Dr. No
Republican congressman RON PAUL of Surfside says no to PAC
contributions. He says no to pork barrel spending for his district. He
says no to honoring Mother Teresa. And he has no influence in
Washington. So why do the Democrats have no chance of beating him?
by S. C. Gwynne
IMAGINE, FOR A MOMENT, THE PERFECT CONGRESSMAN. THOUGH HE works in
Washington, D.C., a city of shameless opportunism, shifting allegiances,
and flannel-mouthed pieties, he is both deeply principled and wholly
uncompromised. He does not bend with the political winds. He does not
take money from corporate PACs. Lobbyists cannot sway him; to try is a
waste of time. He never bargains with his own deeply held beliefs, nor
does he cut backroom deals. Because his political views and his personal
convictions are in complete harmony, he seldom faces a "tough" vote. And
when the politicking for the week is over, he returns to his district to
take up his lifelong occupation, which has nothing to do with politics.
This, of course, sounds like unalloyed fantasy; no one who clung so
tenaciously -- or so naively -- to his beliefs would last in Washington.
The grizzled old pols who run the place would grind him up and sprinkle
him on their pecan-encrusted mahimahi for dinner. But there is such a
man. Whether he is perfect or not is a matter for debate, as you will
see, but the plain fact is that a congressman named Ron Paul, a
66-year-old Republican who represents Texas' 14th Congressional
District, otherwise fits this description exactly. The phrase "honest
politician" is an oxymoron; yet in the sense that Paul never, ever votes
against his stated principles -- which are libertarian and include the
belief that much of our federal government, from the IRS to the
Department of Education, and the massive taxes that support it, should
be abolished -- the phrase describes him.
Wait. There's more. The same beliefs that cause him to vote against
every single appropriations bill in Congress also carry over to his
private life. He intends, for example, to refuse his congressional
pension. He would not let his children take out federally subsidized
education loans. He actually returns money each year from his
congressional office -- some $ 50,000 last year. "I have always thought
that there are two brands of conservatives: the kind who follow the
money and conservatives of principle," says Ronnie Dugger, who as a
longtime liberal and a former editor of the Texas Observer is an
unlikely admirer. "Paul is a conservative of principle. He's held his
ground, and he is an honest man."
He has also violated almost every rule of political survival you can
think of, short of committing a felony. Paul's beliefs run so deep that
he will unhesitatingly vote against his constituents' interests. In a
district with 675 miles of coastline, he opposes federally sponsored
flood insurance. In an overwhelmingly rural region, he speaks out
against farm subsidies. In a district with large numbers of senior
citizens and poor people, he is on record opposing "the welfare state."
In almost all cases, he refuses to deliver "pork" to the good folks of
his home district. Appeals to party loyalty are useless; he was one of
only sixteen Republicans who voted against George W. Bush's energy plan,
one of only four Republicans who voted against the administration-backed
version of the patient's rights bill, and he opposes its education bill.
(He did vote for the president's tax cut, because he supports tax cuts
of any kind.)
His contrarian behavior has made him an enormously appealing figure to
residents of the 14th District, which extends from the central Texas
coast to the suburbs of Austin and San Antonio. Seven times, over four
decades and in two different districts, he has been elected, despite
fierce opposition. In the past three elections, he was targeted by the
national Democratic party and by major unions, which spent lavishly to
beat him. Yet he has won by ever-widening margins. As he coasts into the
second year of his seventh term, he may now be unbeatable.
