The Cato Institute held a discussion Tuesday evening with Brian Doherty, author of “Ron Paul’s rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired” and Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to discuss the Ron Paul’s libertarian movement and its undeniable impact in this election.
Brian Doherty reflected on the first time he met then-former Congressman Ron Paul at University of Florida in 1988 when Paul the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president. There was only about 100 people in attendance curious about the 3rd party candidate. He compared his most recent run in with Congressman-again Ron Paul at UCLA when there was over 7,000 in attendance, and those who were there because not because they were curious, but because they knew about and believed in his message.
Doherty deflected the common question people ask about Ron Paul, which is how many bills has he passed while in Congress, by saying, “If you’re a guy who believes in the Constitution in the U.S. Congress from 1970-2012, you’re understandably not going to get a lot of bills passed.”
Doherty compared the Ron Paul supporters to the Goldwater kids of the 1960’s who were a “similar youth based movement that gathered around a heroic strongly anti-government figure.” He accredited the Ron Paul movement doing so well to the supporters who are “able and willing to do the nitty gritty of politics, they are able and willing to run for central committee, they are able and willing to achieve positions of high authority in state parties from Alaska to Iowa.”
Senator Rand Paul talked about his father and said, “its more than Ron Paul; its a revolution, its a movement…its something bigger than one person.”
When Rand Paul described his dads campaign he said, “Anybody ever go see the Grateful Dead? I never got into a concert but I got into the parking lot one time and they used to hold up the tickets and say I’ve got three in Cincinnati for two in Detroit. I guess they were planning on going to the next concert, and why it reminds me of the Ron Paul revolution in probably many different ways, because… I saw somebody in Orlando last week and he said I met you in Iowa in Ankeny at the Ron Paul headquarters…in the headquarters there would be 250 young people from all walks of life from all over the country…you might see somebody with a tattoo, you might see somebody with a Grateful Dead shirt.”
Rand Paul also mentioned House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and a recent NRO blog post titled “Ryan Shrugged.” He defended Ryan and said, “Just because you like an individual doesn’t mean ‘Oh, gosh, I have to endorse every word in every book. People are now afraid of Ayn Rand.”
It’s clear that the Ron Paul movement is still going strong, and despite the presidential campaign’s recent announcements of a shift in strategy, Cato Institute Vice President David Boaz said, “the campaign is not over. What he said is he’s not going to run expensive television ads in the lingering primaries that no one is paying attention to he’s going to continue to do the kinds of things he’s been doing, talking about the issues, giving speeches to thousands of college students, and his volunteers working hard in caucuses in the other places that delegates are actually selected.”
