Wishful thinking: Why Ron Paul can’t (and won’t) be elected president

By David McElroy · August 12, 2011

I don’t watch presidential candidate “debates” anymore, and last night was no exception. You can usually predict the winner by figuring out which candidate has the lowest IQ and is willing to pander the most. That’s a good fit for the average voter. I don’t have a strong enough stomach to watch that.

I have a lot of friends, though, who are getting excited about Ron Paul‘s chances of winning the Republican nomination. His fundraising is kicking into high gear and his message is starting to catch on with younger people. The momentum is building for a grassroots campaign. Oh, wait. That was 2008, wasn’t it?

I’m having deja vu as I observe my excited libertarian (and some conservative) friends throw their efforts into a new Ron Paul campaign, because it really does feel a lot like 2008. I’m hearing the same things from his supporters. I’m hearing the same vague sense of irrational optimism. I’m having trouble figuring out why such bright people — many of whom I love and respect — are being sucked into a campaign that has no chance of winning. I frequently tell people that it would be easier for me to get my dog, Lucy, elected president than Paul — partly because Lucy never ran for president on a party platform that supported illegal drugs. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me remind you of my biases. I’ve written before about the fact that I like and respect Paul tremendously, but I won’t be voting for him. I won’t be voting for another candidate, though. If you’ve read much of what I’ve written here, you’ll understand why. I’ve given up on the coercive state and I’m looking for what comes next. Not only do I believe the state has no moral legitimacy, I also think it’s pragmatically impossible to save the American empire at this point, so I’m not trying. (Please read my previous article on the subject before continuing. I’ll wait here for you.)

I’m trying to make sure you understand up-front that I’m not trying to dissuade anyone from supporting Paul because I want you to support another candidate instead. I’m in the “Nobody for president” camp. In this article, though, we’re strictly going to look at the political realities. I’m basing this on my 20 years of experience working in politics on a state and local level. I haven’t worked for presidential campaigns, but the same reasoning applies.

Paul is going to lose for three simple reasons. First, his policies and priorities — as much sense as they make to me (and probably you) — aren’t shared by most other people. His economic policies resonate with Republican voters. If we were just electing a president based on economics, I’d give him a slight chance. But we’re not. A presidential campaign is about emotions concerning a lot of different things. If Paul ends up being seen as a serious candidate (which I don’t believe will happen anyway), he will be pummeled with his previous stances on military policy, foreign policy and social issues. His views are far out of step with Republican primary voters. That in itself will be enough to kill his chances of winning. Please just face it. You can’t talk people into agreeing with your logic. It’s not going to happen.

Second, the media don’t believe that Paul has a chance, so he’s not going to get especially favorable coverage. Nothing about him plays into any of the sort of story lines that media like to tell. For instance, after last night’s debate, the focus was on Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney. The media need to reduce things to two candidates in order to tell a story. With eight candidates in the debate, there will probably be three tiers in the media coverage: 1) The top two, in their judgement, 2) the ones who have a shot at moving up, in their judgement, and 3) the “also rans” who complete the field. Paul is in the third category.

They’ll be nice about the third group, but with the way televisions works, it’s impossible to give reasonable “mindshare” to all eight candidates. This isn’t a matter of the media trying to choose a candidate — as some of my conspiratorial friends always allege. It’s just a matter of the TV people having to concentrate on the few people they think have a shot, because that’s the way TV works. (I’ve recommended it over and over, but please real Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” if you want to understand why TV dumbs down public discourse. It’s not the media people. It’s the medium itself.)

Third, even if we could get past the fact that Paul’s positions radically diverging from those of Republican primary voters and even if we could convince the media to treat him as one of the top candidates, there’s one issue that will destroy him. Paul will not be willing to enlist in the “War on (Some) Drugs.” This is honest and principled — and he’s 100 percent right — but it’s political suicide. No matter how stupid it is to keep throwing money after fighting a “war” that can’t be won (and that’s destroying our civil liberties), Republican primary voters want someone who will promise to do it anyway. If Paul were a serious candidate at some point, all it would take to destroy him is to show his previous views about drug legalization (and decriminalization) and show quotes from the 1988 Libertarian Party platform, when Paul was its nominee. The sinister-sounding TV spots about “our children” being in danger with a Ron Paul presidency virtually write themselves.

I read a lot of people trying to convince folks that Paul has a chance. I like and respect many of these people, but they’re just plain wrong on this one. I would love to be wrong about this, but I’m not.

Ron Paul has no chance of being elected president. You’re much better off focusing on what you’re going to do under another four years of the Big Government Demopublican who really is going to be elected. Figure out whether it’s worth staying here or you want to go somewhere else or head for a remote mountain or an island. Whatever your plan might be. Working for Paul might make you feel good for a little while, but you won’t achieve your goal, despite the fact that some very sincere people are sure it’s finally going to be different this time. It’s not.

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Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

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