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But as prophet, he is still defining the GOP race. He came within a whisker of spoiling Michele Bachmann's headline-making win at the Aug. 13 Iowa straw poll and helped end Tim Pawlenty's candidacy by denying him a second-place finish. When Republican heavies like Newt Gingrich and Perry bash the Fed's monetary policy, he mocks them as latecomers to his party. "Who would have thought the former Speaker of the House would come out for 'Audit the Fed?'" Paul says to deafening applause in Concord. "Now we have a Southern governor. I can't remember his name" — a wry reference to Perry, who suggested it would be almost "treasonous" for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to pump more money into the economy — "[who] realizes talking about the Fed is good too."
Paul still struggles to win the major media's attention, prompting Jon Stewart to compare his candidacy to "the 13th floor of a hotel." But Paul's allies say he's more interested in influence than political power. "He does not have a great personal desire to be the President," says Jesse Benton, Paul's campaign chairman and grandson-in-law. Instead, he is that rare commodity in modern politics: a man of ideas, however unconventional they may be.
The Making of the Maverick
Ron Paul's political epiphany took place on Aug. 15, 1971. That was the day Richard Nixon, hoping to boost a flagging U.S. economy, decoupled the dollar from the gold standard. Few people understood or cared about the change. For Paul, it was a calamity. "That was the moment I knew something very strange was going on in the government establishment," he recalls, sitting in a desk chair in his Concord campaign office. Paul believes that a currency unmoored from gold is based on, well, nothing, and that simply printing fiat money inevitably leads to ruin. "I thought it was just a total disaster," he says.
The mild-mannered Paul is an unlikely messenger of economic doom. Born outside Pittsburgh, he attended medical school at Duke and joined the Air Force in 1963. He served as a flight surgeon during Vietnam, an experience that convinced him the American "empire" is folly. As he built an obstetrics practice in Brazoria County, Texas, he spent his free time studying the theories of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, giants of the Austrian school of economics, which champions unfettered free markets, individual rights and money backed by scarce commodities like gold and silver. "When I discovered people like Mises, to me they were geniuses," Paul says. "They could explain this stuff. It helped me feel comfortable that it wasn't only me in the world."
In 1974 Paul ran for Congress in South Texas, promising "freedom, honesty and sound money." He lost that race but won the seat two years later. Paul's latest campaign ad boasts that he is "guided by principle," and his record supports the claim. Though he represents a rural coastal district, Paul regularly votes against farm subsidies and flood insurance. He has never voted for a tax increase or an unbalanced budget. He opposed congressional medals for Rosa Parks, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa as well as aid for Hurricane Katrina victims, all on the grounds that Congress has no business meddling in such matters.