True or false: there is nothing that Republicans want more than to drive Barack Obama out of the White House. That’s what we’ve been told by the politicians and the polls, the pundits and the spinners, from all across the political spectrum. So we should be seeing the G.O.P. leadership and voters fiercely united and single-mindedly motivated in this Presidential primary season by a ruthlessly pragmatic effort to identify and fortify the candidate who is the most irresistible and effective instrument of Obama-eviction possible. But what we have instead is a whack-a-mole primary campaign, with a new frontrunner popping up every few weeks, only to be beaten back by the public recognition of his or her own haplessness: It’s Bachmann! No, its Perry! Sorry, it’s Cain! Wait a minute—what?!—it’s Gingrich!?! Disgraced, discredited, distrusted, despised by his party’s establishment, Newt Gingrich is now the frontrunner, while the only non-preposterous Republican prospect for the general election, Mitt Romney, is shunned. Never mind that Gingrich was running behind Ron Paul in national polls from May to October, hanging back like the bad punchline to a shaggy-dog story. Except, or unless—wait again, yes, here are the latest poll numbers, showing Newt levelling out, maybe slipping a bit, and, rising hot on his heels in pre-Iowa caucus polls and New Hampshire town-hall rallies, here comes Paul!

A new poll, out yesterday, shows Paul running almost neck-and-neck with Gingrich in Iowa. To be sure, in the relentless program of Republican debates this year, Paul—the Ayn Rand-loving, federal-government hating, practically (if not, as I earlier wrote, rabidly) isolationist Texas congressman—often seemed like the only candidate who was making any sense. That was not a measure of Paul’s reasonableness or appeal, however, but of the disarray of the rest of the field. Paul wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, return to the gold standard, and do away with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which he considers unconstitutional. He advocates the sort of states-rights policy that was effectively discredited in the mid-twentieth century as the last refuge of Jim Crow racial politics. And he extends ideological shelter to 9/11 truthers.

But Paul calls the other candidates out on their serial hypocrisies, inconsistencies, and incoherencies. This appeals to elements of the Republican base. While Gingrich deftly took a pole-axe to Romney (and Romney did himself even more harm by his own blundering) during the most recent Republican debate, on ABC last Saturday night, Paul went after Gingrich, depicting him as a hothead, who thrives on stirring up trouble; and Paul has since released two elegantly produced and utterly damning attack ads, in which leading conservatives expose and denounce Gingrich as a sham.

Paul’s critique of the control of politics by corporate interests, and of America’s imperial foreign policy and permanent war-footing around the world, strikes a chord more broadly with disaffected voters on both the political right and the left. Noam Chomsky agrees with much of Paul’s analysis of American foreign policy, while Andrew Sullivan, who is no Chomskian, blogs fondly about Paul’s anti-imperialist harangues (“I love this guy”). Although Sullivan is an Obama supporter and has rightly and repeatedly depicted Paul as a demagogue, he has now endorsed Paul as the best candidate in the Republican field, writing, “I see in Paul none of the resentment that burns in Gingrich or the fakeness that defines Romney or the fascistic strains in Perry’s buffoonery.” Faint praise, but Sullivan’s huzzah was one more sign that this is Paul’s moment.

Because it’s pretty nearly inconceivable that he could win the Presidency, the conventional wisdom is that a vote for Paul is a protest vote. But many of his supporters are not merely disaffected from the alternatives, but steadfast in their devotion to some or all of Paul’s wilder convictions. They love that he’s not owned by and not for sale to any corporate interests—and for this reason, as well as his isolationist repudiation of America’s post-9/11 wars, he draws followers from the ranks of Occupy Wall Street protesters as well as from the Tea Party. And the conspicuous (and, frankly, inexcusable) extent to which he’s been ignored by the national press has only confirmed the conviction of his supporters that he is speaking truth to power.

Lately, for instance, he has been on a tear against the legalization by Congress (with Obama Administration support) of indefinite detention without charge of suspects in terrorism cases under the National Defense Authorization Act. “This should be the biggest news going right now—literally legalizing martial law,” Paul says. A good point: we should leave it to our enemies to announce and define themselves by such laws, and the fact that Paul is the only Presidential candidate to call attention to the outrage makes it an even greater cause for despair.

Then again, it’s hard to find many laws, beyond the text of the Constitution, and Biblical scripture, that Paul does like. During a debate a few months ago, he said that if there’s one book that every American should read it’s Frédéric Bastiat’s “The Law”—a mid-nineteenth century tract that is often cited as a founding document of libertarian thought, but reads more like an anarchist manifesto. Its opening lines have some of the high squeaking pitch of one of Paul’s cheerful bursts of indignation: “The law perverted! The law—and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation—the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law becomes the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens.”

To Bastiat, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” It’s easy to see how supporters of a party that puts forth Newt Gingrich as its fourth frontrunner in three months would be wary of giving government any power. The general public, however, is simply wary of Gingrich. Yes, Gingrich is now crushing Romney in the pre-primary polls, but the same polls show that if Gingrich is the G.O.P. nominee, Obama would crush him in November. That’s how it looks today, anyway, even as Obama’s unfavorability rating has hit an all time high: far from routing Obama, the Republican Party (in its ugly disarray) could hardly be serving his bid for reëlection better.

Of course, as Nate Silver, the political statistics wizard, cautions, the promiscuity of the Republicans this fall means that the race for the nomination remains too wide open to call, with only a few weeks until the contests begin in Iowa and New Hampshire. It is hard to see how the party faithful, who recoil from Romney because he feels phony and alien to them, will be able to stomach Gingrich for long enough to make him their candidate.

That is why Paul’s star is suddenly flickering a bit more brightly. Nobody can question that he walks the walk as surely as he talks the talk. During a debate in September Wolf Blitzer asked him whether he thought a sick and uninsured person should just be left to die. “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks,” Paul said before being drowned out by applause. That’s conviction, that’s commitment, no flip-flopping, no double speak, no compromise. You get what you get and you don’t get upset in Ron Paul’s America—coming to a voting booth near you.

Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.