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Ron Paul isn’t a racist, but he’s shown remarkably poor judgment so far related to his old newsletters containing racially charged language. If you’re going to play in the Big Leagues, you have to play by Big League rules. His response to the newsletter issue so far has been completely Bush League.

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, here’s the issue. Back in the late ’80s and ’90s, Paul published a series of political newsletters as a moneymaking venture. They were written in his name, but he obviously didn’t write them. (I’ve ghost-written hundreds of pieces for clients in the past. It’s perfectly acceptable.) But some of the newsletters have racial language in them that I don’t find acceptable, and it’s hard for me to believe anybody else would.

The newsletters are aimed at a strongly conservative white audience. They paint the world in terms of good Christian white folks vs. the black “thugs” and gays who “hate Euro-American civilization and everything it stands for.” The framing of the issues is repugnant. In a direct mail piece advertising the newsletter, it goes far enough to forecast a “race war.” You just can’t come up with a good enough excuse to justify the content.

I think I understand what happened, at least from a political point of view. The people running the newsletter — which might or might not have actually included Paul — were targeting an audience of the Old Right, trying to build bridges between libertarian economic ideas and what those unreconstructed old-time conservatives already believed. Ever since the ’60s, various people have tried to build some sort of fusion between libertarians and existing groups. I see this as a misguided attempt to do that with the Old Right conservatives it was obviously written to appeal to.

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It’s been like something from the kind of Christmas movie that doesn’t get made anymore. All over the country, anonymous people have been showing up at Kmart stores (and a couple of other chains) and paying for thousands of dollars worth of Christmas presents for strangers.

Nobody knows what’s going on. Nobody seems to have organized it. As far as anyone can tell, it’s just people voluntarily helping people — without having any politician or bureaucrat force them to.

I’d read about the phenomenon last week, and I saw a story in the Birmingham paper Tuesday about it happening at several local stores. The largest single contributor paid $6,400 at one local Kmart toward other people’s layaways. So what is going on?

I think it’s simple. There are a lot of really good-hearted people who truly want to help others. Maybe you don’t really have to hold a gun to folks’ heads to get them to want to help people. And maybe those folks prefer deciding for themselves what to do with the money they donate — instead of having government bureaucrats decide for them.

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I love to watch people’s attitudes toward media shift as the facts of a story changes. I’m never sure whether what I’m seeing is funny or pathetic, though. I guess it’s both.

I’m reminded of that again as I watch various people try to decide what they think of media reports in the last week or two that Ron Paul just might be doing well in Iowa. As the facts of the story have changed, pro-Paul and anti-Paul people have both scrambled to spin the media’s role to suit their own narrative.

For a long time, there wasn’t anything especially positive for the media to report about Paul. He hung around down around 10 percent in real polls and it was clear to all that his positions weren’t going to be adopted by the mainstream anytime soon, so he wasn’t someone to take especially seriously in news coverage. (Let’s not get sidetracked into fanatical craziness about straw polls and website “polls,” both of which are about as close to meaningless as you can get.)

During that period, news coverage was mostly about which candidates were jockeying for the lead or about which new candidates were seen as having the potential to become serious challengers. There wasn’t much to say about Paul in either of those regards. (Remember that the media cover elections as though they’re horse races, not as though they’re about ideas. The public wouldn’t bother to read or watch actual intellectual coverage.) So during that period, all I heard was screams from my Paul-loving friends that the media “hate” Paul and that they’re “trying to make sure he can’t win.”

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