"Ron Paul Saw My Wife Naked!" (Or: Is The Texas Iconoclast Really a Racist?)

“Ron Paul saw my wife naked, and that’s the truth!” said a very old friend. We hadn't seen one another in some years, and I had just met his wife for the first time -- the moment was a bit awkward. (Drinks were involved, and, for reasons I hope are obvious, he, and she, will remain anonymous.)

I pressed him to clarify this statement. And it turned out my old friend’s newish wife had come from the very same small Texas town in which Ron Paul, MD, had hung up his shingle; he had been her first gynecologist. And she had known the future congressman and his family relatively well.

So we started talking about Paul from a perspective I had never heard before: that of a political liberal — and not a “Paulite” — who had spent time with his family, been to his house for dinner and seen him up close and personal throughout much of her youth.

Now, I should pause here. As regular readers know I am: A) fascinated with both Ron Paul as an anachronistic political figure, and the movement he inspires for its shear tenacity and force of will, and B) in total disagreement with so much of his world view, save for those spots where liberalism and libertarianism overlap (civil liberties, opposition to the drug war and a distaste for militarism and empire). And so I’ve criticized the Rep.’s views on various issues, but also acknowledged a certain respect for his consistency and willingness to tangle with his conservative colleagues on some key issues.

Anyway, the conversation turned to Paul as a person. He is, according to my friend’s wife, the stereotypical distracted professor type. A big thinker, smart, but not at all a detail person. He’s the kind of guy who may have an impressive catalogue of legal arguments, legislative ideas and political minutiae at his command, but is frequently unable to find his keys or wallet. He’s a big picture person, distracted and spread thin.

And, importantly, he is the type who is happy to rely on others to handle what he sees as the details of his personal, professional and political lives.

Now, at this point, you may be asking yourself why I’m going on about all this. Well, last year, as the whole Ron Paul Phenomenon gained steam, folks started looking a bit harder at Paul’s past, and one of the things they found was some very ugly, racist garbage in a newsletter that Paul had published. The content of the newsletters wasn't the only issue raised, but it was the key evidence in the argument that Paul had some unsavory views about the old melting pot.

I wrote a piece during the 2008 primaries in which I argued that a lot of commenters were so busy discussing Paul’s more unsavory supporters that they were missing the significance of his unconventional candidacy.

But I stopped short of arguing that there was nothing to any of the charges that had been brought against Paul:

There are ... legitimate concerns about some ugly racist stereotypes that were included in a newsletter that Paul sent out in the early 1990s. Paul claims he didn't write the words, but they were included in a publication called The Ron Paul Political Report and his supporters' insistence that (a) he knew nothing about the content of The Ron Paul Political Report and (b) he shouldn't be held responsible for the contents of The Ron Paul Political Report ring hollow.

What I really wanted to write was that you’d have to be an damn idiot to believe that Paul didn’t know exactly what was in those newsletters.

But in that bar I asked my friend’s wife point blank: could he have been that oblivious? And her response was: “sure, I can totally see him starting that newsletter and then turning it over to some Klansman that he mainly knew for opposing ‘big gubmint.’”