$4.3 million reasons to believe in Ron Paul

An Orange County Register editorial

If this doesn’t get the attention of the mainstream media and the Republican establishment, it’s difficult to figure out just what would – but it’s likely that even more dramatic developments in Dr. Ron Paul’s run for the presidency are yet to come.

The big news is that Ron Paul, the 10-term Republican congressman from Texas and longtime standard-bearer for libertarian and constitutionalist ideas, raised more money – by a considerable amount – in a 24-hour period than any other Republican candidate. Some 37,000 people, 21,000 of them new donors, contributed $4.3 million to Ron Paul’s campaign Monday, Guy Fawkes Day.

Guy Fawkes Day? Go rent the DVD of “V for Vendetta” to gain an insight into the spirit that moves the Ron Paul revolution.

The previous single-day fundraising record for Republicans was held by Mitt Romney, who raised $3.14 million last January, when he held a “national call day.” Barack Obama on the Democratic side has raised more money in a single day, and Hillary Clinton raised $6.2 million on June 30. But Paul is the single-day champion among Republicans.

Dr. Paul surprised the political world by raising more than $5 million in the third quarter, and his campaign set a goal of raising $12 million by the end of the year. As of Tuesday afternoon it had raised $7.396 million, so that goal, which seemed utopian a month ago, looks as if it will be surpassed easily.

“What was striking to me,” Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala., who’s a longtime friend and associate of Dr. Paul, told us, “is that this was entirely a volunteer event. It was conceived, designed and run entirely by volunteers. A normal campaign that tried a one-day fundraising event would have had weeks of top-down coordination and a huge staff manning the phones. This was an example of bottom-up spontaneous order.”

So what does it mean? We believe it shows a considerable constituency not just for ending the war in Iraq, which Dr. Paul opposed from the beginning, but for an honest candidate who says what he thinks rather than what has been poll-tested, and for the kind of constitutionalist, limited-government philosophy that many Republicans and conservatives (as well as libertarians) used to think they supported.

In short, there’s a hunger for liberty among young and old of all races and backgrounds, and many are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Ron Paul has been the catalyst, but he has awakened a growing group of Americans whom standard-issue politicians will no longer be able to ignore.

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