Texas U.S. Rep Ron Paul on Tuesday said he believes his emphasis on securing freedoms and financial soundness has universal appeal, making him optimistic about finishing near the top at next week’s Ames Straw Poll.
Anything below a third-place finish would sadden him, he admitted to the 140 supporters gathered in the Sheraton Hotel ballroom.
Finishing fourth or fifth “wouldn’t be anything to brag about,” Paul said. “It would be a real negative, so we’re bound and determined to do better than that.”
Paul is one of nine presidential candidates on the ballot for the Aug. 13 Ames Straw Poll, a key test of a campaign’s organizational strength. His campaign is investing a lot into doing well at the event. During an auction for tent space, Paul placed the highest bid of $31,000 and won the spot held in 2007 by the campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won that year with 32 percent of the vote.
This is the third time that Paul has run for president. He previously ran in 1988 as a Libertarian and in 2008 as a Republican. In 2007, he finished fifth at the Ames Straw Poll with slightly over 1,300 of the 14,302 ballots cast.
But on Tuesday, he brushed that historical fact aside with a laugh that was echoed by his supporters in Iowa City.
Paul told the crowd that this time around, he’s counting on a new wave of credibility that he gained when the financial bubble burst, and his ability to broaden appeal across the political spectrum. Paul, who considers himself the “father of the tea party,” said he appreciates any chance to pitch himself to liberal-minded voters.
“I like to challenge them that I understand you have perfect desires, you have good motivations, you want to help the downtrodden – I do too,” Paul said. “But I happen to believe the downtrodden can be helped by free markets, and sound money and free enterprise.”
The crowd that arrived at the Ames Straw Poll to support the Texas congressman four years ago was predominantly young and college-aged, and during his speech Tuesday he reached out to that same age group.
“Today there is a concern about jobs and there’s a concern about the future,” Paul said. “Young people know that they’re going to inherit a great burden. They’re not going to be able to work hard enough and long enough to pay off all the entitlements.”
The 75-year-old harkened back to the late 1950’s, when he and his friends were earning their college education and had no qualms about finding a job upon graduation. In contrast, Paul said, young people today know there is no time to sit back and wait.
Paul’s message resonated with 22-year-old Zach Townsend, an Iowa City resident currently looking for a job.
Townsend said he voted for President Obama in 2008. But he said he became a passionate supporter of Paul after “finding out that (Obama) just continued all the same policies that Bush had put in place.” Tuesday’s 50-minute meet-and-greet marked Townsend’s third time seeing Paul speak, and he said it was the best yet.
First-time listener Lynette Ammar, a nurse from Iowa City who watched the speech from a standing section in the back of the room, said she liked what she heard. However, she also said she would not yet consider herself a Paul supporter.
“I need to hear from other constitutional conservatives, and then I’ll make my decision,” said Ammar, who brought her sons, aged 10 and 13, to hear Paul speak. “I’ve got a year.”
Many among the crowd seated close to the assembled stage carried yard signs bearing the message “Ron Paul 2012,” and broke in applause dozens of times throughout the speech.
To Townsend, the scene had theatrical quality.
“It seems like the story is moving deeper into the plot,” Townsend said. “His speech seems to be like one big story with the whole drama concerning the debt ceiling.”
Paul was in Washington D.C. on Monday to cast a vote in the U.S. House on the federal debt ceiling. He voted “no” on a bill that raises the amount of money that the U.S. is allowed to borrow, but also reduces the deficit by $2.4 trillion.
The proposal cleared the U.S. House 269-161 and the U.S. Senate 74-26 despite all seven of Iowa’s congressmen also voting against the plan. The bill was quickly signed into law Tuesday afternoon by President Obama.
Paul said he would never vote to increase the debt ceiling, and has maintained the same stalwart stance on borrowing through nearly 24 years in the U.S. House.
He likened the country’s economic crisis to an attack on the middle class “in a system biased towards people making a lot of money out of the inflationary climate.”
“The fact that we have to face up to is that our country has got a problem. Sort of like if a person’s an addict. They are never healthy until they admit they’re an addict, and they decide they are going to change their life and change their lifestyle. We have become addicted to big spending and big government,” Paul said, reiterating his stance.
Despite his hard-line approach to the borrowing plan, Paul has said he is adept at compromise and told the audience Tuesday that could help him gain traction among independents.
“I probably work more with liberal Democrats than most Republicans, because I can find some issues that we agree on. The best example would be transparency of our monetary system, the Federal Reserve,” Paul said. “As a matter of fact, one of the strongest co-sponsors of the bill was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, who’s pretty darn liberal, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. He’s very liberal.”
The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009 would have required a full audit of the central bank before the end of 2010, but it died in the U.S. Senate, according to OpenCongress, a non-partisan transparency project by the Sunlight Foundation.
Matt Hoppenworth, a 37-year-old from North Liberty who has been organizing the liberal pocket of Johnson County for Paul, said this appeal was helping the efforts of the 10 volunteers who worked the phones for Paul in a home-based operation, making 30 to 40 calls daily.
“Especially in the climate today where we need some bipartisanship to solve some of these problems going forward, I definitely think it’s a big help,” said Hoppenworth, who works as a manager at Alpla Inc., a plastics processing company.
Paul’s campaign staff continued the pitch outside the door after the speech, accumulating $10 bills from supporters buying discounted tickets to the straw poll. The tickets, originally priced at $30 are being funded by Paul donors, according to Iowa Campaign Chairman Drew Ivers.
Hannah Hess covers politics for Iowapolitics.com