HE STANDS AT THE MICROPHONE IN THE EMPTY, ECHOING hall, addressing his
words to no one. At seven-twenty on a winter night in the United States
House of Representatives, Congressman Paul is the only member on the
floor. High above him, half a dozen people are scattered across the
nosebleed seats of the spectator gallery, along with a couple of yawning
security guards. There is a woman in the seat where the Speaker of the
House normally sits, shuffling paper and paying no attention. There is a
lone stenographer on the floor. Out in the Great American Night, there
are no doubt some C-SPAN2 junkies watching and listening -- part of
Paul's far-flung network of pro-gun, pro-life, pro-property rights, and
anti-government admirers, perhaps -- but here in the vast, cavernous
gallery, there are only empty seats and silence. Paul is unfazed; he is
an habitue of this place in these lonely off-hours. This is his time --
the end of the workday, when everyone goes home except those who want to
speechify on any subject. In a soft tenor voice that occasionally rises
to a higher pitch, he delivers a stem-winding denunciation of the
secretive institution he believes is responsible for many of the
economic ills of the modern world: the Federal Reserve System.
This is, of course, a distinctly minority view in a city that regards
Federal Reserve System board chairman Alan Greenspan as a sort of cross
between Houdini and Saint Peter. But it is typical of Paul's
unconventional ideas. If he had his way, there would be no Federal
Reserve at all. (He calls Greenspan a "price fixer" and refers to the
Fed as the "chief counterfeiter for the world.") He wants to return the
U.S. to the gold standard, get us out of the United Nations, and abolish
most forms of federal law enforcement. He has also voted against giving
congressional medals to Mother Teresa and Rosa Parks, against giving
earthquake relief to India, and against a bill that would have helped
prevent child pornography on the Internet. He wants to abolish all
federal drug laws and cancel the war on drugs. Like Don Quixote, Paul
confronts a vast and transcendent evil that most of his colleagues do
not believe exists. They have a name for him: Dr. No. His beliefs are so
at odds with those of his 434 House colleagues that as of October 1,
1999, the Congressional Quarterly had tallied that he had been the lone
negative vote 42 times in the previous two sessions -- compared to 22
times for everybody else combined. He hates Washington, never attends
the usual cocktail parties and receptions, and spends as little time
there as he possibly can.
Back in his quiet, high-ceilinged office in the Capitol, the dreaded Dr.
No turns out to be something different from the guntoting,
fire-breathing, right-wing militia nut his opponents would have you
believe he is. Instead of a libertarian Genghis Khan, I am talking to a
friendly, slender man with graying hair, wearing a standard-issue
chalk-stripe suit. He would strike you as a kindly, crinkle-eyed,
slightly absentminded family doctor, direct from central casting. In
fact, he is a doctor, a prominent obstetrician in Brazoria County who
has delivered four thousand babies, a good portion of those while
serving as a congressman. He is answering, in a patient and good-natured
way, a question asking if he thinks the federal government has become
too powerful.
"I think it's a police state that is absolutely out of control," he says
placidly, eating a modest lunch of canned soup and a white-bread
sandwich at his desk. "We have eighty-three thousand federal officials
carrying guns. Every regulation that is made, every federal law that is
written, is done with the idea that there is a gun waiting right there
to enforce it. If you don't pay your taxes or follow the regulation or
use your land exactly as they tell you to, if you cut down a tree you're
not supposed to or fill in a ditch, a gun will come and take your money,
take your land, or put you in jail. Everything that is done up here is
based on a gun. It's an armed state. It has gotten so big already, it's
going to be hard to stop." He pauses, then smiles and says, "You know,
I'm for gun control. I want to get the guns out of the hands of the
bureaucrats."
To grasp fully how such a man can possibly exist in contemporary
American electoral politics, you must first understand two basic truths.
One involves gynecology; the other involves a semi-obscure, dead
Austrian economist by the name of Ludwig von Mises. If that sounds like
a slightly odd preamble to a story about a United States congressman, it
is no more odd than the world of Ron Paul.
First: Politics for him is a passion, not a career. Paul is one of few
doctors in the House (eight, including dentists) and part of an even
smaller group that has actively practiced medicine while holding office.
