Kelefa Sanneh: Party Crasher | The New Yorker
To see Ron Paul on the Republican debate stage is to be reminded that the Party’s libertarian streak is so thin as to be almost invisible. During the debates, when he warns against threatening Iran, or calls the war on drugs “a total failure,” or observes that “rich white people don’t get the death penalty very often,” he seems like a man competing in an entirely separate contest, and perhaps he is. Last summer’s fierce fight over the debt limit convinced some liberals that the Republicans had become the party of small-government extremism. But in Paul’s view that kind of dispute—an argument about whether to attach conditions to a bill authorizing the federal government to pay an enormous debt that it has already incurred—only illustrates how far the Republicans are from the kind of radical bureaucratic abolition that he would like to see. Unlike many of his Republican colleagues in the House, Paul cares more about cutting spending than about cutting taxes, because he knows that tax cuts don’t necessarily make government smaller—sometimes they just make the deficit bigger.
In theory, Paul should be able to find common ground with Democrats on non-economic issues, and he cites Dennis Kucinich, the liberal congressman from Ohio, as an ally on foreign policy and civil liberties. But he hasn’t found much to admire about the Obama Administration, which has hung its reputation on expansive domestic programs and aggressive antiterrorism. “We thought Obama might help us and get us out of some of these messes,” he says. “But now we’re in more countries than ever—we can’t even keep track of how many places our troops are!”
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