In Tuesday’s Iowa Caucuses, the Republican Party will come face-to-face with its Ron Paul problems.

The first problem for the party is that the libertarian Texas congressman Paul, despite months of massive media indifference and despite mounting vitriolic attacks by his opponents, may win. That’s a problem because there are powerful party factions and many registered Republicans who simply will not support him, even against socialist-in-chief Barack Obama. Without them, Paul can’t win in November, even if he wins every primary.

Problem No. 2: Without his people, the GOP may not win in November, either.

“I think Ron Paul’s views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American,” rival Newt Gingrich said last week. Not just outside mainstream American thought, but outside decent American thought. It’s probably noteworthy that, not too much before last week, Gingrich was praising Paul for bringing important issues to the forefront in the campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. But that was before Gingrich had fallen below Paul in the polls.

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The next problem for the party is that win or lose on Tuesday, Ron Paul, perhaps more than all of his opponents, has tapped in to the most potent strain of voter enthusiasm – the kind of enthusiasm necessary to unseat an incumbent president. Call it Tea Party fever. It’s what Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry had before their campaigns turned sour or self-destructed.

As if Republicans didn’t face enough Ron Paul problems, there are more. For example, there’s his foreign policy stance, seen as fatal for a presidential aspirant. Even though growing numbers of Americans, including growing numbers of Republicans, are weary with ongoing Middle East wars, when Paul suggests, as he has unrepentantly, that the U.S. essentially asked for terrorists to sock it to us, he loses rather than gains support.

This unbridgeable gulf is epitomized by Paul criticizing the U.S. for killing Osama bin Laden. That isn’t the way to win even war-weary Republican hearts, no matter how “principled” a stance it may seem on paper. The fact is, practically speaking, most Americans don’t much mind blurring international legal fine points when it comes to killing murderers of Americans.

Need another problem? How about Paul’s refusal to rule out a third-party candidacy? How many parties have won when their ranks were so split? That’s a rhetorical question.

And then there’s that flaky, crazy-uncle image Paul worked so hard to shed during the present campaign, which, thanks to the near-eternal Internet, has been resurrected by mere mouse clicks. Google “Ron Paul racist newsletter” and you will be overwhelmed with innumerable accounts of how, decades ago, the Texan’s name appeared atop publications laced with nasty references to blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals and Jews.

Somewhere buried in this mass of Web data you might find Paul’s renunciation of those words, which he has since not only disavowed but disclaimed authoring, and which he attributes to underlings he refuses to identify whom he insists wrote without his knowledge. That would be a strain on credibility for a regular guy, let alone for a politician. As with such things, his rebuttals and retractions never quite catch up to the original transgressions. Anyone searching for a reason to discount a Paul candidacy will hit a treasure trove in these archives.

All of this is unfortunate, but also probably inevitable in the world of politics.

The pity is that Ron Paul offers the best option for Republicans who truly seek to reverse the catastrophic course being steered in Washington. Those Americans who still value liberty, unfettered economic and personal freedoms and enforceable limits on government will find no better champion than Ron Paul. Iowa’s social conservatives, evangelical Christians, small-government advocates and freedom lovers of all stripes can find much to admire in this obstetrician who says he would slash a trillion wasted dollars from the federal budget.

While other candidates may claim to have come to new understandings on old issues, or less genuinely have flip-flopped to assume more popular positions, Paul has been far more consistent for far longer. Unfortunately, the Republican Party’s Ron Paul problems probably mean that no matter how well he fares Tuesday, the GOP will end up with a flip-flopping, establishmentarian nominee in November. As usual.

Contact the writer: mlandsbaum@ocregister.com

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