It may seem strange to suggest that a seventy-seven-year-old man, retired this year from his perch in Congress, where he had served for most of the past thirty-seven years, might represent the future of anything. But the critical thing to understand about Ron Paul is that his campaign will never end. Since leaving Washington in January, he has committed even more time and attention to returning the Republican Party to its humble, small-government roots. For the wider public, Ron Paul remains the eccentric old man at the far end of the primary-debate stage, rambling about the Federal Reserve, the balance of power, and the dangers of an expanding American empire. Before that, Paul spent decades in Congress casting lonely votes against seemingly innocuous bills.....
"It’s like really waking up.” That’s how Ashley Ryan describes the day she found Ron Paul. She first heard him speak five years ago, when she was sixteen, and has since spent countless hours as an activist not for Ron Paul the man, she says, but for his beliefs. The speech that drew her in was one of Paul’s staples, a folksy homily on the evils of the modern war-making corporate nation-state, but it sparked moral outrage. The petite, mildmannered Maine teenager was electrified, and she took up Ron Paul’s mission. “Once you wake up,” she told me, “you can’t go back to sleep.”
I met Ryan last August in Tampa, where she was sworn in at the Republican National Convention as Maine’s committeewoman, possibly the youngest person from any state ever to hold the title. Ryan had spent the previous weekend at the PAUL (People Awakening
and Uniting for Liberty) Festival,the grassroots libertarian shadow convention that served as the Paulite operating base in Tampa. (Having refused to endorse Romney, Paul was denied a speaking slot at the real thing.) Ryan told me about being “bitten by the liberty
bug” and said that she was taking off her fall semester at college to concentrate on her political activities. When she talked about nonpolitical topics, such as the painted beads she wears in her tongue (“I take them out when I go to Republican things”), she seemed like an average upbeat young woman. But when she talked about Liberty, her voice dropped and gathered like a fist.
The day before she took on her establishment role, Ryan gave the biggest speech of her life, to a crowd of 10,000 fellow subversives. As the outer bands of Tropical Storm Isaac lashed the palm trees on the University of South Florida campus, the Paul campaign filled the
Sun Dome for a six-hour extravagance they called the We Are the Future Rally. To many on the outside, it looked like a preening swan song for Paul, who would be leaving Congress at the end of the year. But inside, the retirement party escalated into a declaration of
intraparty war. The dark arena washed with strobes and boomed with chants of “President Paul!” When her turn came, Ashley Ryan had the screaming crowd on its feet before she had uttered a single word. As rally emcee and senior Paul campaign adviser Doug Wead put it when he introduced her, “[RNC rules-committee chair] John Sununu is here today, but he’ll be gone tomorrow. And this young lady, she will still be here.”
