Rep. Ron Paul, G.O.P. Loner, Comes In From Cold By KATE ZERNIKE |
December 12, 2010
WASHINGTON — As virtually all of Washington was declaring
WikiLeaks’s disclosures of secret diplomatic cables
an act of treason, Representative Ron Paul was applauding
the organization for exposing the United States’ “delusional
foreign policy.”
For this, the conservative blog RedState dubbed him “Al
Qaeda’s favorite member of Congress.”
It was hardly the first time that Mr. Paul had marched
to his own beat. During his campaign for the Republican
presidential nomination in 2008, he was best remembered
for declaring in a debate that the 9/11 attacks were the
Muslim world’s response to American military intervention
around the globe. A fellow candidate, former Mayor Rudolph
W. Giuliani of New York, interrupted and demanded that he
take back the words — a request that Mr. Paul refused.
During his 20 years in Congress, Mr. Paul has staked out
the lonely end of 434-to-1 votes against legislation that
he considers unconstitutional, even on issues as ceremonial
as granting Mother Teresa a Congressional Gold Medal. His
colleagues have dubbed him “Dr. No,” but his
wife will insist that they have the spelling wrong: he is
really Dr. Know.
Now it appears others are beginning to credit him with
some wisdom — or at least acknowledging his passionate
following.
After years of blocking him from a leadership position,
Mr. Paul’s fellow Republicans have named him chairman
of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which
oversees the Federal Reserve as well as the currency and
the valuation of the dollar.
Mr. Paul has strong views on those issues. He has written
a book called “End the Fed”; he embraces Austrian
economic thought, which holds that the government has no
role in regulating the economy; and he advocates a return
to the gold standard.
Many of the new Republicans in the next Congress campaigned
on precisely the issues that Mr. Paul has been talking about
for 40 years: forbidding Congress from any action not explicitly
authorized in the Constitution, eliminating entire federal
departments as unconstitutional and checking the power of
the Fed.
He has been called the “intellectual godfather of
the Tea Party,” but he also is the real father of
the Tea Party movement’s most high-profile winner,
Senator-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky. (The two will be roommates
in Ron Paul’s Virginia condominium. “I told
him as long as he didn’t expect me to cook,”
the elder Mr. Paul said. “I’m not going to take
care of him the way his mother did.”)
Republicans had blocked Mr. Paul from leading the monetary
policy panel once before, and banking executives reportedly
urged them to do so again. But Republicans on Capitol Hill
increasingly recognize that Mr. Paul has a following —
among his supporters from 2008 and within the Tea Party,
which helped the Republicans recapture the House majority
by picking up Mr. Paul’s longstanding and highly vocal
opposition to the federal debt.
Aides, supporters and television interviewers now use words
like “vindicated” to describe him — a
term Mr. Paul, a 75-year-old obstetrician with the manner
of a country doctor, brushes off.
“I don’t think it’s very personal,”
he said in an interview in his office on the Hill, where
he has represented the 14th District of Texas on and off
since 1976. “People are really worried about what’s
happening, so they’re searching, and I think they
see that we’ve been offering answers.”
If there is vindication here, Mr. Paul says, it is for
Austrian economic theory — an anti-Keynesian model
that many mainstream economists consider radical and dismiss
as magical thinking.
The theory argues that markets operate properly only when
they are unfettered by government regulation and intervention.
It holds that the government should not have a central bank
or dictate economic or monetary policy. Once the government
begins any economic planning, such thinking goes, it ends
up making all the economic decisions for its citizens, essentially
enslaving them.
The walls of Mr. Paul’s Congressional office are
devoid of the usual pictures with presidents and other dignitaries.
Instead, there are portraits of Ludwig von Mises and Murray
Rothbard, titans of the Austrian school. For years, Mr.
Paul would talk about their ideas and eyes would glaze over.
But during his presidential campaign, he said he began to
notice a glimmer of recognition among those who attended
his events, particularly on college campuses.
