The Elephant in the Room: Video Extra 
The Elephant in the Room
Ron Paul's rivals for the Republican presidential nomination say his opposition to the Iraq war makes him a traitor to his party. He says it makes him the only genuine Republican in the race.
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A reporter asked if we should base American foreign policy on what somebody like Osama bin Laden has to say. “Why don’t you listen to the CIA,” Paul retorted. “They call it blowback. They have warned us about that. Just think, we had been allies with Saddam Hussein, and now we had to go in there and fight him. We used to be allies with Osama bin Laden; we put the shah in power in Iran. There’s always a reaction to our action. And to deny that is foolhardy. And it will bankrupt this country. Our empire will end. And that’s really the challenge here. What’s going to come first: the wisdom to come home and not bully the world or bankruptcy?
“And I suspect on the Internet tomorrow we’ll find out that there’s a lot of people out there who are sick of this war and who will support me more strongly and more numerously than ever before, because I’m on the right side of that issue. It’s a Republican position, it’s a conservative position, it’s a constitutional position. And the country politically is ready for it. I mean, the people want this war ended. They’re sick and tired of this.”
Paul stood his ground for half an hour, until reporters began drifting off to find other candidates. He turned to me, the only one still standing there with a tape recorder, the look on his face still defiant. When he saw it was me, he said, “Hi,” in a grim voice and looked at the ground. He didn’t seem like a man who just wanted to get his name in the papers at any cost. He seemed like a man worried that he’d just come out on the losing side of an argument he could have and should have won.
Suddenly, Special Agent Branham leaned in and made an exaggerated poking motion at Paul and said, “Well, America knows who you are now!” He began laughing heartily. Jesse and Kent smiled, looking at Paul to see if he was laughing, which he was, albeit a little uncertainly. His posture was starting to sag a bit. “How about that?” Branham added, a little more soberly. “I think it’s great.”
“Well, I just wish I’d heard it,” Carol said, complaining about the poor acoustics in the front rows. “Giuliani is so stupid!” she added, as if the exchange had merely confirmed something she’d suspected for a long time. “How anyone could vote for him is beyond me.”
On the other side of the room, Fox News had set up a stage for a special live broadcast of the Hannity & Colmes talk show, one of Fox’s premier brands. One by one, the candidates sat down for brief post-debate interviews.
“What was your reaction to the confrontation between Ron Paul and Mayor Giuliani?” Alan Colmes asked McCain. “Don’t our policies at all have anything to do with why we are disdained by people overseas?”
“I thought Mayor Giuliani’s intercession there was appropriate and, frankly, very, very excellent. I really appreciated it,” McCain said, in his vaguely patronizing, sotto voce style. “Because we should never, never believe that we brought on this conflict. This is an evil force that is trying to destroy everything we stand for and believe in. And this is a transcendent struggle.” Then he added, somewhat incongruously, “That’s why I want to be president of the United States.”
The show’s producer came over and told Paul he would go on at 11:35 for five minutes. “That’s longer than I got onstage,” Paul joked. After the Fox producer moved on, Paul and his team put their heads together for a quick strategy session. Sean Hannity, a younger, brasher version of Bill O’Reilly with a head of thick black hair and TV weatherman good looks, was a well-known fan of Giuliani’s and was one of those who’d suggested that Paul had somehow rigged the online poll following the California debate. (“Sean Hannity is very good at what he does. He’s a neocon attack dog,” Jesse said later.)
“I’m sure they’ll ask me about all that with Giuliani,” Paul said ruefully.
“It was painful, but I think you made your point,” Kent said.
“Well, we can respond that Giuliani is just pandering, using the 9/11 victims for political gain,” Jesse offered.
“Well, I don’t think I’ll do that,” Paul replied.
As we waited in line near the soundstage for Paul’s turn, Special Agent Branham leaned over and mentioned that Paul was winning Fox News’s text-messaging poll of debate viewers, the results of which were scrolling across the bottom of a monitor to the right of the Hannity & Colmes stage. I pointed this out to Kent, who excitedly told Paul. “My understanding is these text polls can’t be manipulated,” Kent told me. A few feet way, I noticed Paul’s granddaughters staring at the monitor, furiously texting away on their cell phones.
The five minutes had become four by the time it was Paul’s turn to go on. He and Colmes chatted amiably as a producer miked him up and sat him down between the two hosts, but Hannity just studied his notes, refusing to make eye contact.
