Dr. No
Republican congressman Ron Paul of Surfside says no to PAC contributions. He says no to pork barrel spending for his district. He says no to honoring Mother Teresa. And he has no influence in Washington. So why do the Democrats have no chance of beating him?
(Page 3 of 3)
His reasons for keeping this a secret are harder to understand: "They were never my words, but I had some moral responsibility for them . . . I actually really wanted to try to explain that it doesn't come from me directly, but they [campaign aides] said that's too confusing. 'It appeared in your letter and your name was on that letter and therefore you have to live with it.'" It is a measure of his stubbornness, determination, and ultimately his contrarian nature that, until this surprising volte-face in our interview, he had never shared this secret. It seems, in retrospect, that it would have been far, far easier to have told the truth at the time.
That controversy ought to have destroyed him. Lefty Morris certainly thought it would, and things looked even bleaker for Paul when the AFL-CIO kicked in with a heavy rotation of anti-Paul ads. That may explain why, even after midnight on Election Day, when the newspapers were all giving the election to Paul, Morris still refused to concede. He simply couldn't believe it.
As it turned out, Morris had underestimated Paul's ability both to raise money from his national network of donors and to successfully paint his opponent as a tool of trial lawyers and big labor. Paul raised $1.2 million to Morris' $472,153. "He has one of the largest contributor bases in Congress, outside of the leadership," says Ken Bryan, a political consultant who has worked for Democratic state senator Ken Armbrister and for Paul opponents Laughlin and Loy Sneary. According to Paul's campaign manager, Mark Elam, Paul raises a lot of money in small amounts. "He appeals to people nationwide," he says. "We have used direct mail and built our own contributors' list. The vast majority of it comes from individuals, at an average of about forty dollars." That money enabled him to launch a massive direct-mail campaign in the 14th Congressional District.
In the 1998 election, the Democrats were just as certain that Paul could be beaten. His opponent was Loy Sneary, a rice farmer from Bay City and a former Matagorda County judge. This time even more national party money and union money flowed into the 14th. "The Democrats officially targeted us both times," says Elam. After all, here was a politician foolish enough to preach against federal farm subsidies in a rural district. And he was now famous as Dr. No, the man who voted against everything.
Again, Paul drew on his vast contributor base, outraising Sneary $2.1 million to $734,000. And again he won, this time by 55 percent to 44 percent—a significant improvement over his 51 to 48 win over Morris. In 2000 Paul raised $2.4 million to Sneary's $1.1 million and widened his margin yet again, to 60 to 40.
In the years of defending himself against the assembled liberal multitudes, Paul has learned a slashing campaign style of his own. "Ron Paul specializes in attack, only he is much better at it than they are," says Dan Cobb, the editorial page editor of the Victoria Advocate, which endorsed Sneary. "He used Sneary's own record as a county judge to attack him in a misleading fashion, but it worked." Indeed, in a "Truth Test" report during the 2000 campaign, TV station KVUE in Austin found three out of four claims in Paul's ads to be false; a fourth was "true but misleading." Says Sneary, who is still upset about the campaign: "It's one thing when you criticize our position. It's another thing to take that information and use half-truths and no truths in a campaign."
Cobb says that, in part, Sneary and the Democrats asked for it. "He [Sneary] tried to paint Paul as a right-wing monster. He's not that. He's a bundle of interesting points of view, no question. You can't turn that into a terrible person. It's just nonsense and people don't buy it because they know him." Cobb also says Sneary was wrong, strategically, to attack Paul: "It should be obvious by now that you can't attack him. All you can do is run a positive campaign. People in the Fourteenth feel they know exactly where Paul stands. He is consistent and adheres to his principles. He has great personal integrity."
The question about someone like Ron Paul, who always votes his conscience and never cuts a deal, is whether he can be effective. That depends upon how you define "effective." Out in his district, where he spends three to four days a week, every week, often taking one or two of his fifteen grandchildren out politicking with him, it is quickly apparent how good he is at keeping in touch with his constituents. He is famous for attending Boy Scout honor ceremonies and graduations and civic club luncheons and just about any event that will have him. I recently followed him as he made his rounds in his district. He began the day at his home in Surfside, driving east with a staffer to Victoria. He met with the editors of the Victoria Advocate, attended two war-medal ceremonies in Victoria and Bay City, made several calls on constituents, met with his staff briefly at his district office, listened to the complaints of a commercial fisherman, and gave a midday speech to a civic group. By the end of the day, he had driven three hundred miles or more. For him, this is politics as usual.
The medal ceremonies are a good example of why Paul is so effective as a candidate. They are the result of efforts by his staff to secure medals for veterans who never received them. These are moving events, and Paul does dozens of them each year. The recipients' families often weep when they receive the medals that Paul's staff has had framed, usually with photographs of the soldier as a young man. Paul gives a short speech, celebrating the medal winners and plugging a few of his own political causes. At several stops people who know him as a doctor come up to him. "Guess what?" one young woman says as we stand in the parking lot of a small newspaper. "You delivered me!" Several of his older constituents mention the help they got from Paul in getting free or discounted prescription drugs by exploiting a little-known patient-assistance program offered by drug companies. His staff makes an effort to send all of his constituents birthday cards, as well as condolences at the death of a family member.
At the Northside Rotary Club luncheon at the Victoria Country Club, Paul is in his usual form. He is not a particularly inspiring speaker, but he pulls no punches: a combination of bland and apocalyptic. He talks of the "bubble" world economy, of the Federal Reserve System as the "counterfeiter for the world." He says that, contrary to what everyone else in Washington thinks, there is no surplus in the Treasury. He says we should get rid of the income tax, get rid of the Food and Drug Administration ("It does more harm than good"), and abolish the Environmental Protection Agency ("It now controls your land").
The businessmen in attendance applaud politely. They seem to be somewhat perplexed by Paul's monetary theories, strongly in favor of his anti-tax message, and amused by some of the anti-government rhetoric. A couple of them tell me that they like him because he votes against taxes. But what he actually says in his twenty-minute speech doesn't seem to matter that much to the one hundred or so Rotarians. In a strange way, he transcends his message. They don't see Dr. No, the man who wants to dismantle Washington. They just see good old Ron Paul, the taxpayers' best friend.
But if effectiveness is measured by his success at sponsoring and passing bills in Congress, he does not score as well. He is not, after all, a leader or a consensus builder. He is a loner, an outsider. "We don't kid ourselves about the chance of passage of a lot of these bills," concedes Paul's press secretary, Jeff Deist. In his past three terms in Congress, Paul has managed to get only two pieces of his own legislation onto the floor and into law: a bill to prohibit the Department of Housing and Urban Development from seizing a church in New York State by eminent domain and a bill transferring ownership of the Lake Texana dam project from the federal government back to the State of Texas. He has, in addition, managed to get four amendments into other bills, including prohibitions on funding for national ID numbers and federal teacher certification. That doesn't mean he doesn't try to pass legislation. In the 106th Congress he sponsored 59 bills, including measures abolishing the income tax and estate and gift taxes, withdrawing the U.S. from the World Trade Organization, ensuring the integrity of Social Security trust funds, and prohibiting the Department of Defense from using troops in Kosovo unless specifically authorized by law. In the current Congress, he is sponsoring 35 bills. He again proposes to abolish the personal income tax, he wants to repeal the War Powers Resolution so that the president cannot deploy American troops without a declaration of war by Congress, and he has moved to end U.S. membership in the United Nations. Few of these have even been debated on the floor, let alone voted on. His greatest influence these days is probably felt in the area of individual privacy; he has worked tirelessly against national ID cards and other forms of what he considers to be federal snooping.
"Principles have a price," says Charlie Cook, who publishes the Cook Political Report in Washington. "Ron Paul has a rigid, inflexible ideology, and it has undermined his effectiveness. But he probably sleeps better than anyone else on Capitol Hill." Paul's own answer is short and vintage Ron Paul. "The only real measure of effectiveness," he says, "is if I stand up for people's rights and their liberty and the Constitution."
My Library
Add your comment »