FreedomsAdvocate.com

April 21, 2008 Issue Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative mebeli

The Ron Paul Evolution The campaign winds down, but the movement is just beginning.
by Daniel McCarthy

"Ron Paul owns the future," influential evangelical Doug Wead concluded in an early April post on his personal blog. Wead makes an unlikely Paul enthusiast: his religious background might seem a better fit for Mike Huckabee. And his personal history-as an adviser to both Presidents Bush-might have inclined him toward the triumphant establishment candidate, John McCain.

But in Ron Paul and the movement that championed him, Wead saw something remarkable: "His is a campaign of ideas. ... His army was left unchallenged on the battlefield. Now their ideas have taken root and they will grow." Yes, they will-they have already begun to.

The Ron Paul "revolution," as it is known to its adherents, has made deep inroads into an area where Republicans are otherwise weak: energizing and mobilizing young people. Already, Paul has inspired other Republicans, mostly young themselves, to campaign for Congress on his antiwar, fiscally conservative platform. A new youth movement is also coming into being as Students for Ron Paul reconfigures into a permanent libertarian-conservative activist organization, Young Americans for Liberty.

And these are just the first manifestations of the revolution's second act, as youth gains political experience. Wead had no connection to the campaign, but early on he sensed what it might become.

The day after Super Tuesday, Wead compared the legacy of the Paul campaign to that of Barry Goldwater's 1964 run. Paul's supporters, he wrote, "are producing blogs and papers and books and like Goldwater's revolution they will be able to say that they could see what the country missed. They were there when history was made."