PEOPLE who say that politicians are all the same may be in for a surprise next week. Heading the polls in Iowa, whose caucuses on January 3rd mark the true start of the Republican race for a presidential candidate, is a 76-year-old libertarian from Texas with a worldview so wacky and a programme so radical that he was recently discounted as a no-hoper. Even if he wins in quirky Iowa, Ron Paul will never be America's president. But his coming this far tells you something about the mood of Republican voters. A substantial number like a man who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, introduce a new currency to compete with the dollar, eliminate five departments of the federal government within a year, pull out of the United Nations and close all America's foreign bases, which he likens to “an empire”.

How did such a man rise to the top of the polls? One thing to note is that his support has a ceiling: in no state do more than about a third of Republican voters favour him, though in Iowa's crowded race that could be all he needs. Also, liking the man does not require liking his policies. During the candidates' debates of 2011, Mr Paul won plaudits for integrity. Where slicker rivals chop, change and pander, the rumpled Mr Paul hews to his principles even when they are unpopular. Unlike Newt Gingrich, who seldom misses a chance to play on fears of Islam, Mr Paul insists on the rule of law and civil liberties and due process for all—including suspected terrorists. Unlike Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, who adore Israel and can sound impatient to bomb Iran, Mr Paul has no great love for the Jewish state, even though this hurts him with the evangelical voters of Iowa. He opposed the Iraq war from the start and wants America to shun expensive foreign entanglements that make the rest of the world resent it.

These, however, are sideshows compared to the central belief that animates Mr Paul's politics. Born in 1935, he remembers the tail-end of the Depression and the shortages during the second world war. At five, he and his brothers were put to work helping their father run a small dairy from their basement. His job was to check that the bottles were clean. For each dirty one he spotted, he received a penny. Thus, he says in “Ending the Fed”, the book he wrote after the financial collapse of 2008, was born a fascination with numismatics. This flowered into a preoccupation with the money supply and a lifelong conviction that governments must be prevented from debasing the currency.

Not all of Mr Paul's positions are unpopular. Like other conservatives, he defends the God-given right to keep and bear arms, “the guardian of every other right”. He is pro-life, which he believes begins at conception. He champions home-schooling. But only he combines a general dislike of the overweening federal government with a particular, obsessive hatred of what he considers the corrupt system of money at its secret heart.

Pauline conversion

In 1972, though hard at work as an obstetrician and gynaecologist, he travelled 50 miles to Houston to hear the elderly Ludwig von Mises offer an “inspiring” denunciation of socialism. Several years later he dined with Friedrich Hayek. The good doctor's conversion to the Austrian school of economics turned him into a crusader who has come to see the operations of the Fed—indeed the entire banking system, with its reliance on paper money no longer backed by gold—as a dangerous confidence trick. The Fed has “ominous powers that Congress barely understands,” he says. “Trillions of dollars can be created and injected into the economy with no obligation by the Fed to reveal who benefits.” Though ending the Fed would take time, this is his panacea: it would end dollar depreciation, remove America's ability to fund endless wars and stop the growth of government.

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One consequence of Mr Paul's rise in the polls has been a flurry of speculation about his true intentions. Having run for president twice before, he is not naive about politics. He has served a dozen terms in the House of Representatives, failing to find allies for his radical measures. He cannot expect actually to win the nomination, let alone become president. His real aim appears to be didactic: he wants the widest possible hearing for his ideas. And since the financial collapse of 2008, more Americans have indeed been listening. His quest for the Republican nomination that year gave him respectability and an audience he could not reach as the nominee of the Libertarian Party in 1988.

How long will Mr Paul stay in the race? Though the nomination may be out of his reach, he has dedicated supporters and the ability to raise lots of money through small donations. That could keep him going longer than most of his rivals, and perhaps give him enough delegates to shape August's nominating convention in Tampa. Or he could run as a third-party candidate. But that would help Barack Obama, embitter a mainstream party on which he has at last made a big impact and damage his like-minded ophthalmologist son, Rand, now a Republican senator.

As Mr Gingrich has learned, rising poll numbers bring extra scrutiny. The Christmas period has revived interest in a group of newsletters published under Mr Paul's name in the 1990s, some of which included toxic remarks about blacks and Jews. Mr Paul says that he neither wrote nor approved of those words, and that they do not reflect his opinions. That still leaves him with some explaining to do. It is true that in recent years Mr Paul has stuck to his core principles: sound money, small government, individual liberty and bringing the troops home. But the newsletters shed light on some of the unsavoury fellow-travellers he has collected on his long political road. In the end, Mr Paul's obsession with the Fed is an anti-government conspiracy theory. And in America, anti-government conspiracy theories attract a lot of wingnuts, some of whom have never read Hayek or von Mises.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington