Been a while since I indulged myself and talked about American politics and such here on this blog, and I just happen to have come across a couple of pretty interesting political articles lately, so I figured, what the heck!

First, there is this fairly interesting article from The Week about why Ron Paul’s winning so many of these straw polls taken after GOP events despite being way behind on the national polls.

The article runs down the four main theories people are touting, which I shall summarize thusly :

1. He cheats. His supporters flood the straw polls, skewing the results.
2. The national polls are biased and meaningless. The mainstream media, included the conservative side of it, hates Ron Paul and is trying to keep him down, but the straw polls tell the real story.
3. He only wins when the real contenders aren’t there. The straw polls that Paul supporters tout as proof of their guy’s awesomeness are ones where people like Romney, Pawlenty, and Rick Perry decided to opt out.
4. Libertarianism is increasingly big in the GOP. Ron Paul has unimpeachable (so to speak) credits as a true dyed in the wool Libertarian, and the Libertarians are rapidly becoming the intellectual power to look out for in the GOP.

All these arguments have some validity, but even taken together, they fail to get the real picture. I think they show the media’s political myopia generated by their relentless reduction of everything into bullet points and sound bites.

For one thing, they completely ignore the actual person and his assets as a candidate, and Ron Paul has come considerable assets that give him more appeal than you would think.

For example, he is idealogically consistent. He is a Libertarian from toenails to eyebrows, his positions are consistent with one another in a way the Johnny-come-lately Tea Party fake Libertarians cannot compete with, and it gives him a solidity and an integrity that the highly artificial mainstream candidates, with their focus grouped “messaging” and media massaged “positions”, simply cannot compete with.

Relatedly, he truly believes everything he is saying. These are the same positions he has held for decades and he gives all indications of believing them with his whole being. This means that he is speaking from the heart, and politicians speaking from genuine conviction have always had an advantage in seeming both honest and visionary, which is especially important in this highly fake political age. A great deal of Barack Obama’s appeal has been his ability to convey conviction and not seem “like a politician”.

Unfortunately for him and his supporters, that’s where it ends. Being a true Libertarian, his policies are a bewildering mishmash of palatable populism, radical reforms of things most people have not even heard of (most people don’t even know what The Fed is, Doctor Paul), and things that strike most people as simply loonie. He is far too socially liberal for most Republicans (who despite the new fashion for Libertarianism, are still social conservatives at heart) and far too anti-government for most liberals. He has his cadre of supporters, and he could maybe double it if he was really lucky and really scored some points off the other GOP candidates off their platform vulnerabilities from his position, but that is it.

The other article I wanted to share was this rare and wonderful piece of glorious sanity from a writer at Time who talks about “How conservatives lost touch with reality”.

From what I can tell from the article, the author is a moderate conservative who, like me, pines for an era when conservatives were the practical, realistic, pragmatic, sober adults who acted out of genuine knowledge of the world and never spoke in the sort of ideological garblefarb completely without intellectual integrity that marked the rise of leaders like Mao and Castro.

Such people are simply not to be found any more. The Baby Boom generation simply did not produce any. That is how the political madness that is a world where it’s the conservatives want to tear down the system and are shouting Anarchy! and the liberals who are the guardians at the gate, keeping the Revolution mobs from burning down the grainhouse, has come to pass.

I feel strongly that in another era, I would have been a moderate conservative. In a previous era, they would have seemed like the voice of sanity versus the idealistic but impractical liberals.

But there is no voice of sanity in modern politics. Only lunatics and cowards.

And that’s how someone like Ron Paul can start looking good to people.