“As the first votes in the Republican presidential race approach, Rep. Ron Paul has become a serious force with the potential to upend the nomination fight and remain a factor throughout next year’s general-election campaign…

“‘The reality is Ron Paul is poised to become a major figure in the Republican Party if his momentum continues and he’s able to win in Iowa,’ said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, who managed the campaign of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the party’s 2008 nominee. ‘The open question is: How much durability does he have over the balance of the race?’…

“‘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.”

“A suddenly surging Ron Paul boasted yesterday that he’s counting on a victory in Iowa to vault him past GOP front-runners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and into the winner’s circle in this state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

“‘Iowa has something big to do with it. If we win or get a close second we can build our credibility. There’s this thing that’s very real in politics called momentum,’ the Texas congressman told the Herald, referring to the Granite State’s Jan. 10 primary…

“‘If you run to win and you win, who are you spoiling?’ Paul said during a stop at the Early Bird Cafe in Plaistow.”

“Paul’s supporters are disproportionately young, independent, non-interventionist, non-Christian and perhaps most telling, dedicated…

“That also means, though, that he leaves himself less room to grow, because as he maxes out among those small, key demographic groups, he’s not able to appeal to others. This appears to be what’s happening in Iowa, and while it might be good enough in a six-candidate field there, it will be tougher to execute it as a successful strategy as the race shrinks.

“And none of his base groups will turn out in as big numbers as old people, Republicans (independents can’t even cast ballots in some states), Christians and foreign policy hawks.”

“Rep. Ron Paul has tried since 2001 to disavow racist and incendiary language published in Texas newsletters that bore his name, denying he wrote them and even walking out of an interview on CNN Wednesday. But he vouched for the accuracy of the writings and admitted writing at least some of the passages when first asked about them in an interview in 1996…

“Paul told The Dallas Morning News in 1996 that the contents of his newsletters were accurate but needed to be taken in context. Wednesday, he told CNN he didn’t write the newsletters and didn’t know what was in them…

“Paul cited [a 1992] study and wrote: ‘Given the inefficiencies of what DC 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.’

“‘These aren’t my figures,’ Paul told the Morning News. ‘That is the assumption you can gather from the report.'”

“Yes, you read that correctly, Ron Paul endorsed Cynthia McKinney in 2008. For those who do not know, Cynthia McKinney is a certifiably insane anti-American anti-Semitic lunatic. She first came to widespread public attention when she was arrested for punching out a member of the capitol police who tried to stop her when she wasn’t wearing her pin. Cynthia McKinney is so crazy that she got defeated in a primary by a guy who thought Guam might tip over and capsize. McKinney was once arrested by the Israelis while trying to give aid to Hamas and penned a bizarre anti-American and anti-Israeli screed. See more of her anti-Americanism here.

“Now, I know that the above is not necessarily persuasive to the average Ron Paul fan – after all, if they were bothered by siding with terrorists, they’d have probably jumped off the Paul bandwagon already. What is perhaps more important is that Cynthia McKinney is also next door to being a communist in terms of her domestic policy. McKinney is an open and avowed enemy of free market capitalism, preferring instead Ghadaffi-style socialism. Seriously, she literally and openly favors dictatorial socialism. McKinney ran on the Green Party ticket, whose platform explicitly includes guaranteed open-ended welfare (at a living wage) for everyone regardless of their ability or willingness to work, among other quasi-communist and far-left economic policies…

“For whatever his failings as a Presidential candidate and conservative (and they were legion), no reasonable person would say that John McCain was worse than any of these clowns. It was one thing for Paul to not endorse McCain – but we have to ask what sort of person affirmatively supports anti-American avowed socialists and confederate sympathizers over a Republican? The answer: Someone who, like Howard Dean, hates Republicans and everything they stand for.”

“One devout libertarian told me recently that candidate Paul ‘believes in all the things I do about the menace of government control, and he’s a defender of the Constitution—I just intend to take what I like about him.’ The speaker, educated and highly accomplished in his field (music), is a committed internationalist whose views on American power are polar opposites of those his candidate espouses. No matter. Having tuned out all else that candidate has said—with, yes, perfect consistency—it was enough for him that Dr. Paul upheld libertarian values.

“This admirer is representative of a fair number of people now flocking to the Paul campaign or thinking of doing so. It may come as a surprise to a few of them that in the event of a successful campaign, a President Paul won’t be making decisions based just on the parts of his values that his supporters find endearing. He’d be making decisions about the nation’s defense, national security, domestic policy and much else. He’d be the official voice of America—and, in one conspicuous regard, a familiar one.

“The world may not be ready for another American president traversing half the globe to apologize for the misdeeds of the nation he had just been elected to lead. Still, it would be hard to find any public figure in America whose views more closely echo those of President Obama on that tour.”

Via the Examiner.

Click the image to watch.

Via the Daily Caller.