Dr. No
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First: Politics for him is a passion, not a career. Paul is one of few doctors in the House (eight, including dentists) and part of an even smaller group that has actively practiced medicine while holding office. After attending Gettysburg College and Duke University School of Medicine, Paul, who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, spent five years as an Air Force flight surgeon—two and a half on active duty at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio—then set up practice in Lake Jackson in 1968. Having taken over the practice of a retiring doctor, he was the only ob-gyn in Brazoria County. "On my first day, I had thirty to forty patients in my office," Paul says. "I delivered forty to fifty babies a month and did a lot of surgery. It was exactly what I was looking for." He was 41 and a prominent, successful physician when he was first elected to Congress. He is affluent, or whatever the notch below wealthy is. He doesn't need the job.
Second: His hero is neither a founding father nor a contemporary politician but an obscure Austrian economist whose ideas guide most of what Paul does. While he was pursuing his medical career, he became interested in economics, especially the works of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), a laissez-faire economist opposed to government intervention in markets and in favor of the gold standard. What launched Paul into politics were two distinctly un-Misean actions taken by President Richard Nixon in 1971: He intervened massively in the U.S. economy by establishing wage and price controls, and he took the country off the gold standard. For Paul, these actions were unthinkable exercises of federal power. We all have our moments of clarity. His epiphany came on August 15, 1971. "I remember the day very clearly," he says. "Nixon closed the gold window, which meant admitting that we could no longer meet our commitments and that there would be no more backing of the dollar. After that day, all money would be political money rather than money of real value. I was astounded." In 1974, the year of Nixon's resignation and possibly the worst year in American history for the Republican party, Paul, already the contrarian, decided to become a Republican and run for Congress from the 22nd District, which lies slightly to the north and east of the 14th (and which is now represented by Tom DeLay). He lost that election. Then he got lucky: When the winner resigned a year later, Paul won the special election that followed.
He quickly made a name for himself as the ultimate constitutional dogmatist: If it wasn't written in plain language in the Constitution, which allocated only a few specific powers to the federal government, he didn't believe in it. In Paul's view, government should provide for national defense, ensure fairness under the law, guarantee personal liberty—and get out of the way. That includes abortion, which he sees as murder, but he believes that the proper authority to deal with it is the state, not the federal government. What galls him more than anything else is the sheer size of government. He likes to remind people that in 1909 the cost of government at all levels came to 7.7 percent of the total domestic economy. Today that figure is 50 percent.
Though Paul is a Republican, he can be maddeningly uncooperative with his GOP colleagues, especially when it comes to spending taxpayers' money. In the eighties Republicans desperately needed Paul's vote in favor of the B-1 bomber. Despite enormous pressure, he refused. He saw it as a needless expenditure of taxpayer money to fund an expansionist foreign policy that he opposed. He even got a call from President Reagan and still would not change his vote. "The conservatives hated me for that," he says. He can also be, on occasion, something of a gadfly. When he was criticized for voting against the medal for Mother Teresa, he chivied his colleagues by challenging them to personally contribute $100 to mint the medal. No one did, of course. At the time, Paul observed, "It's easier to be generous with other people's money."
Paul served four terms in Congress, during which time he usually voted no, and sponsored dozens of bills that were instantly consigned to oblivion and a few, such as one that would have set term limits, that were ahead of their time. In 1984 he took his own advice and term-limited himself, made a hopeless run against Phil Gramm in the Republican Senate primary, then retired to doctoring—which he had kept doing the whole time anyway, seeing patients and delivering babies on Mondays and Saturdays for all of his eight years in Congress. He was then 49, had a prospering practice, and had no particular political ambitions. As always, he refused to take Medicare or Medicaid money from patients (he worked out a cash payment or did not charge them). He didn't believe in the welfare state, so why take its money?
For reasons that even he cannot quite explain, in 1987 Ron Paul became the Libertarian party's candidate for president of the United States. Though his positions on most issues are identical to those of the Libertarians (abortion being the main exception), Paul admits that this was a strange, almost Sisyphean move, considering his prospects for victory. "I probably invested close to a year," he says. "It was a lot of time and effort. Sometimes I had some ambivalence about how productive it was."As it turned out, it was hugely productive but not in ways that Paul could see then. Though he got less than one percent of the vote in the 1988 presidential election, he managed to unite a vast network of true believers—not only staunch Libertarians, but also anti-gun control folks, fiscal conservatives, home-schoolers, right-to-lifers, school prayer advocates, isolationists, and people who generally felt that the U.S. government was veering out of control. Their financial support would become a key factor in Paul's return to congressional politics.
That happened in 1996. With Nolan Ryan as his honorary campaign chairman, he entered a bruising Republican primary against incumbent Greg Laughlin, who had switched parties the year before. Paul was now running in a new district, the 14th (he had moved his residence from Lake Jackson to his beach house in Surfside). It was a demographic oddity that connected the Gulf Coast and Central Texas and included the Brazos, Colorado, and Guadalupe lower river basins and the small cities of Victoria, San Marcos, and Freeport. Paul immediately discovered that the electoral ground rules had changed: With the Democrats trying to regain control of the House, which they had lost two Dr. No years earlier, and Speaker Newt Gingrich backing Laughlin, whom GOP regulars viewed as the stronger candidate, someone who had run for president on the Libertarian ticket—and who had advocated things like the repeal of federal drug laws and an end to the "so-called drug war"—was now a much bigger and more visible target. "My image was completely different in 1996 than in 1976," Paul says. "You can't just get passed off as an average Republican having done what I did. We got hit hard."
Most of the hitting was on the drug issue, first by Laughlin, whom Paul beat convincingly in a runoff, then by Charles "Lefty" Morris, Paul's opponent in the general election. Morris was certain that Paul's radical views would discredit him with voters. "We just have to get his ideas out, and people will know what he really stands for," Morris said at the time. He ran ads saying that Paul advocated the legalization of illegal drugs, which was not entirely accurate. Though some of Paul's public remarks had suggested that he supported full drug legalization, his official position was (and is) that federal drug laws ought to be repealed: Let the states handle all drug laws. Then Morris' subalterns dug up something even more damaging to Paul: copies of a 1992 newsletter he had published that contained racially tinted remarks.
They caused a minor sensation. In one issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report, which he had published since 1985, he called former U.S. representative Barbara Jordan a "fraud" and a "half-educated victimologist." In another issue, he cited reports that 85 percent of all black men in Washington, D.C., are arrested at some point: "Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the 'criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal." And under the headline "Terrorist Update," he wrote: "If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."
In spite of calls from Gary Bledsoe, the president of the Texas State Conference of the NAACP, and other civil rights leaders for an apology for such obvious racial typecasting, Paul stood his ground. He said only that his remarks about Barbara Jordan related to her stands on affirmative action and that his written comments about blacks were in the context of "current events and statistical reports of the time." He denied any racist intent. What made the statements in the publication even more puzzling was that, in four terms as a U. S. congressman and one presidential race, Paul had never uttered anything remotely like this.
When I ask him why, he pauses for a moment, then says, "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me. It wasn't my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around. I think the one on Barbara Jordan was the saddest thing, because Barbara and I served together and actually she was a delightful lady." Paul says that item ended up there because "we wanted to do something on affirmative action, and it ended up in the newsletter and became personalized. I never personalize anything."