After attending Gettysburg College and Duke University School of
Medicine, Paul, who was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, spent five
years as an Air Force flight surgeon -- two and a half on active duty at
Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio -- then set up practice in Lake
Jackson in 1968. Having taken over the practice of a retiring doctor, he
was the only ob-gyn in Brazoria County. "On my first day, I had thirty
to forty patients in my office," Paul says. "I delivered forty to fifty
babies a month and did a lot of surgery. It was exactly what I was
looking for." He was 41 and a prominent, successful physician when he
was first elected to Congress. He is affluent, or whatever the notch
below wealthy is. He doesn't need the job.
Second: His hero is neither a founding father nor a contemporary
politician but an obscure Austrian economist whose ideas guide most of
what Paul does. While he was pursuing his medial career, he became
interested in economics, especially the works of Ludwig von Mises
(1881-1973), a laissez-faire economist opposed to government
intervention in markets and in favor of the gold standard. What launched
Paul into politics were two distinctly un-Misean actions taken by
President Richard Nixon in 1971: He intervened massively in the U.S.
economy by establishing wage and price controls, and he took the country
off the gold standard. For Paul, these actions were unthinkable
exercises of federal power. We all have our moments of clarity. His
epiphany came on August 15, 1971. "I remember the day very clearly," he
says. "Nixon closed the gold window, which meant admitting that we could
no longer meet our commitments and that there would be no more backing
of the dollar. After that day, all money would be political money rather
than money of real value. I was astounded." In 1974, the year of Nixon's
resignation and possibly the worst year in American history for the
Republican party, Paul, already the contrarian, decided to become a
Republican and run for Congress from the 22nd District, which lies
slightly to the north and east of the 14th (and which is now represented
by Tom DeLay). He lost that election. Then he got lucky: When the winner
resigned a year later, Paul won the special election that followed.
He quickly made a name for himself as the ultimate constitutional
dogmatist: If it wasn't written in plain language in the Constitution,
which allocated only a few specific powers to the federal government, he
didn't believe in it. In Paul's view, government should provide for
national defense, ensure fairness under the law, guarantee personal
liberty -- and get out of the way. That includes abortion, which he sees
as murder, but he believes that the proper authority to deal with it is
the state, not the federal government. What galls him more than anything
else is the sheer size of government. He likes to remind people that in
1909 the cost of government at all levels came to 7.7 percent of the
total domestic economy. Today that figure is 50 percent.
Though Paul is a Republican, he can be maddeningly uncooperative with
his GOP colleagues, especially when it comes to spending taxpayers'
money. In the eighties Republicans desperately needed Paul's vote in
favor of the B-1 bomber. Despite enormous pressure, he refused. He saw
it as a needless expenditure of taxpayer money to fund an expansionist
foreign policy that he opposed. He even got a call from President Reagan
and still would not change his vote. "The conservatives hated me for
that," he says. He can also be, on occasion, something of a gadfly. When
he was criticized for voting against the medal for Mother Teresa, he
chivied his colleagues by challenging them to personally contribute $
100 to mint the medal. No one did, of course. At the time, Paul
observed, "It's easier to be generous with other people's money."
Paul served four terms in Congress, during which time he usually voted
no, and sponsored dozens of bills that were instantly consigned to
oblivion and a few, such as one that would have set term limits, that
were ahead of their time. In 1984 he took his own advice and
term-limited himself, made a hopeless run against Phil Gramm in the
Republican Senate primary, then retired to doctoring -- which he had
kept doing the whole time anyway, seeing patients and delivering babies
on Mondays and Saturdays for all of his eight years in Congress. He was
then 49, had a prospering practice, and had no particular political
ambitions. As always, he refused to take Medicare or Medicaid money from
patients (he worked out a cash payment or did not charge them). He
didn't believe in the welfare state, so why take its money?
FOR REASONS THAT EVEN HE CANNOT QUITE EXPLAIN, IN 1987 Ron Paul became
the Libertarian party's candidate for president of the United States.
Though his positions on most issues are identical to those of the
Libertarians (abortion being the main exception), Paul admits that this
was a strange, almost Sisyphean move, considering his prospects for
victory. "I probably invested close to a year," he says. "It was a lot
of time and effort. Sometimes I had some ambivalence about how
productive it was."
