WASHINGTON—Radical. Dangerous. Crazy. Unworthy of mainstream attention. Just too out there. And don’t forget about all those old racist newsletters.

That was the conventional Republican playbook on Ron Paul in December, when the eccentric 76-year-old Texas libertarian began showing the first real signs of traction in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Plenty of conservatives could get their head around Paul’s doomsday pledge to drastically shrink the federal government. But his vow to completely upend American foreign policy, ending its role as “the world’s police officer” for being neither helpful nor affordable, whoa.

Add in Paul’s unbending opposition to the freedom-squelching Patriot Act and the U.S. war on drugs, all in the name of individual liberty, and the Republican establishment was in eye-rolling overdrive, with American conservative media outlets dutifully following suit.

No worries, Fox News reassured its viewers. If Ron Paul won Iowa, the Iowa caucuses would be meaningless. If Mitt Romney won, well, that’s different.

Fast forward a month and a funny thing is happening on the way to South Carolina. In the wake of his third-place in Iowa and significantly more impressive second-place finish in New Hampshire — kooky Ron Paul is beginning to matter.

It still may be Romney’s world — and it is most likely going to stay that way for the duration of this race — but suddenly, Paul’s world view is being welcomed into the conversation.

The respect came most vividly this week from influential Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, who called Paul’s undeniable momentum “a signal achievement, the biggest story yet of this presidential campaign.”

No, Paul will never enter “the promised land” of the Oval Office, wrote Krauthammer. But he is nevertheless on the verge of a historic moment — poised to win mainstream recognition for his cherished libertarian ideals after a quarter-century in the political wilderness.

“I find him a principled, somewhat wacky, highly engaging eccentric. But regardless of my feelings or yours, the plain fact is that Paul is nurturing his movement toward visibility and legitimacy,” said Krauthammer.

Krauthammer is not alone. Bedrock conservative commentator Mark Steyn, while grudgingly assessing Paul as “a weird goofy gnome in a baggy suit two sizes too big,” observes that the Texan’s clout is no longer in doubt.

Paul’s drastic foreign policy prescription may amount to “delusional” isolationism, said Steyn. Yet it is a view that is finding “more and more takers after a decade of expensive but inconclusive war.

“In response, too many of my friends on the right are demanding business as usual — the Pentagon’s way of doing things must continue in perpetuity. It cannot,” wrote Stein.

If you sense a nervous tension between these lines of grudging respect, it’s real: Paul may not be able to go all the way with his crazy-quilt of spectrum-bending ideas, which simultaneously beguile and repulse both the right and the left, but he can be a kingmaker.

As his fanatically loyal fan base grows, Paul becomes evermore viable as a potential third-party candidate in November’s general election — a scenario many expect would siphon enough conservative votes to hand President Barack Obama a second term.

The alternative is that the Republicans now must play nice with Paul and his fervent and growing movement and give it a voice in August, when all eyes turn to Tampa for the party’s 2012 convention. A voice for Paul as a prime-time speaker, a voice for at least part of his agenda as the party crafts its official platform for 2012.

Paul, though sprightly for 76, is no spring chicken. And though he has run on the big-L Libertarian ticket in the past, some analysts see such a move as unlikely this year, lest he doom the career of his like-minded son Rand, who was elected Republican Senator of Kentucky in the 2010 mid-terms that brought the Tea Party to Washington.

Born in Pittsburgh to a family of dairy operators, wed to the same woman (Carol Wells) since 1957, a father of five, an obstetrician and gynecologist by training, Paul is famously consistent in his politics, having hewn to unbending principles since he was elected to the first of this three stretches in Congress in 1976.

His core following, famously, comprises the young — web-savvy, college-going acolytes — whose almost religious fealty to their septuagenarian guru first emerged in 2008, when Paul fell short to John McCain in his quest for the Republican nomination.

Paul’s support was about 10 per cent four years ago. But more than twice that today, based on the results of Iowa and New Hampshire.

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It’s early days to specify the roots of Paul’s new momentum. But one data point suggests Paul is emerging as a sort of Venus Flytrap for America’s downwardly mobile. In New Hampshire, for example, Paul soared past Romney, gathering the lion’s share of low-income voters, whereas Romney’s strongest support came from those earning $200,000 a year or more.

On the ground, that translates into people like John McGowan, 45, an Atlanta resident who the Toronto Star encountered at Paul’s Iowa campaign headquarters two weeks ago.

“I drove from Atlanta to be here — 14 hours on the road with my son and my nephew — to do whatever we can for Ron Paul,” said McGowan.

“This is a make-or-break moment for our country and as far as I’m concerned, Romney is just Obama on steroids.

“The American people are worker bees. And every other politician is moving us toward having more worker bees and a smaller elite. Ron Paul is the only one who makes any sense to me.”

Many of Paul’s supporters, though no less ardent, come to him through other apertures. In New Hampshire on Tuesday, Jeff Creem, 44, spent 14 hours holding his Ron Paul sign outside a polling station in Nashua — all on the merits of Paul’s opposition to the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 legislation that encroaches on civil liberties.

“It disgusts me that all the other candidates will talk about the Constitution but when it’s inconvenient they will toss it aside and make laws that go against it. Ron Paul may not be polished but he is real. I trust him. And I’m going all out to help.”

Exit polling data, together with the anecdotal observations of those of us who watched the first primaries up close, show Paul’s appeal is tapping new nerves, with an unlikely mix of Tea Partiers, independents, discouraged Democrats and even Occupy types joining the bandwagon.

Critics mock the very diversity of Paul’s followers, suggesting his platform is self-limiting. Progressives, for example, may find nirvana in Paul’s anti-war stance — it’s everything they wanted in Obama but never got — yet the liberal blogosphere is in a fury over Paul’s zeal for deregulation, which they perceive as both anti-union and anti-environment.

And then there’s Paul’s avowed pro-life stance — an exception to the personal liberty mantra in that it does not extend choice to pregnant women. A policy, many note, that would likely come as a shock to the late Ayn Rand, ideological doyenne of libertarianism.

But for all these contradictions, Paul’s followers say they sense in their candidate a guileless humility absent from the rest of the slate. He’s quirky but he’s real. Not bought and paid for. The little guy, literally and figuratively, in a roster otherwise inauthentic — and none more so than that fee-fi-faux-fum giant of a front-runner, Mitt Romney

“The freedom Ron Paul stands for is coming again. It might happen in this election cycle, it might happen in the next one. But sooner or later, it’s going to happen,” said Leah Wolczko, 45, an unemployed schoolteacher from Manchester, N.H.

“What Ron Paul started is not going to go away. Republicans are in the midst of deciding what the GOP really is. He’s the only one standing on principles. And those principles are going to outlive Ron Paul. We’re going to make sure of it.”