Ron Paul in Meredith

This afternoon I attended a Ron Paul event in the charming lakeside resort-ish town of Meredith, NH. The room was packed to overflowing and the energy level among Paul's supporters high. My anecdotal confirmation of what the polls suggest: Lots of young people in the room, many of them sporting "Liberty" t-shirts, hawking Ron Paul pamphlets, even reading his book about the federal reserve as they waited for the candidate to arrive.

Paul is just as disarmingly quirky and avuncular in person as he seems on TV--even more so. During an impromptu press conference after his event (what campaigns call an "avail"), one reporter asked how his health is holding up (a question she said she's been getting from some of her viewers). He grinned, laughed, and said "Let's ride a bicycle!"

Paul hits many notes that explain his oddball appeal to disparate sets of voters--while at the same time asserting things that (I can't help it) make me roll my eyes. When asked to reassure voters worried about his foreign policy views, especially his beliefs about 9/11, Paul says that the 9/11 attacks were misused by politicians to pass the Patriot Act--thus infringing on our civil liberties--and invade Iraq; at another point he asks, If American civilians had been bombed by a foreign country as we have done to people overseas, how would we respond? Here he effectively conjured a very basic human sense of injustice and why military might is not the real key to international peace. On the other hand, when asked what he would do to improve working relationships in government, Paul asserts that if everyone abides by the constitution and government cuts its spending way back, the quality of politics will improve. Hmmmm....

In the end, I came away with a better sense of why he appeals to so many voters here. His message seems simple and makes a kind of gut sense to post-partisan young adults, military vets, and retirees alike. And he doesn't always sugar coat his prescriptions. When asked what a Paul administration would do to fight Alzheimer's disease, he doesn't give the standard response of 'committing more resources' to the fight. Instead (and here I rolled my eyeballs big time), he says that the answer doesn't lie in government-funded research "because those funds are all allotted for political reasons." Wow.