Mr. Paul now views his exchange with Mr. Giuliani in 2008
as a crucial moment in his drive for more supporters. “A
lot of them said, ‘I’d never heard of you, and
I liked what you said and I went and checked your voting
record and you’d actually voted that way,’ ”
he said. “They’d see that the thing that everybody
on the House floor considered a liability for 20 years,
my single ‘no’ votes, they’d say, ‘He
did that himself; he really must believe this.’ ”
His campaign that year attracted a coalition that even
he recognizes does not always stand together: young people
who liked his advocacy of greater civil liberties and the
decriminalization of marijuana; conservatives who nodded
at his antidebt message; and others who agreed with his
opposition to the Iraq war.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, he was out of
favor with the reigning neoconservatives who were alarmed
at his anti-interventionism. He still gives many conservatives
fits with comments like his praise for WikiLeaks.
And many of those who follow the Fed closely say his ideas
are “very strange indeed,” in the words of Lyle
E. Gramley, a former governor of the Fed who is now a senior
economic adviser at the Potomac Research Group. “I
don’t think he understands what central banking is
all about,” Mr. Gramley said.
Putting such a critic of the Federal Reserve chairman,
Ben S. Bernanke, in such a prominent role, he added, could
damage economic confidence.
“The public doesn’t understand how serious
the problem was and why the Fed had to take the action it
did,” Mr. Gramley said. "Having someone in Congress
taking shots at the Fed makes the situation uneasy.”
Still, Mr. Paul says, his colleagues respect his following
outside Washington. “I was on the House floor today,”
he said, “and somebody I don’t know real well,
another Republican, he was talking to two other members,
and he knew I was listening. He pointed at me and said,
‘That guy has more bumper stickers in my district
than I do!’ ”
Interview requests are so common that Mr. Paul has set
up a camera and studio backdrop in his district office to
save him the hour’s drive to television stations in
Houston.
His bill demanding a full audit of the Fed, which he had
unsuccessfully pushed for years, attracted 320 co-sponsors
in the House this year.
And the lunches that he has held in his office every Thursday,
where lawmakers can meet intellectuals and policymakers
who embrace Austrian economics, have become more crowded,
drawing Tea Party celebrities like Congresswoman Michele
Bachmann of Minnesota.
“For a long time, a lot of people in Congress on
both sides of the aisle agreed with Ron a lot of the time
but felt it wasn’t safe to go there,” said Jesse
Benton, a longtime Ron Paul aide who ran Rand Paul’s
Senate campaign.
The father is about to gain even greater visibility. He
says he will use his new chairmanship to renew his push
for a full audit of the Fed and to hold a series of hearings
on monetary policy.
On Web sites for Ron Paul fans, there are urgent pleas
for a father-son (or son-father) “Paul/Paul 2012”
ticket. But in an interview, the senior Mr. Paul seemed
taken by surprise by the suggestion of teaming up. While
he is bursting-proud of his son, he is not necessarily ready
to yield the spotlight: He is pondering another presidential
run on his own.
“I’d say it’s at least 50-50 that I’ll
run again,” he said, adding that he would look at
where the economy is. (Aides add that it would depend a
lot on what his wife, Carol, says.)
But for all the ways the Tea Party echoes Mr. Paul on fiscal
issues, it is not clear such support would carry over into
a presidential campaign. The last time he ran, he won less
than 2 percent of the vote, though that was before the Tea
Party became a force in politics.
Even many Tea Party conservatives are not on board with
Mr. Paul’s beliefs about scaling back the United States
military worldwide. And Paul supporters look on the Tea
Party with some disdain.
Mr. Paul acknowledged the sometimes competing interests
among Tea Party supporters and his fans. “What brings
them together is this acceptance that there’s something
really wrong, that we’ve spent too much money and
government’s too big,” he said.
That, he added, was why he had to work at keeping up his
influence, particularly in spreading the word about the
cost of foreign interventions.
Still, he noted: “We’re further along than
I would have expected in getting our message out in front.
I thought I’d be long gone from Congress before anybody
would pay much attention.”