Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No. Sadly and disappointingly, it’s just the Ron Paul Blimp. Many of us feel that the Ron Paul candidacy will wind up merely a sour footnote to an often dispiriting primary season. The candidate himself barely operates on the fringes of normal, routinely tossing grenades like the time he suggested that Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack was justified because of our foreign policy. But let’s face it – even at his worse moments, Paul has never said anything worse than you’d read in reputable online activism sites such as the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos. But Paul’s supporters have elevated crazy to an art form. It is thanks to a particularly maniacal band of supporters that Paul can make a claim that no other presidential candidate in history can make. Paul is officially the first Oval Office aspirant to have a dirigible
floating across America’s spacious skies and over its amber fields of grain with his name plastered across it, advertising his candidacy. In case you’ve missed the biggest story of the 2008 campaign, the Ron Paul Blimp has taken flight. What were his supporters thinking (and I use the term advisedly)? According to the patriots at RonPaulBlimp.com, they imagined “the mainstream media mesmerized as the image of the Ron Paul blimp is shown to tens of millions of Americans throughout the day. … The local television stations broadcast its every move. … The PR stunt generates millions upon millions of dollars worth in free publicity, and captures the imagination of America.” I am surprised to report that the blimp has been afloat for nearly a week now, and my imagination has to date eluded capture. I know the thought of a “mesmerizing” blimp makes it sound like Paul’s supporters have a full supply of crazy, but the people who willed the Ron Paul Blimp into flight are just getting warmed up. As we speak, the lawyers for the Ron Paul Blimp people are filing papers, making sure they are not denied their constitutional right to fly their blimp at the Super Bowl and over Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The fact that the people responsible for security at those gatherings may have a legitimate concern over a bunch of obviously insane people piloting a blimp over their events will surely make no impact on the chronically cranky Paulnuts. Regardless, nothing better communicates the message that a man should be president than his followers’ willingness to deck out a dirigible on his behalf. If we can learn one lesson from Campaign ’08, let it be that.
