Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Ron Paul's Newsletters   [David Freddoso]

Jamie Kirchik of The New Republic is described to me as a "hawkish, big-government, identity-politics neo-con." I don't think that his article on Ron Paul treats much of the subject matter fairly. But that aside, no amount of messenger-attacking can diminish what he's unearthed in Ron Paul's old newsletters. He did well to dig it up, it's good reporting. And it is like a gut-punch to read the racist material they contained within the timeframe of 1988-1992.

Paul's official response is the same as when he addressed other old quotes that had been unearthed. He did not write and does not believe these things, he says, and he was careless not to pay more attention to what went into a newsletter bearing his name. Fine. Having worked in the newsletter business, I know that a lot of "authors" have little or no involvement in what's written, and some of them don't even read their own newsletters. (Robert Novak, by contrast, read, edited, and added to each issue of the Evans-Novak Political Report before we published.) A bad ghostwriter can ruin just about anyone's name.

But was Paul so uninvolved that he was completely unaware of this material over the course of three or four years? I do not believe that Ron Paul is a racist, but that sort of absenteeism would be...well, it requires a suspension of disbelief, that's for sure. Did he ever read it? Did any of his close friends ever read it and say something to him? Who was writing the newsletter at that time? Was this content eventually discovered? Was the writer fired? His spokesman couldn't help me with these questions yesterday. The campaign should try harder to answer them, instead of writing this off as "old news."

Despite all of my early hopes, Paul is not going to become president, and so I'm a lot less interested in the political consequences of the story. The real question is the man's integrity, which I have never doubted before. No one contends that Paul has ever said anything racist in his life. Nothing in these newsletters squares with anything in the philosophy he has advocated over the years. But this story is for real. It is not an adequate response to shoot the messenger.  

UPDATE: A Paulite writes:

Kirchik's descriptions of the articles are alarming — and inflamatory and inaccurate.

In some cases, this is true, which is why I noted that Kirchik is basically unfair in his characterization of some of the material. Kirchik appears to get the whole "secession conference" wrong, for example. In other cases, he tries to conflate standard conservative thought on limited government with some kind of racist agenda. But read the newsletters themselves. The homage to David Duke, for example, is not taken out of context.

But even the content of the newsletters is not the real issue here. Paul says that he didn't write them, and he doesn't believe in them. I believe him, and I think everyone should. But I want to know why, if he did not write and does not believe these things, it never even came up. Or, if it did come up at some point and he fired the writers responsible, I'd like to know that, too. It would be reassuring.

Consistency with Paul's own philosophy of freedom and personal responsibility would require that whenever he became aware that this sort of thing was being printed under his name, he took some action to correct it. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt just because he is unlike any other politician I've ever seen in Washington since I started covering Congress in 2002. But I also want to know the rest of this story. I don't think I'm being unreasonable, or participating in a "smear."

01/09 11:48 AMShare