Ron Paul is Making the GOP Conservative Again
Before Barack Obama became the biggest big government president in American history, George W. Bush held that title. The Republican Party of Bush nearly doubled the national debt and gave Americans the largest entitlement expansion since Lyndon Johnson. As Sen. Jim DeMint said of that time: “You could accuse Republicans of a lot of things, but you could never convict us of being too conservative!”
Unfortunately, most of the 2012 GOP presidential candidates remain far closer to what Bush’s Republican Party stood for than the constitutional conservatism espoused by Ron Paul. But this is not necessarily true of the party as a whole. Write’s Ed Kilgore at The New Republic:
“The reason Paul has been able to slowly build his base of support in the state is that, on most issues, his views no longer lie outside the mainstream of the party orthodoxy. It’s become one of the great clichés of 2012 that the GOP as a whole has moved significantly in Ron Paul’s direction since his last campaign in 2008, and on domestic issues, it’s largely true. Paul’s endless fulminations about profligate monetary policy and the evil Fed, as well as his draconian prescriptions for a radically smaller federal government, now all sound completely within the conservative mainstream.
Added Kilgore: “This development is due, in part, to the fact that there is now a Democratic administration that all Republicans are happy to demonize. More subtly, Paul’s narrative of a long disastrous national slide into socialism, which sounded very weird to many Republicans when their party controlled the White House and Congress, has become commonplace…”
Americans for Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist makes a similar point. Reports The Washington Post:
“Ron Paul is the most consequential guy running for president,” said Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist and Republican organizer. “All the other guys are basically saying the same things, and one gets to be the nominee. But Ron Paul has changed the nature of the modern Republican Party and brought into it discussions not only of non-interventionist overseas policy but monetary policy.”
Is Ron Paul returning the GOP to its Goldwater/Reagan roots? Ben Smith at Politico writes:
“His views may have seemed ‘out-of-the-mainstream’ of the GOP at one time, but they really never were, the Republican Party simply moved away from some of their own platform,” campaign spokesman Gary Howard tells us. “George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 on a humble foreign policy, no nation-building or being the world’s policeman, Ronald Reagan campaigned on eliminating the Departments of Education and Energy; these are things Congressman Paul has always advocated for, he never changed—the party establishment did.”
Smith adds: “In other words, if “today’s wild and wooly GOP is a much friendlier venue for the Ron Paul Revolution” (Kilgore’s words), it’s simply because Republican voters are returning to their late-20th-century roots…”
