Politics makes the strangest alliances, especially in 2008

Someone once said politics makes strange bedfellows, and that’s perhaps never been truer than it will be for the 2008 presidential election.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul filed the necessary papers on Jan. 11 to form an exploratory committee in order to raise funds for a possible presidential run in ’08.

While this story garnered all of almost 4 inches on page 4A of the next day’s San Antonio Express-News, I would have missed it completely if not for an alert reader’s e-mail. Obviously, Paul is an underdog.

While the traditional media overlooks his campaign in favor of the likes of Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, and Hillary Clinton, the blogs are all over it. The raves for Paul are filling the blogosphere faster than you can say cyberspace. Now the nine-term congressman from southeast Texas is the darling of the anti-war crowd as well as Republican-leaning Libertarians and Libertarian-leaning Republicans, and those in the Constitution Party and other fringes. Interesting bedfellows, indeed!

A more genuine candidate than Dr. Ron Paul is not likely. He speaks his mind, votes his conscience, and doesn’t play Washington politics. In fact, he doesn’t play politics, period. Paul is a friend of small business and may be the taxpayers’ best friend.

He may be anti-war but he is not anti-American. He is a statesman and perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime candidate. He loves this country and, despite his age, can work circles around folks half his age. “We have a hard time keeping up with him,” one of his staffers said to me when he visited Floresville a few years ago. Paul’s district included Wilson County for a brief time following one of the redistricting attempts.

If the Republican Party actually would nominate him, it means they really would have to make a change toward limited government. That in itself makes it unlikely.

While I’m not anti-war or anti-Bush, I am pro-listening to the solid reasoning of Ron Paul. Had anyone been listening in 2001, we might not be where we are with the War on Terror.

A press release from Paul’s office dated Oct. 11, 2001, shows that he presented Congress with a chance to give President Bush more options in fighting terrorism. “The President promised the American people that the federal government would use every available resource to defeat the global terror network,” Paul stated in that release.

Western intelligence in the Middle East is exceedingly limited, said Paul. “We should avail ourselves of the assistance of those with better information to track, capture, or kill bin Laden,” he said. Legislation he introduced would have allowed Congress to narrowly target terrorist enemies, lessening the likelihood of a full-scale war with any Middle Eastern nations. The legislation also threatened terrorist cells worldwide by making it more difficult for our enemies to simply slip back into civilian populations or hide in remote locations.

Every terrorist would have become a marked man, Paul concluded. “Congress should … give the president another weapon to supplement our military strikes.”

Perhaps Paul’s approach would have worked. We’ll never know, but it makes sense.

His ’08 campaign will be faced with having to attract sufficient financial and political support in order to launch a full-fledged campaign. He is expected to formally announce his bid in the next week or two, his staff said.

It will be a grassroots campaign at its best. Politics does, indeed, make strange bedfellows.