Well, looking at his website, you can see that there’s quite a bit of the survivalist attitude; I can’t think of any major candidate who would waste bandwidth talking about defeating the North American Union, for instance. (Even though NAFTA was intentionally modeled on the predecessor treaties that led to the EU). And of course the whole gold-standard issue is way out on the fringe. I can also say that he has a strong grassroots presence in Arizona, where of course a lot of people have adopted a fortress mentality towards illegal immigration (but then again, he’s the only candidate actually proposing to effectively guard the border).

I have to believe that most of his supporters are not of the survivalist and/or Aryan Nation camps because there aren’t really all that many of those people left — those movements have been in decline since the 90s. Read Louis Theroux’s The Call of the Weird to see what I mean. Turns out that anarchists and extreme individualist libertarians have trouble building functional communities.

Most of what Dr. Paul says in public, especially these days, is focused on his beliefs in constitutional rights and not on his personal beliefs, which are borderline nutcase. It’s especially embarrassing for an MD like him, or Sam Brownback for that matter, to not espouse a belief in evolution. What gets lost in the shuffle is that he more or less only wants the federal government to stop interfering with the states; I would bet that he wouldn’t have desegregated Alabama or used the FBI to dismantle racist groups, and that’s the real reason that all sorts of extremists are behind him. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to lie about his beliefs on race, as he has stated in interviews over the last decade or so retracting those newsletters; after all, he’s already said a lot of other politically suicidal things in public, like pledging and end to the Department of Education and Medicaid. (What exactly does the federal Dept. of Ed. do, anyway? When I was working in DC for Dept. of State I remember they had a good cafeteria, but as far as I know they administer education loans and enforce a certain controversial unfunded mandate (No Child…) on the states, neither of which seems particularly meriting of a Cabinet-level department).

Problem is, I think that he needs to make the strongest possible showing just to introduce his libertarian and small-government ideals into the political mindset. Otherwise, I have a feeling that we’ll be hearing nothing but FUD this fall. I would love to see a Paul-Obama debate, since people I respect, like Larry Lessig, have endorsed Obama as an honest guy, and I think that dialogue could move this country in a much-needed new direction.

Plus, I imagine that if he ever did get elected, the mere fact that he would veto every bill crossing his desk would force the Congress to be bipartisan, and/or cause a total government shutdown.

So, I’ve switched my party affiliation from Libertarian to Republican temporarily in order to vote for him in the primary, just to get out the message. I’m a fairly unusual libertarian compared to him, in that I can see the widespread prevalence of market failure in naturally monopolistic industries like telecom and insurance, but what else can I do?

Oh, and re: Huckabee, watch out. If you think he’s too much of a populist, just wait and see if Lou Dobbs enters the ring as an independent.

I was too young to really understand politics at that age, but as I grew older, I started realizing how crazy he really was. How he treated his daughter after she came out really cinched it for me.

Here’s hoping it’s Huckabee.

Don’t forget to save one for the end: ideally, the last Republican standing should be one who’ll go down in flames against the Democratic nominee. If Huckabee goes down during the nominating process, the eventual candidate should be someone like Alan Keyes.