Ron Paul’s supporters are regular accused of hoping for their own messiah. They’re tarred with the same brush used on the Hope-and-Change unicorn squad. Doesn’t make sense to me, because nobody wants a messiah who promises to leave everybody alone as much as possible. That’s almost an anti-messiah.
After last night’s Iowa caucus, Tam sees it like this:
In third place, we have the guy who is rapidly becoming the most, if not only, palatable GOP candidate to me, which says more about the rest of the field than it does about Ron Paul. At least his campaign seems to revolve around laws he wants to see repealed rather than ones he wants to see passed. People are yelling that he wants to dismantle the federal government and pull all our troops back to a defensive posture (as though these are bad things) but we're only voting for president here, not priest-king. He's not going to be able to unilaterally do a lot of the things people are afraid he will.
A president can want a lot of stuff, but is lucky to see a tiny fraction of his wishes come true. At least I can find a tiny fraction of Ron's dreams that I wouldn't mind seeing come true myself. We've had both the Legislative and Executive branches pulling on the same end of the rope in the game of Government Growth Tug-o'-War for almost a quarter century. Why not let one guy pull on the other end for a couple years and see what happens? I doubt it'll make much of a difference, but let's at least try flapping our arms a little before we hit bottom. What can it hurt?
We forget—and the candidates encourage us to forget—that a President can’t do much without Congress. I contend also that a bureaucracy changes slowly.
The current President had messianic status, an ambitious agenda and a friendly Congress. And he couldn’t get Obamacare passed without trickeration by that friendly Congress.
Why fear the rumpled old man waving the Constitution around? He does not have messianic charisma, and Congress barely pays lip service to our founding document.
Ron Paul is not our messiah. He is our conscience.