As
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) gains in popularity and political relevance
– he’s currently polling tops in Iowa and is looking very good in
New Hampshire – he’s got more and more explaining to do about the
late 1980s-early ’90s newsletters that
went out under his name.

And make no mistake about it: The newsletters include undeniably
racist and other vile comments, such as calling blacks “animals,”
preternaturally criminal, and welfare cases. No amount of
“contextualizing” is going to change that, especially when the
contextualizing
includes rationalizations such as this:

“If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you
know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”

These statements are offensive, and I’d bet my bottom dollar
that Ron Paul not only didn’t write them, but never read.

(One might quibble about the “fleet-footed” quip: it seems more
like a compliment, albeit a left-handed one, rather than an
insult—but never mind.)

Despite the claims of Paul’s most devoted supporters, it’s not a
“smear” to raise the newsletters (smear would apply only
if the newsletters didn’t exist). And the newsletter issue
definitely threatens the continued popularity of Paul’s
campaign.

Which leads to the basic question for those of us who find Ron
Paul to be most successful and influential articulator of
libertarian ideas in politics today: Do the newsletters invalidate
his candidacy?

Paul recently walked out on a CNN interview with Gloria Borger
when she brought up the newsletter issue, saying he’d already
disavowed them decades ago, wasn’t aware of their content, and
hasn’t changed his story.
But USA Today reports what readers of Reason already know: That
he has in fact said different things about the provenance of the
newsletters over the years and his involvement with them.

In 2001, Paul told the magazine Texas
Monthly that the language in the newsletters wasn’t
his, but his campaign staff told him not to say others had written
it because it was “too confusing.”

“I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t
really written by me,” he said. “It wasn’t my language at all.
Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around.”

Texas Monthly said of Paul: “It is a measure of
his stubbornness, determination, and ultimately his contrarian
nature that, until this surprising volte-face in our interview, he
had never shared this secret. It seems, in retrospect, that it
would have been far, far easier to have told the truth at the
time.”

More here.

Reason’s 2008 story, “Who
Wrote Ron Paul’s Newsletters?“, documents Paul’s changing
accounts of the newsletters’ authorship and the congressman’s
knowledge of their contents. Paul has said that he made a mistake
by lending out his name to material that didn’t reflect his views
and that he didn’t pay much attention to. That statement however is
contravened by this 1995 video dug up by Andrew
Kacynzski:

 

Around the 1.15 mark,
Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey notes, Paul starts promoting the
newsletters to a Texas audience.

So, do the newsletters and Paul’s shifting relationship to them
invalidate his candidacy? Writing in The New Republic, James
Kirchick,
whose 2008 story first brought the issue to light, asks,
“Why
Don’t Libertarians Care About Ron Paul’s Bigoted
Newsletters?“ The question is wrong, however. While some
libertarians plainly don’t care about the newsletters or their
odious claims about blacks, gays, and others, many do. Kirchick
argues that whether Paul wrote or even read the newsletters (Paul
has at times said he did not read them), his continuing engagement
with 9/11 truthers and conspiracy-mongers such as Alex Jones and
The John Birch Society is not an incidental part of his appeal:

Paul’s following is closely linked with the peculiar attractions
of the libertarian creed that he promotes. Libertarianism is an
ideology rather than a philosophy of government—its main selling
point is not its pragmatic usefulness, but its inviolable
consistency. In that way, Paul’s indulgence of bigotry—he says he
did not write the newsletters but rather allowed others
to do so in his name—isn’t an incidental departure from his
libertarianism, but a tidy expression of its priorities: First
principles of market economics gain credence over all
considerations of social empathy and historical acuity. His fans
are guilty of donning the same ideological blinders, giving their
support to a political candidate on account of the theories he
declaims, rather than the judgment he shows in applying those
theories, or the character he has evinced in living them. Voters
for Ron Paul are privileging logical consistency at the expense of
moral fitness.

Well, no.

I’m sure that the vast majority of libertarians – and
conservatives, Republicans, liberals, Democrats, etc. – who end up
pulling a lever for Ron Paul are not ignoring the policies and
legislation he has either authored or worked to enact. It is
precisely in his concrete attempts to roll back the state – whether
through pushing for an end to massive, endless, and uncritical
increases in military spending and operations or by co-authoring
(with Barney Frank) of the first attempt to end federal marijuana
prohibition – that Paul captures the libertarian vote. His
philosophical rhetoric and ideological consistency may be appealing
to some, but it’s really what he plans to deliver on that is
motivating people to listen long and hard and show up at
rallies.

