Signs started popping up all over the city last Independence Day, declaring a new revolution: The Ron Paul Revolution. The speculation ranged the gamut from a new land developer to an underground hip-hop producer. Now, after several months, the revolution is spreading through Arizona and the nation as more people get behind Ron Paul for president in 2008.
Paul, the Texas congressman who is running for president as a "champion of the Constitution," started out as the underdog but has now raised more money than Arizona's own Republican presidential hopeful, John McCain, according to ABC News.
Though Paul is a Republican candidate, he is gaining a lot of attention in places that are typically considered more left-wing — like college campuses — which may be this long shot candidate's biggest hope in the upcoming election.
One of Paul's strengths has been his ability to connect with the Internet generation. Hundreds of Facebook.com groups have sprouted up devoted to the candidate, including an ASU group with 127 members as of late Monday. He logs 4.6 million YouTube.com video views for his channel each day— nearly 1 million more than the next leading presidential candidate, Barack Obama, according to online data tracking company TechPresident.com. He has 70,000 MySpace.com friends and 31,000 Facebook.com supporters, thousands more than his nearest Republican rivals, though far less than the leading Democrats, according to TechPresident.
"Young people … are open to ideas, and they like principled answers to our problems," Paul recently said on PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." "I am just so excited when I see the young people coming."
One such young person is engineering sophomore Travis Sarver, who leads ASU Students for Ron Paul. The group usually meets on Monday nights to make homemade Ron Paul Revolution signs, which they post across Tempe. Last weekend, they organized a march down Mill Avenue that drew approximately 200 people. A week ago, the group spent an early morning plastering posters and chalk all over Palm Walk, only for it to all be removed before any students showed up.
One distinction that is drawing Paul support, particularly among young people, is that he is the only Republican candidate to advocate withdrawing troops from Iraq as soon as possible. This, says mathematics and computer science graduate student Brandon Menc, a member of ASU Students for Ron Paul, makes Ron Paul an interesting candidate.
"The surprising thing about him is he is a Republican from Texas and he voted against the war," he says.
Many students also support Paul because he stays consistent in his voting and focuses on the Constitution, Sarver says. "He's all about the Constitution, and that's something people don't talk about," he says. "People just disregard it as if it doesn't mean anything, but really, it's the foundation of our country."
And that, according to Paul's campaign Web site, ronpaul2008.com, is one of his main issues. "Dr. Paul never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution," the Web site says.
Born in Pittsburgh, Penn., Paul graduated from the Duke University School of Medicine and served as an Air Force flight surgeon in the '60s, according to his Web site biography. After moving to Texas, Paul worked as a specialist in ob-gyn and delivered more than 4,000 babies, which spawned the Facebook group "4,000 Babies for Ron Paul," which has more than 100 members.
Paul began serving in Congress in the late '70s, where he served on the House Banking committee, according to the Web site. Since then, Paul has spoken out against taxes, the Federal Reserve's inflationary measures and the war in Iraq.
But political science senior Joaquin Rios, president of the Young Democrats at ASU, says many young people support Ron Paul for the wrong reasons.
"I think the appeal of Ron Paul doesn't really have anything to do with ideology, so much as his style," Rios says. "He comes across as a principled political and as someone who sticks to his guns and goes against the grain."
This is what appeals to people, Rios says. But when young people are out on their own for the first time, they tend to want to be individualistic, like many of the ideals Paul portrays, he says.
"They don't necessarily want to subscribe to a sense of community that people of other age groups might," Rios says of Paul's young supporters. "[Ron Paul] provides a highly individualistic political platform."
For Sarver and the rest of the ASU Students for Ron Paul, it's been a long haul, but he says when people started hearing about Paul, they "just started jumping on the bandwagon."
And many of those who got on board are — to most people's surprise — young.
"Everybody's cynical, but I think young people are more likely to believe you can change what's going on," Menc says. "People our age are more willing to try and see change happen."
— tara.brite@asu.edu and kdsnow@asu.edu
