Ron Paul Ain’t Gonna Win? Say You Don’t Know, Joe!

October 31, 2007

Ron Paul Ain’t Gonna Win? Say You Don’t Know, Joe!

When I first read Joe Wallace’s column on LongIslandExchange.com, “Who The Heck Is Ron Paul?” (Oct 25, 2007), I was angry and I wanted badly to write a response article to zing him and what I perceived to be his arrogance. Never before in my lifetime would I have cared enough to defend a presidential candidate, but this time was different. Fortunately, I was pressed for time, and my indignance subsided into rationality. What I mean is that I’ve written less of a zing and more of a invitation.

Although Joe Wallace made his case clear about why the ignorant American public would not elect Ron Paul, I found Joe’s article to be fatally flawed in two ways. Perhaps you guys spotted more flaws than I did, but here’s what I found. First, he spent substantial verbiage on the right-to-life issue and injected a very condescending opinion on it. He called it a non-issue, although he clearly is a pro-choice kind of guy. Heralding the pro-choice stance, he called any reversal of the status quo “going backwards”. The more one reads of his two pro-choice paragraphs, the more one sees that it’s not a non-issue for Joe. In any event, his focus on the issue was misplaced and his opinion that it is a non-issue, erroneous. It is misplaced because the article was supposed to introduce Ron Paul to his readers, not take jabs at right-to-lifers, and it was erroneous to state that it is a non-issue because Ron Paul is someone who seeks to bring power back to the States from the Federal government and, like every President before him, would have the power to nominate and appoint federal judges who, in turn, can play a part in bringing the question of choice or life back to the States. In concluding the topic of Joe’s first fatal flaw, let me just implore voters to not reject any candidate based on one issue.

The second fatal flaw in Joe Wallace’s supersedes even the first. Joe Wallace’s article purported to be about Ron Paul, but revealed itself to be an article of opinion about why Joe thinks Ron Paul will not win the Presidency. Not only is the title, “Who The Heck Is Ron Paul” misleading, but the article, whether intended or not, casts Ron Paul’s campaign in a negative light. With the title as it was worded, Joe Wallace should have presented Ron Paul to the reader and left the reader’s choice in limbo. Instead, an uninformed reader was left with the impression that a vote cast for Ron Paul (“the spoiler” as he put it) is a wasted vote. I harken back to that ABC News interview from July, 2007, with George Stephanopoulos: