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Most people have hobbies: golf, model trains, restoring old cars, whatever. A year after Ron Paul announced his Republican presidential bid, I have concluded that his supporters must not do these things. They can’t possibly have the time. While others are at rest or at play, Paul’s supporters are on the Internet, googling his name and diving into the comments sections of news articles to register their opinions. Maybe it’s a measure of their dedication or their web savvy, or both. I don’t know. But they always show up, sometimes 500 or 600 in force or more. And since they often complain about the media giving their guy short shrift, I thought I’d give them a chance to tell Paul’s story, now that it’s in its last chapter. (There, the media just did it again.) What follows is a collection of comments, culled from TIME’s archive, that span the epoch of Ron Paul 2012.
Don’t believe the hype. That was President Obama’s message to Barnard College’s 2012 graduating class. Though he used more words:
This recession has been more brutal, the job losses steeper. Politics seems nastier. Congress more gridlocked than ever. Some folks in the financial world have not exactly been model corporate citizens. No wonder that faith in our institutions has never been lower, particularly when good news doesn’t get the same kind of ratings as bad news anymore. Every day you receive a steady stream of sensationalism and scandal and stories with a message that suggest change isn’t possible; that you can’t make a difference; that you won’t be able to close that gap between life as it is and life as you want it to be.
Ron Paul on Monday announced he will scale back his already diminished presidential campaign, effectively ending his longshot bid for the Republican nomination.
In an e-mail that took the tone of a valedictory, the libertarian icon said he would no longer compete in upcoming primaries, though his campaign would continue its work amassing delegates at the local and state levels.
Forget the particulars of JPMorgan’s $2 billion blunder, if it might have been stopped by a robust Volcker Rule or who would’ve done what differently. Here’s what you need to know about how the incident relates to the presidential campaign: Are tougher financial rules popular? Yes. Are people convinced the Dodd-Frank financial reform law completely fixed the problem? No.
I’ve seen some recent praise for the discipline of the Romney campaign, which has generally proven effective at hewing to its core message and preventing internal strife from leaking to the media. David Sanger’s fascinating Sunday New York Times story on Romney’s foreign policy vision is a dramatic exception.
I was grabbed right away by Sanger’s lead, which spotlighted Romney’s remarkably under-discussed assertion that U.S. policy should be to defeat the Taliban, not negotiate with it. As I wrote recently, that position breaks dramatically from a bipartisan consensus and also implies a much longer and more violent American commitment to that conflict than the public seems willing to tolerate. No wonder that Romney’s statement, made in a January debate, caused “a faction of his foreign policy advisers to shake their heads in wonderment,” as Sanger puts it.
–Sen. Rand Paul on Obama and gay marriage.
The failed bet that cost JPMorgan Chase $2 billion and plunged the bank’s stock by more than 9% on May 11 has rattled the financial sector. This wasn’t the case of a vigilante trader who struck out on his own. It was a top executive at the shining steel sentinel of the U.S. investment-banking industry, vested with the full confidence of his bosses. And they all screwed up.
I have always been skeptical of the conventional Beltway wisdom that Florida Senator Marco Rubio will be the politico who finally builds bridges between Latinos and Republicans. It’s not that Rubio isn’t a capable envoy; his efforts to craft an alternative version of the DREAM Act (legislation to let illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children stay in the country) prove he’s serious about outreach. But as a Cuban-American, Rubio represents only 3% of the U.S. Latino population, and that 3% is largely estranged from the rest of the Latino cohort, who tend to resent what they call the free pass los cubanos get on immigration.
