What Is This World Coming To?

Representative Ron Paul of Texas is still a candidate for the GOP nomination, having refused to drop out of the race, and is still recording a substantial vote against John McCain in primary elections.

The former Air Force flight surgeon has served Texas 14th District since 1976, having run once for president in 1988 as a Libertarian candidate, while maintaining his membership in the Republican Party.

Dr. Paul’s support base is small, but vocal and utterly dedicated to their man. Last December, he raised more than six million dollars in a twenty-four hour period, in what became the largest one-day fund-raiser in US political history.

Paul decided to enter politics following Richard Nixon’s de-linking of the US dollar to precious metals and pegging it instead to the international oil market. In his 1988 run at the White House, Dr. Paul gained supporters nationwide who agreed with him on many positions—gun rights, fiscal conservatism, homeschooling, and abortion—and won approval from many who thought the federal government was misdirected elsewhere. This nationwide support base encouraged and donated to his later campaigns.

With Hillary Clinton out of the race and Barack Obama facing the kind of scrutiny in the general election unlike anything he’s received so far, it is almost a sucker bet that he won’t go down in flames long before November, essentially handing the Oval Office to John McCain — unless Ron Paul decides to run as an independent.

Twice in the 20th century, third-party candidates have split the vote and handed the White House to a minority winner. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” party split off enough votes from popular Republican William Howard Taft to give the White House to Woodrow Wilson.

In 1916, the Bull Moose Party split the Republican vote again, with Wilson defeating Charles Hughes with the smallest margin of victory in the Electoral College since 1804. In each election, Wilson was favored to lose; indeed, one is hard-pressed to find a biography of Woodrow Wilson that doesn’t use the word ‘lackluster’ somewhere to describe him.

Had Ross Perot not split the Republican vote in 1992, George Bush would have defeated Bill Clinton handily, by a margin that could have been as high as 59% to 41%. But Perot’s conservative candidacy pulled 19% of the popular vote — most of it from conservatives — and Bill Clinton became the second president of the 20th century to win with less than half the popular vote, defeating George Bush 41% to 38%.

TIME Magazine was unable to conceal its bias, trumpeting Clinton’s 41% victory over George Bush as a ‘Mandate For Change’.

In 1996, Perot’s candidacy only pulled 8.4% of the vote, handing Bill Clinton a second minority victory, 49.4% to 40.7%. Thanks to Ross Perot, even though Bill Clinton couldn’t manage to get one vote out of every two, the liberal media proclaimed his victory a ‘rout’.

There are those who believe that US politics has been manipulated by the international Money Trust for at least the past century, beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s unlikely 1912 victory that resulted in the 1913 creation of the US Federal Reserve.

They believe the ‘Bull Moose Party’ was invented to hand the election to Wilson because of Taft’s opposition to the creation of a US central banking scheme. They also believe that Bill Clinton’s election was manipulated to prevent Reaganomics from destroying the influence they had been developing throughout the 20th century.

Interestingly, among those who share that view are Ron Paul and his supporters. What makes it so interesting it that it appears that they will most likely become the pawns in this year’s election theft, as a groundswell of support is growing for another third-party candidacy.

Until only a few months ago, the conventional wisdom said there was no way the Bush administration would be succeeded by another Republican administration — the White House was the Democrats’ to lose.

Not anymore. Unless, of course, Ron Paul runs as a third-party candidate.