Paul is a wisp of a man, with hardscrabble features like a Dust Bowl farmer’s. He has the kindly manner of a small-town doctor, which he was, and an old-fashioned sense of propriety to go with it—he doesn’t travel alone with women who aren’t his wife. But when he gets caught up explaining his philosophy, especially his unorthodox ideas about economics, his eyes widen and his insistent, high-pitched voice makes him seem—there’s no way of putting this gently—slightly unhinged.

At the parade, the proximate cause of anger was Obama’s decision to end the manned-spaceflight program at the nearby Johnson Space Center, a major employer, and to retire the space shuttle. But the sentiment had been building. Recently, the White House had ordered a freeze on offshore oil drilling after the BP blowout, which further disrupted the local economy. Things were looking bleak. A community that Money magazine had only recently named one of America’s “best places to live” suddenly felt robbed of its economic vitality—and by a government that had not hesitated to rescue Wall Street banks and Detroit automakers. To an aggrieved citizen of Friendswood and the many places like it, the accusation that the federal government has broken faith in some fundamental way with the Founding Fathers sounds not just right but righteous. And therefore so does Paul, since this is the message he has preached for 40 years.

In Congress, Paul usually stands alone. This is a natural consequence of voting against Mother Teresa and the countless other bills on seemingly unobjectionable matters to which only he has objected. For much of his career, his own party routinely blocked him. His notoriety peaked three years ago during a presidential-primary debate in South Carolina when, alone among the 10 candidates, Paul, an isolationist, questioned the U.S. presence in the Middle East and seemed to suggest that it had prompted the September 11 attacks. Rudy Giuliani immediately demanded he withdraw the statement (he refused), and afterward Paul tussled with Sean Hannity of Fox News, which derided him mercilessly for the rest of the campaign. When Republicans convened in Minneapolis to nominate John McCain, Paul was so far out of favor that he and his supporters held their own convention across town.

Paul is also a loner because his ambitions lie mostly beyond Washington. He wants to inspire a national movement, but from the outside. Demonstrating purity of conviction is more conducive to that goal than acceding to ordinary political compromises. Paul’s presidential campaign drew a large grassroots following, even while he was being dismissed as a kook, and it made better use of the Internet than any campaign besides Obama’s. Like Obama, Paul inspires people of widely varying beliefs to see him as the vessel of their desires. His opposition to the Iraq War, strident criticism of the Federal Reserve, and early warnings of financial collapse, which he derived from the theories of semi-obscure Austrian economists, brought all sorts of people into the fold.