Ron Paul’s Newsletter Problem

It shouldn’t surprise anyone who remembers anything about Ron Paul’s run for the Presidency four years ago that The Newsletter Issue has cropped up again. There are many things that place a low ceiling on the Texas Congressman’s potential level of support and the newsletters are one of the reasons for that.

This won’t matter for the true believers for whom Paul is an increasingly apostolic figure but it will, indeed must, be a problem for those coming to the Doctor for the first time. Matt Welch has the indispensable summary of the whole sorry scenario, but the shorter version runs something like this:

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, after he’d run on the Libertarian ticket in the 1988 Presidential election and before his return to Congress in 1996, Paul published a newsletter entitled the Ron Paul Political Report. (You can read some of them here). He didn’t write everything in it but it all, you know, appeared under his name.