The Invisible Presidential Candidate

How can it be that one Republican candidate could do so well in the polls, yet be virtually ignored by the mass media and even his own party? In the meantime, the media spotlight is shone brightly on a lady who doesn't know where the Revolutionary War began, a man who thinks he can solve the nation's problems with a ridiculous tax plan instead of cutting government spending, another guy who turned his back on his own Contract with America when he was Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the usual assortment of "entrenched" Republican governors who are paraded out at presidential primary time.

All the while, this invisible candidate, Ron Paul, is either winning state "straw" polls or finishing high in voter opinion polls. Yet in the televised Republican debates, he's almost never on camera and few questions are asked of him. He is essentially invisible as far as the mass media is concerned. And it is obvious that his own party, the Republicans, would rather he disappeared altogether.

In one of the latest national polls, when run head-to-head against Barack Obama, Ron Paul came in second, behind Mitt Romney, but ahead of Cain, Perry, and the rest of them. This, despite the fact that all the Republican candidates, except for Ron Paul, get fairly constant media exposure. Paul gets almost none. On those rare occasions when the press does acknowledge his existence, it's often to portray him as a kook or worse.

And I guess in the eyes of the mass media and the political establishment, he is a scary fellow. That's because he's the one guy on Capitol Hill who believes what the Founders believed, namely, that our politicians and bureaucrats should be bound by the U.S. Constitution.

Much to the discomfort of the political establishment, he is not shy about pointing out that many government programs, laws, and agencies — from the Ponzi scheme called Social Security, to the RICO Act which has layed waste our property rights, to the PATRIOT Act which has savaged our personal rights — may well be unconstitutional and therefore illegal. He was one of the few in Congress to vote against the PATRIOT Act, which the overwhelming majority of congressmen signed without reading first. He has the courage to dispute the story being proffered by the politicians and the media that 9/11 was committed by terrorists "who hate us because of our freedoms." Paul was bold enough to say 9/11 was the result of America's intervention in the Arab world because that's what the terrorists themselves said.

The sad truth is that those who become nominees for the presidency or congressional seats rarely depend on what the public wants. Rather, it's who the special interests want, and they don't want someone who's not in their pockets. Constitutional government, our basic freedoms, and rational foreign policy is not what's on their minds.

So, Ron Paul isn't getting much support from the fat cats or corporations because crony capitalism is dead if he's elected. He's not getting much support in the defense industry because, if he's elected, we'll stop "protecting" countries like Japan and the wealthy European countries that should be taking care of their own defenses, and we won't be fighting any more undeclared wars. He's not going to get support from federal workers because government is going to get a lot smaller under Ron Paul, so those people are going to have to get real jobs.

But despite the lack of support from so many special interests, Paul continues to do well among ordinary people. He doesn't mouth platitudes and sound bites, but has a well-thought-out libertarian philosophy, and there's never a secret as to where he stands on issues because his principles haven't wavered in 40 years.

More than 40 percent of U.S. citizens do not vote, and pollsters have often asked nonvoters why that is so. Among the responses: 1) They don't like any of the candidates, and 2) When they do vote, nothing changes unless it's for the worse.

So, the question is, what if voters were offered a choice other than Democratic big-government programs and Republican big-government programs? What if they were offered someone who would actually cut the size of government, stop crony capitalism, and refuse to waste the nation's treasury and youth in foreign adventures? What if they were offered somebody who would really make a difference and not just give us four more years of another run-of-the-mill Republican or Democrat — another Tweedledum or Tweedledee?