After Colmes gently quizzed Paul on his libertarian principles, Hannity jumped in and began interrogating Paul about his support of a noninterventionist foreign policy. Didn’t we have a moral obligation to intervene in cases like the Gulf War, Hannity asked, especially when Saddam had gassed his own people? “You’d stand by and let that immorality happen?” he demanded.
“We have on numerous occasions,” Paul replied.
“You support that?”
Paul attempted to elucidate, but Hannity kept cutting him off, until finally Colmes came to his aid: “The fact is, the Reagan administration stood by while the Kurds were being gassed; it happened in 1988, and we didn’t do anything about it.”
Paul suddenly found his voice. “What did we do with Pol Pot?” he shouted, throwing his arms up in the air. Colmes was earnestly trying to wrap up the interview, but Hannity ignored him.
“You would stand by and do that. I would not,” he said to Paul. “I think that’s immoral.”
“Well, would you have the courtesy to ask the Congress to declare war?” Paul retorted.
Paul and Hannity were still going at it off camera but not off mike, as Colmes finally succeeded in wrapping up the segment. Paul stood up abruptly when it was over, but the stage director waved him back down until the outro was over and the mikes were dead. Hannity continued to jaw at Paul as the commercial rolled, and Jesse and I leaned over the stage railing trying to listen. “What’s he saying?” Carol asked. “He’s talking about Rwanda and our obligations and blah, blah, blah,” Jesse said, laughing dismissively. “It doesn’t sound like Sean Hannity understands the Constitution very well.”
As Paul stepped down from the stage, Jesse and Kent and Carol folded around him. “Good job,” Jesse said. “You stood your ground.”
Paul didn’t look too sure; he looked mad and shook-up. Then an old man in a cheap suit and loafers came over with a disposable camera in hand and asked Paul for a photo. I wondered how he’d gotten backstage, but Paul gratefully agreed.
Jesse mentioned Paul’s supporters in front of the Capitol. Though it was after midnight, he suspected they were still down there. “You up for going down and meeting some people?” he asked Paul.
“You bet,” Paul said. “Let’s do it.”
About twenty people were still at the camp, clustered around the Granny Warriors’ RV. When they saw Paul, they sent up a cheer. Everyone wanted to pose with him for cell phone photos and get his autograph. Paul seemed instantly recharged by their enthusiasm. “I appreciate what you do,” he kept saying. Somebody played a recording of yet another song written for Paul, this one a kind of blues-rock ballad.
“We’ve got a free T-shirt for you. What size T-shirt does Ron wear?” somebody shouted. Paul was presented with a T-shirt bearing a swastika over an image of a national ID card, an idea that is proposed from time to time in Congress and which many libertarians find Orwellian. Underneath were the words “May I See Your Papers, Please?” Paul shook his head when he saw it. “Isn’t it sad?” he said. A middle-aged man who called himself Steve the Sign Guy sidled up to Paul. “I have to do my thing,” he said, gently elbowing everyone aside as a friend videotaped him. When he got next to Paul, he shouted, “Nine-eleven was an inside job!” Everyone laughed, including Paul, who gladly played along.
“But the government did an investigation,” Paul said in mock protest.
“I bet Ghoul-iani did the investigation!” the Sign Guy yelled.
The two Granny Warriors asked for a photo. “My wife is a granny,” Paul said. “Can she get in here?”
As I worked my way out of the throng, a woman grabbed me by the arm. “He’s talking to one of our service members,” she said, pulling me back toward Paul. It was the tattooed young man I had seen at the RV that afternoon; he had waited all day to talk to Paul. The crowd grew quiet as the young man told his story. He had done 27 months in Iraq over the past three years, he said. His wife had served too, and she had been seriously wounded by an IED. “I’ve had a lot of friends that died over there, so something has to change,” he said.
Paul asked if things were getting better or worse in Iraq.
“It’s getting worse,” the young man said. “In the States you can only see so much, but in Iraq—these Iraqi soldiers we’re supposed to train, their heart isn’t in it.”
The militias, on the other hand, were getting bolder, he said. “Let’s talk about [Muqtada al-] Sadr. That guy—we know he’s responsible for killing Americans. We’ve got it in intel briefs. But his people are rolling through the checkpoints, and we can’t touch ‘em.”
He sounded exasperated and tired. “I ain’t tryin’ to toot my horn, but I got two Bronze Stars, so I got plenty of credibility,” he said. “But I don’t know. I can’t find an appropriate outlet, you know?”
“It’ll come, it’ll come,” Paul said reassuringly. “If you’re available to tell the truth, someone will listen to you.”
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