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And yet other avid Paulites—most notably, techies—seem to have been plucked straight from the Dean camp. Dean has characterized his partnership with the Netroots online activists as completely organic (when a reporter asked him last year why he'd chosen to embrace the Net, he replied, "The Internet embraced us"), but the truth is that the tech crowd came late to the Dean campaign and in response to targeted outreach by staffers. "We had a tech council, we reached out to people like [open-source guru] Larry Lessig, we got [the tech blog] Slashdot—no other candidate had done that before," Teachout says. "But as politics go, it was not a natural fit. It was just the first time that anybody had talked to them."
When Paul talked to the tech crowd at Google last summer and promised to eliminate the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and the Department of Commerce, he spoke in Silicon Valley's lingua franca. Many valley libertarians are furious about the investor-protection rules of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law they blame for driving Wall Street IPOs to London. That kind of self-interested, anti-government leaning cross-pollinates in the techie brain with the yearning for a reassuringly Cartesian political philosophy. "Techies think of life as like code," says Peter Leyden, a Democratic strategist and former editor of Silicon Valley's original libertarian-leaning tech bible, Wired. "You just find where the bug is and fix it." Capitalism and democracy are seen as self-regulating systems that bureaucrats can only screw up—exactly the way Paul sees them.
Obviously, Paul's radical views make appealing to a broad swath of the electorate more difficult than it would be for more mainstream candidates. Still, a recent study by the Cato Institute found that some 15 percent of voters hold typically libertarian opinions on the issues, and trends suggest they're hungry for a political leader they can believe in. Although they've most often voted Republican—enthusiastically for Goldwater in 1964 and Reagan in 1980—they began to abandon the GOP in droves just as the party pressed ahead with the Patriot Act, Guantánamo, and the war in Iraq. In the 2002 midterm elections, Republicans won 70 percent of the libertarian vote to the Democrats' 23, but in 2006, the split was much closer: 54-46.
This year, Paul engaged these voters in ways no fellow Republican dared, and no Libertarian Party candidate had thought to try, wrapping his opposition to domestic spying, torture, and taxes in a shrewd populism. During the Republican debates, the other candidates emphasized wealth and security, but "the rhetoric of freedom was almost entirely missing, except for Ron Paul," Teachout observes. "This is a really deep American idea. If only one candidate talks about it, that's really exciting [to voters], and there is some anger that the other candidates are not."
Paul is soft-spoken, charming, and articulate but not particularly charismatic. Supporters tend to see him as a straight-talking everyman, someone for whom appearances are less important than classic American values. He grew up on a Pennsylvania dairy farm, where his first job, at age five, was to watch as his uncle washed milk bottles and put them on a conveyor belt. He earned a penny for every dirty bottle he found. Money saved from delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, and working at a drug store and coffee shop paid for college. Ron Paul was "brought up with the ethic that you worked for six days a week and went to church on the seventh," his wife, Carol, has written. These early experiences would inform his belief that anyone can succeed in life—without the help of the government.
Paul's near mythical biography helps him evoke the memory of an older, better, and mostly forgotten American republic, lending his radical ideas the legitimizing tinge of history. Throughout the campaign, Paul described himself as a Constitutionalist and pledged to uphold the document as the Founding Fathers (and not the Bush administration) had intended. And he revived a nineteenth-century debate over the gold standard, addressing a long-dormant American suspicion of the federal banking system that had been awakened by the tumbling dollar.
"He is calling on our collective memory with these symbols that have a deep American resonance," Teachout says. "The Constitution and the gold standard are both really visceral symbols at a time when people are feeling insecure."
In a few other ways that went beyond the standard small-government script, Paul capitalized upon American disquiet. He broke with most libertarians to support much tighter controls on immigration, tapping into resurgent American nativism. And his pro-life views, though they doubtless wooed some cultural conservatives, aren't shared by the Libertarian Party. Still, both Paul stances find a place in the wider libertarian tent, falling into an ideological sideshow, known as paleolibertarianism, which seeks common cause with the conservative movement that predated the neocons. The best-known exponent of this strain, Lewellyn Rockwell, is Paul's former chief of staff and directs the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a paleolibertarian think tank in Auburn, Alabama.
The clear downside of Paul's populist brand of libertarianism is that it has attracted an unusual amount of support for his campaign among racists. In November, the Paul campaign refused to return a $500 donation from the publisher of a well-known neo-Nazi website after it was brought to his attention. Two months later, The New Republic reported that dozens of overtly racist articles had appeared over the span of decades in newsletters published under Paul's name. Although Paul denied knowledge of the articles, Munger, the Libertarian Duke political scientist, faults him for, at minimum, creating an environment in which racism flourishes. As if to make amends, Paul held his third money-bomb fundraiser, which raised nearly $2 million, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. "Two great men, with one great message," says the script of a slick video promoting the event. Both King and Paul were fighting back against the "War on Freedom," according to the video.
A montage of protest and battle footage that screens like the preview to a Hollywood thriller, the video was created and posted on YouTube by a twenty-five-year-old. It is one of hundreds of independent short films, music videos, and websites supporting Paul that have been posted online by volunteers in their twenties and thirties. Many of the ads call to mind libertarian messages in commercials such as Apple's "Think Different" campaign, a fitting parallel given that the Libertarian Party was founded in 1971 in the living room of an advertising executive. "We might be coming full circle," Teachout says, "where there is this co-option [in campaign ads] of this libertarian language in advertising—be yourself, don't be dominated—which is now actually pretty deeply embedded in young people."
As the major state primaries neared, Paul's newbie volunteers had created so many pro-Paul ads on the Net, donated so much money, and swarmed so many online straw polls (often to the point that media outlets spiked the polls or removed Paul's name) that they posed the risk of creating an echo chamber. Someone who lived online might never know that Paul polled in the low single digits in the real world. Many Netizens believed the polls were wrong and the media were complicit in the cover-up. "People I know, people who were otherwise rational, they were shocked when he did so poorly, when the polls proved accurate," Munger says. He worries that the crushing defeat might discourage Paulites from future activism. "A lot of them are going to swear off politics forever."
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