IT WAS Ron Paul’s anti-war stance that attracted Tatiana Moroz (32) to his campaign.
The blond singer and songwriter had risen at 3am in New Jersey to travel to New Hampshire on Saturday. All day, she handed out pamphlets. A friend was attacked by a Rottweiler.
“We’re willing to risk our lives for Ron Paul!” Moroz said, laughing, when we met at a party thrown by the Paul campaign on Saturday night.
You have to have experienced the staid, uptight atmosphere at a rally for Mitt Romney or the wholesome Christian high of Rick Santorum’s victory party in Iowa to appreciate the uniqueness of the Paul campaign. The beer flowed freely at Jillian’s Billiard Club, and the music was so loud you had to shout to be heard. Party-goers wore red, white and blue headbands with Ron Paul’s name, and T-shirts emblazoned with the words “The Paul REVOLUTION” in which “EVOL” was high-lighted, the letters reversed so they clearly spelled “LOVE”.
Among young Republicans, and surprisingly high numbers of the military, the 76-year-old grandfather, medical doctor and congressman from Texas is cool.
Paul has unleashed passions unparalleled by any other candidate. He won roughly half the under-24 vote in Iowa, and is running a distant second behind Romney in New Hampshire.
“When I was younger, I was so jealous of the hippies,” Moroz said, explaining what she called her love for Ron Paul.
“They had something to believe in. I’m proud to be part of something that really moves me, like the civil rights movement or the Vietnam protests. I am very, very passionate about making the world a better place.”
Much of the Republican party looks askance at Ron Paul. At a debate night forum hosted by the conservative National Review, members of the audience told me Ron Paul was “crazy”. The current issue of the magazine condemns him as “a crank with cunning enough to appeal opportunistically to the fringes of larger bodies of opinion”. Paul believes terrorism is a reaction to US policies, that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were wrong, and that 90 US bases overseas should be shut down. He opposes infringements on civil liberties in the name of the “war on terror”.
“When I was growing up, 1984 was my favourite book,” Moroz said. “We’re turning into that. Ron will combat it.”
A placard at a Paul demonstration listed Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Crédit Suisse as Mitt Romney’s top three contributors, while Paul’s leading donors were members of the air force, army and navy. “My whole family are military, and they are all for Ron Paul, like me,” said Gary (22), a soldier on active duty.
“The US military have been through 10 years of war. How many dead babies do you have to see? They don’t take care of veterans. There’s high rates of suicide,” Moroz explained. “Maybe a million Iraqis died; is that proportionate to the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11? Why are our lives so much more valuable than theirs?”
Breanna Wentworth (28) joined our conversation. “Google ‘Falluja’ and see what we did there. Babies are born deformed because of depleted uranium... This movement means something to me. It means something to every person in this room.
“I saved from my unemployment cheques to come here from Connecticut because I really believe in Ron Paul. This is our last shot. We have to stop this foreign interventionism, because it’s destroying the world.”
The Paul Revolution seems to have a lot in common with the Occupy movement, I suggested. “We cannot associate with fringe groups who have socialist ideas,” a third young woman rebuked me.