As it turned out, it was hugely productive but not in ways that Paul
could see then. Though he got less than one percent of the vote in the
1988 presidential election, he managed to unite a vast network of true
believers -- not only staunch Libertarians, but also anti-gun control
folks, fiscal conservatives, home-schoolers, right-to-lifers, school
prayer advocates, isolationists, and people who generally felt that the
U.S. government was veering out of control. Their financial support
would become a key factor in Paul's return to congressional politics.
That happened in 1996. With Nolan Ryan as his honorary campaign
chairman, he entered a bruising Republican primary against incumbent
Greg Laughlin, who had switched parties the year before. Paul was now
running in a new district, the 14th (he had moved his residence from
Lake Jackson to his beach house in Surfside). It was a demographic
oddity that connected the Gulf Coast and Central Texas and included the
Brazos, Colorado, and Guadalupe lower river basins and the small cities
of Victoria, San Marcos, and Freeport. Paul immediately discovered that
the electoral ground rules had changed: With the Democrats trying to
regain control of the House, which they had lost two years earlier, and
Speaker Newt Gingrich backing Laughlin, whom GOP regulars viewed as the
stronger candidate, someone who had run for president on the Libertarian
ticket -- and who had advocated things like the repeal of federal drug
laws and an end to the "so-called drug war" -- was now a much bigger and
more visible target. "My image was completely different in 1996 than in
1976," Paul says. "You can't just get passed off as an average
Republican having done what I did. We got hit hard."
Most of the hitting was on the drug issue, first by Laughlin, whom Paul
beat convincingly in a runoff, then by Charles "Lefty" Morris, Paul's
opponent in the general election. Morris was certain that Paul's radical
views would discredit him with voters. "We just have to get his ideas
out, and people will know what he really stands for," Morris said at the
time. He ran ads saying that Paul advocated the legalization of illegal
drugs, which was not entirely accurate. Though some of Paul's public
remarks had suggested that he supported full drug legalization, his
official position was (and is) that federal drug laws ought to be
repealed: Let the states handle all drug laws. Then Morris' subalterns
dug up something even more damaging to Paul: copies of a 1992 newsletter
he had published that contained racially tinted remarks.
They caused a minor sensation. In one issue of the Ron Paul Survival
Report, which he had published since 1985, he called former U.S.
representative Barbara Jordan a "fraud" and a "half-educated
victimologist." In another issue, he cited reports that 85 percent of
all black men in Washington, D.C., are arrested at some point: "Given
the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the 'criminal justice
system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males
in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal." And under the
headline "Terrorist Update," he wrote: "If you have ever been robbed by
a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can
be."
In spite of calls from Gary Bledsoe, the president of the Texas State
Conference of the NAACP, and other civil rights leaders for an apology
for such obvious racial type-casting, Paul stood his ground. He said
only that his remarks about Barbara Jordan related to her stands on
affirmative action and that his written comments about blacks were in
the context of "current events and statistical reports of the time." He
denied any racist intent. What made the statements in the publication
even more puzzling was that, in four terms as a U.S. congressman and one
presidential race, Paul had never uttered anything remotely like this.
When I ask him why, he pauses for a moment, then says, "I could never
say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me.
It wasn't my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as
I travel around. I think the one on Barbara Jordan was the saddest
thing, because Barbara and I served together and actually she was a
delightful lady." Paul says that item ended up there because "we wanted
to do something on affirmative action, and it ended up in the newsletter
and became personalized. I never personalize anything."
His reasons for keeping this a secret are harder to understand: "They
were never my words, but I had some moral responsibility for them . . .
I actually really wanted to try to explain that it doesn't come from me
directly, but they [campaign aides] said that's too confusing. 'It
appeared in your letter and your name was on that letter and therefore
you have to live with it.'" It is a measure of his stubbornness,
determination, and ultimately his contrarian nature that, until this
surprising volte-face in our interview, he had never shared this secret.