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf has
a pretty elegant formulation on this point:

What I want Paul detractors to confront is that he alone, among
viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies,
including policies that explicitly target ethnic and religious
minorities. And that, appalling as it is, every candidate in 2012
who has polled above 10 percent is complicit in some heinous policy
or action or association. Paul’s association with racist
newsletters is a serious moral failing, and even so, it doesn’t
save us from making a fraught moral judgment about whether or not
to support his candidacy, even if we’re judging by the single
metric of protecting racial or ethnic minority groups, because when
it comes to America’s most racist or racially fraught policies,
Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them. 

His opponents are often on the wrong side, at least if you’re
someone who thinks that it’s wrong to lock people up without due
process or kill them in drone strikes or destabilize their
countries by forcing a war on drug cartels even as American
consumers ensure the strength of those cartels. 

Even Obama, who has spoken so eloquently about the harm done by
the drug war and lost civil liberties, is now on the wrong side of
those issues, and shows no signs of reversing himself. As bad as
the Paul newsletters are — let me emphasize again that they are
awful — I can’t persuade myself that they should
carry more weight than war, or civil liberties,
unless Paul in fact wrote them, which would mean that he is lying
about his core philosophy of individualism, equality, pluralism,
and opposition to bigoted laws. In that case, there would be no
reason to trust him.

What a sad-but-true statement about 99 percent of politicians,
including the sitting president and the top GOP contenders for the
Republican nomination.

One of the reasons that the newsletters have not automatically
made Paul radioactive among libertarians is that they do not sound
like the guy, either in diction or tone. If Paul’s published
comments and legislative actions since his return to Congress had
in any way confirmed the pathetic character of the newsletters, I
can’t imagine he’d be pulling the sorts of crowds he has been.

Reason’s Brian Doherty, whose biography of
Paul will appear in spring 2012, was on CNN’s OutFront with Erin
Burnett last night, talking about the congressman’s growing
popularity and appeal. As it happens, one of the other talkers was
Gloria Borger, whose questioning of Paul so frustrated the guy he
stopped the interview; even she seems pretty well disposed to the
guy. Doherty is right that the appeal of Paul in the here and now
has absolutely nothing to do with the newsletters and everything to
do with the fact that he alone among Republicans (and Democrats) is
providing an actual alternative to the status quo. As Doherty says,
in an age of historic and chronic budget deficits, Paul is the only
candidate talking about actually cutting spending; in a country
tired of war and unabated increases in military spending, only Paul
is talking about reducing the size and scope of armed forces and
redirecting foreign policy; and in a country that never embraced
bank bailouts and monetary policy that abetted the asset bubble
that fueled the financial crisis, Paul was the first person to talk
about auditing the Federal Reserve.

Paul is going to need to deal with the newsletter issue more
directly than he has so far, especially if he doesn’t want it to
loom larger and larger as the stakes get higher. He is actually in
control of the issues that most vex contemporary America, which
have nothing to do with affirmative action, “racial terrorism,” or
the transmission of AIDS via saliva. He is running against
Republicans who were for individual mandates in health care long
before they were against them or who seriously invoke sharia law as
a threat to the American way of life, and he faces a possible
general election against a president with low approval ratings
precisely because he passed his awful health care, bailout, and
stimulus plans, among other things. As Friedersdorf argues, Paul
actually has a far better record on matters that directly affect
the minorities slagged so disturbingly in his newsletters.

As I’ve argued elsewhere and
often, Paul is providing the alternative that Americans are
craving in politics.That alternative, by definition, is going to
discomfit conventional politicians and politicos who are more
concerned with whether their party is in power than what is done
with that power; with whether deficits and entitlements and
“defense” spending will bankrupt the country; with whether
Americans should be treated like adults when it comes to deciding
what to eat, smoke, and drink. Paul is not the perfect
vessel for a libertarian message, but waiting for perfection is
something ideologues insist on. Most of us are far more interested
in someone who at least has shown he understands the most pressing
issues of the moment – and the future.

Whether Paul can fully deliver on the promise he’s shown so far
may well rest upon the way that he puts the newsletter issue to
bed, once and for all.

Watch Doherty on CNN:

Reason on
Ron Paul.