Ron Paul is easy to overlook. He takes the stairs; he does not have an entourage. You can't hear him coming because he's wearing plain black tennis shoes. In a bag he carries a can of soup that he will heat for himself in the microwave in his office. Beneath pictures of Austrian economists Frederick Von Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, he will eat his lunch alone and in peace.
When Newt Gingrich cracked the whip on party members to support a messy budget compromise, he excused Paul from the duty to support the budget, and the "Ron Paul exemption" entered the congressional vocabulary. What did it take for other members to earn this privilege to buck the party? A voting record that opposed all unnecessary federal spending, even in their home district. No one else has been granted the exemption.
But until the day when scores of Ron Pauls overrun the Capitol building in sneakers, we have one man who heats his own soup and fights for the Republic, not the Empire. If America elects him president, he'll sit atop a bucking federal beast that withstood the taming of convinced small-government riders like Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge. It would be a wild ride for the thin, unassuming Texan. He might never forgive us for putting him in the saddle.
