Web finds Ron Paul, and takes him for a ride

By Katharine Q. Seelye and Leslie Wayne

updated 2:30 a.m. ET Nov. 11, 2007

PHILADELPHIA - From posting video on YouTube to enlisting friends through Facebook, all of the presidential candidates are looking for ways to harness the Internet. In the case of Ron Paul, the Internet has harnessed him.

Mr. Paul, a 10-term Texas congressman who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, came into the campaign with a conservative platform: a return to the gold standard, abolition of the I.R.S., a literal view of the Constitution. His campaign was bare bones. Then he started appearing in debates. His emphatic presence and fierce opposition to the war in Iraq set him apart from his fellow Republicans. Setting him even farther apart were ideas like blaming American foreign policy for the attacks of 9/11 and abolishing the Federal Reserve.

If his campaign had taken place in the pre-Internet era, it might have gone the way of his 1988 Libertarian campaign for president, as a footnote to history. But because of the Internet’s low-cost ability to connect grass-roots supporters with one another — in this case, largely iconoclastic white men — Mr. Paul’s once-solo quest has taken on a life of its own. It is evolving from a figment of cyberspace into a traditional campaign, with yard signs, direct mail and old-fashioned rallies, like one here on Saturday attended by a few thousand people under cold, gray skies. Mr. Paul said it was his biggest rally so far. He said it proved his campaign was more than “a few spammers” and called it a “gigantic opportunity” to establish credibility.

How much the Paul campaign had snowballed on the Internet became evident last week when supporters independent of the campaign raised $4 million online and an additional $200,000 over the phone in a single day, a record among this year’s Republican candidates. There is even talk that Mr. Paul could influence the primary in New Hampshire, where he could draw votes from Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is trying to revive the independent persona that helped him win the state’s primary in 2000.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Paul, 72, a retired physician and a grandfather, acknowledged that the influence of the Internet had surprised even him.

“We always knew it was supposed to be important,” he said of the Internet. “My idea was you had to have someone who was a super expert, who knew how to find people. But they found us.”

As for the record one-day fund-raising, he said, “I had nothing to do with it,” adding that he had so far neglected to thank the people responsible. (James Sugra, 28, of Huntington Beach, Calif., acting on his own, posted an online video proposing one big day of fund-raising; Trevor Lyman, 37, of Miami Beach, then independently created a site, www.thisnovember5th.com, that featured the video.)

Mr. Paul estimated that the one-day haul had brought “$10 million worth of free publicity.”

He added, “It’s kind of sad, but the money is what has given us credibility, not the authenticity of the ideas.”

Those ideas were on display Saturday as Mr. Paul said young people should be able to opt out of Social Security, called for an audit into how much gold really is in Fort Knox, and, in urging an end to the war, declared, “The Versailles Treaty is one of our biggest problems we’re dealing with today, because it was under the Versailles Treaty that we created — the West created — this artificial country called Iraq.”

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He also called the Internet “a strong political equalizer,” adding that the attention after the one-day fund-raiser had been “a very, very valuable lesson for us.”

Stirring the interest in contributions to the Paul campaign is an innovation on his Web site, www.ronpaul2008.com, a real-time display of the dollars and the names of donors as they roll in. By contrast, most campaigns conceal their fund-raising and time the release of financial information for political effect.

“What is new is how Paul’s openness about his daily fund-raising data helped foster this surge,” said Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of techPresident.com, a nonpartisan Web site that tracks the candidates’ use of technology. “It fed a powerful user-driven feedback loop.”

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That success is propelling Mr. Paul increasingly toward the nuts and bolts of concrete campaigning. His staff members — in headquarters above a dry-cleaning shop in Arlington, Va., where some have built bunk beds in their cubicles — began a $1.1 million television campaign in New Hampshire this week. He even held an old-school fund-raiser here on Saturday, behind closed doors.

The Paul campaign says it expects to expand its staff of 70 paid workers and 8 unpaid state coordinators. (By contrast, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, who is also seeking the Republican nomination, has 244 paid staff members.)

“To have any chance of success, you have to blend the old with the new,” said Lew Moore, Mr. Paul’s campaign manager. “If you just have a cyber-campaign and that does not translate into votes or money, it would be a fantasy and we would just be a video game.”

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