It seems, in retrospect, that it would have been far, far easier to have
told the truth at the time.
That controversy ought to have destroyed him. Lefty Morris certainly
thought it would, and things looked even bleaker for Paul when the
AFL-CIO kicked in with a heavy rotation of anti-Paul ads. That may
explain why, even after midnight on Election Day, when the newspapers
were all giving the election to Paul, Morris still refused to concede.
He simply couldn't believe it.
As it turned out, Morris had underestimated Paul's ability both to raise
money from his national network of donors and to successfully paint his
opponent as a tool of trial lawyers and big labor. Paul raised $ 1.2
million to Morris' $ 472,153. "He has one of the largest contributor
bases in Congress, outside of the leadership," says Ken Bryan, a
political consultant who has worked for Democratic state senator Ken
Armbrister and for Paul opponents Laughlin and Loy Sneary. According to
Paul's campaign manager, Mark Elam, Paul raises a lot of money in small
amounts. "He appeals to people nationwide," he says. "We have used
direct mail and built our own contributors' list. The vast majority of
it comes from individuals, at an average of about forty dollars." That
money enabled him to launch a massive direct-mail campaign in the 14th
Congressional District.
In the 1998 election, the Democrats were just as certain that Paul could
be beaten. His opponent was Loy Sneary, a rice farmer from Bay City and
a former Matagorda County judge. This time even more national party
money and union money flowed into the 14th. "The Democrats officially
targeted us both times," says Elam. After all, here was a politician
foolish enough to preach against federal farm subsidies in a rural
district. And he was now famous as Dr. No, the man who voted against
everything.
Again, Paul drew on his vast contributor base, outraising Sneary $ 2.1
million to $ 734,000. And again he won, this time by 55 percent to 44
percent -- a significant improvement over his 51 to 48 win over Morris.
In 2000 Paul raised $ 2.4 million to Sneary's $ 1.1 million and widened
his margin yet again, to 60 to 40.
In the years of defending himself against the assembled liberal
multitudes, Paul has learned a slashing campaign style of his own. "Ron
Paul specializes in attack, only he is much better at it than they are,"
says Dan Cobb, the editorial page editor of the Victoria Advocate, which
endorsed Sneary. "He used Sneary's own record as a county judge to
attack him in a misleading fashion, but it worked." Indeed, in a "Truth
Test" report during the 2000 campaign, TV station KVUE in Austin found
three out of four claims in Paul's ads to be false; a fourth was "true
but misleading." Says Sneary, who is still upset about the campaign:
"It's one thing when you criticize our position. It's another thing to
take that information and use half-truths and no truths in a campaign."
Cobb says that, in part, Sneary and the Democrats asked for it. "He [Sneary]
tried to paint Paul as a right-wing monster. He's not that. He's a
bundle of interesting points of view, no question. You can't turn that
into a terrible person. It's just nonsense and people don't buy it
because they know him." Cobb also says Sneary was wrong, strategically,
to attack Paul: "It should be obvious by now that you can't attack him.
All you can do is run a positive campaign. People in the Fourteenth feel
they know exactly where Paul stands. He is consistent and adheres to his
principles. He has great personal integrity."
THE QUESTION ABOUT SOMEONE LIKE RON Paul, who always votes his
conscience and never cuts a deal, is whether he can be effective. That
depends upon how you define "effective." Out in his district, where he
spends three to four days a week, every week, often taking one or two of
his fifteen grandchildren out politicking with him, it is quickly
apparent how good he is at keeping in touch with his constituents. He is
famous for attending Boy Scout honor ceremonies and graduations and
civic club luncheons and just about any event that will have him. I
recently followed him as he made his rounds in his district. He began
the day at his home in Surfside, driving east with a staffer to
Victoria. He met with the editors of the Victoria Advocate, attended two
war-medal ceremonies in Victoria and Bay City, made several calls on
constituents, met with his staff briefly at his district office,
listened to the complaints of a commercial fisherman, and gave a midday
speech to a civic group. By the end of the day, he had driven three
hundred miles or more. For him, this is politics as usual.
