiwar stance, understand this aspect of his philosophy.
At the end of our interview, as he was heading off to the airport to
catch a plane to South Carolina for a campaign event, I asked Paul what
he thought his chances were of winning the Republican nomination.
“Better than they were six months ago,” he replied, and then he praised
the internet for helping him compete at a level he never could have in
1988, when he was running for president as a Libertarian.
It’s undeniable that Paul has been smart in harnessing the power of
the internet, but he’s not as much of a pioneer as he makes himself out
to be on the campaign trail. At a fundraiser inside a fancy golf-course
restaurant in Mountain View, he said of his surging internet
popularity: “It’s unique and nobody can even measure what’s going on.”
But it’s not unique: Dean experienced the same thing before flaming out
in the Democratic primaries in 2004 (due in part to the type of onstage
overexuberance that Paul studiously avoids). It’s also not impossible
to measure. It will be measured in the contributions Paul receives
online over the next months, in the results of the upcoming straw poll
in Iowa, and in public-opinion polls between now and the first
Republican primaries.
What is unique about the Paul campaign is that a Republican candidate is wholeheartedly embracing the internet. In the four years
since the Dean phenomenon, Democrats have largely welcomed the internet
into their political process, and have so integrated the party’s
“netroots” into their race for the presidential nomination that last
weekend in Chicago, almost all the Democratic presidential candidates
appeared at a conference of liberal bloggers called YearlyKos (after
the influential liberal blog, DailyKos). Republicans, on the other
hand, still treat the web as something of unclear value, a scary place
full of backtalk and hostile to top-down messaging. While Democrats
last month participated in a CNN debate that featured questions asked
by voters via YouTube submissions, Republicans have been balking at the
idea of their own YouTube debate. It’s currently scheduled for
September 17, but so far only Ron Paul and McCain are certain to
attend.
In fact, Paul’s shrewdest move had nothing to do with getting ahead
of other Republicans in terms harnessing the power of the internet. It
was that he decided to run for president as a Republican rather than as
a Libertarian. That got him into the pre-primary Republican debates,
which gave him a national platform early on and created a virtuous
cycle for his campaign: Coverage of Paul’s unusual debate statements
led people to go online to find out more about him, and then they
donated money to him, which made Paul seem more viable than expected,
which then earned him more coverage, at which point the cycle
repeated.
The August 11 straw poll in Iowa will be the first test of whether
this cycle has produced enough support for Paul to become a serious
contender when Republicans are asked to vote for their best man. As
part of a national effort to help Paul’s chances in the straw poll, a
lot of his Seattle-area supporters have been making calls to Iowa
voters in recent weeks. Boyapati, the Google software engineer, hasn’t
had time to work the phones, but would if he could, and thinks that
even if Paul doesn’t do well in the straw poll, or does but then fails
to win the Republican nomination, something important will have been
accomplished. Something worth the investment of all this energy, money,
and hope.
“I think he’s still a long shot,” Boyapati conceded to me. “But I
think the most important thing is getting the ideas out to
America—that the Constitution is important, and the war was
wrong.”