The medal ceremonies are a good example of why Paul is so effective as a
candidate. They are the result of efforts by his staff to secure medals
for veterans who never received them. These are moving events, and Paul
does dozens of them each year. The recipients' families often weep when
they receive the medals that Paul's staff has had framed, usually with
photographs of the soldier as a young man. Paul gives a short speech,
celebrating the medal winners and plugging a few of his own political
causes. At several stops people who know him as a doctor come up to him.
"Guess what?" one young woman says as we stand in the parking lot of a
small newspaper. "You delivered me!" Several of his older constituents
mention the help they got from Paul in getting free or discounted
prescription drugs by exploiting a little-known patient-assistance
program offered by drug companies. His staff makes an effort to send all
of his constituents birthday cards, as well as condolences at the death
of a family member.
At the Northside Rotary Club luncheon at the Victoria Country Club, Paul
is in his usual form. He is not a particularly inspiring speaker, but he
pulls no punches: a combination of bland and apocalyptic. He talks of
the "bubble" world economy, of the Federal Reserve System as the
"counterfeiter for the world." He says that, contrary to what everyone
else in Washington thinks, there is no surplus in the Treasury. He says
we should get rid of the income tax, get rid of the Food and Drug
Administration ("It does more harm than good"), and abolish the
Environmental Protection Agency ("It now controls your land").
The businessmen in attendance applaud politely. They seem to be somewhat
perplexed by Paul's monetary theories, strongly in favor of his anti-tax
message, and amused by some of the anti-government rhetoric. A couple of
them tell me that they like him because he votes against taxes. But what
he actually says in his twenty-minute speech doesn't seem to matter that
much to the one hundred or so Rotarians. In a strange way, he transcends
his message. They don't see Dr. No, the man who wants to dismantle
Washington. They just see good old Ron Paul, the taxpayers' best friend.
But if effectiveness is measured by his success at sponsoring and
passing bills in Congress, he does not score as well. He is not, after
all, a leader or a consensus builder. He is a loner, an outsider. "We
don't kid ourselves about the chance of passage of a lot of these
bills," concedes Paul's press secretary, Jeff Deist. In his past three
terms in Congress, Paul has managed to get only two pieces of his own
legislation onto the floor and into law: a bill to prohibit the
Department of Housing and Urban Development from seizing a church in New
York State by eminent domain and a bill transferring ownership of the
Lake Texana dam project from the federal government back to the State of
Texas. He has, in addition, managed to get four amendments into other
bills, including prohibitions on funding for national ID numbers and
federal teacher certification. That doesn't mean he doesn't try to pass
legislation. In the 106th Congress he sponsored 59 bills, including
measures abolishing the income tax and estate and gift taxes,
withdrawing the U.S. from the World Trade Organization, ensuring the
integrity of Social Security trust funds, and prohibiting the Department
of Defense from using troops in Kosovo unless specifically authorized by
law. In the current Congress, he is sponsoring 35 bills. He again
proposes to abolish the personal income tax, he wants to repeal the War
Powers Resolution so that the president cannot deploy American troops
without a declaration of war by Congress, and he has moved to end U.S.
membership in the United Nations. Few of these have even been debated on
the floor, let alone voted on. His greatest influence these days is
probably felt in the area of individual privacy; he has worked
tirelessly against national ID cards and other forms of what he
considers to be federal snooping.
"Principles have a price," says Charlie Cook, who publishes the Cook
Political Report in Washington. "Ron Paul has a rigid, inflexible
ideology, and it has undermined his effectiveness. But he probably
sleeps better than anyone else on Capitol Hill." Paul's own answer is
short and vintage Ron Paul. "The only real measure of effectiveness," he
says, "is if I stand up for people's rights and their liberty and the
Constitution."
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