Still Time To Dump McCain ?  

I thought the Ron Paul campaign had given up a while back and his supporters had retreated to Paulville but apparently not - according to the New York Times, the campaign isn't over yet - Its not a campaign, its a mission.

Mr. Paul was supposed to be a memory by now. But in the Oregon primary last week, he won 15 percent of the vote, and the campaign appears to be growing into something beyond a conventional protest campaign. Some supporters have helped turn the outspoken congressman’s campaign into a colorful, loud sideshow with their guerrilla marketing tactics — self-penned Ron Paul anthems on YouTube, a Ron Paul blimp, T-shirts that portray Mr. Paul as a world-historical icon like Che Guevara.

Attendance at Ron Paul campaign stops has nearly returned to pre-Super Tuesday levels. A group of supporters recently announced plans to start Paulville, a gated community in West Texas, where believers can pursue the candidate’s libertarian ideals as a cooperative lifestyle. Ron Paul’s book, “The Revolution: A Manifesto,” rocketed to No. 1 on a New York Times best-seller list on May 18 (it has since dropped). Supporters are starting to discuss creating yippie-ish disruptions at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul in September to gain visibility for the movement.

Many supporters say that such gestures are not the final gasp of a failed political campaign, but a spark for a “revolution.” And Mr. Paul encourages such talk. When he speaks or writes of revolution, the congressman means it in the 1776 sense, except that the oppressors now live in Washington, not London. The candidate wants to turn back what he sees as 200 years of creeping expansion of federal power, dissolve the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service, return to the gold standard, bring the troops home, not just from Iraq, but from everywhere — and yes, legalize pot, at least for medical purposes.

This message has hit home — not only with some traditional libertarians, but also among a small but passionate group of young voters who came of age after Sept. 11, during the debates about the Iraq war, the Patriot Act and Abu Ghraib. For them, the Ron Paul message has the feel not of 1776, but of 1968, when an unpopular war raged abroad, and a subculture of disenfranchised young people embraced an unorthodox philosophy built around a utopian ideal of freedom.

Of course, Ron Paul is a lot closer to Barry Goldwater than to Eugene McCarthy. But his young supporters, many of whom call themselves former liberals, said the peacenik left shares much with the libertarian right. ...

Mr. Paul’s voters tend to be younger and angrier than most Republicans. Exit polls in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan by Edison/Mitofsky showed that Mr. Paul’s voters tended to strongly disapprove of the Iraq war, and hold a far more negative opinion of the Bush administration than other Republican voters do. In Michigan, where Mr. Paul received 6 percent of the vote, 34 percent of Paul voters were under 30, compared with 13 percent of voters there over all. (Mr. Paul is also, largely, a guy thing. In the New Hampshire primary, where the candidate received 8 percent of the vote, his support was 77 percent male, according to exit polls.) ...

Some supporters are as quick as Dylan fans from the 60s to label mainstream politicians as sell-outs and compromisers. They cherish their candidate’s outspokenness.

“Man, I’ve straight hated politics, I’ve just never liked the authority,” explained Tommy Rayome, 19, a “musician-slash-cook-slash-whatever” from Lexington, Ky., who was one of more than 600 people who showed up at last week’s Ron Paul signing at a Borders bookstore in Louisville.

Mr. Rayome, whose unkempt ash curls cascaded from a knit Rasta cap, wore an enameled American flag pin on his faded maroon T-shirt. He said that he fell for Mr. Paul almost instantly after his roommate, also a supporter, described the candidate’s lack of hypocrisy. (In Congress, Mr. Paul is known as Dr. No, for his staunch refusal to vote for any bill he thinks might expand government power.) “I said, ‘All right, I like him,’ ” Mr. Rayome recalled. “He’s a terrible politician, so he’s the best.” ...

In this passionate support, some political observers hear echoes not from 1968, but from 1964 — when Barry Goldwater lost the presidential election but won a fervent following.

The youthful zeal of the Paul movement “does recall the early Goldwater movement, which was also jam-packed with people dropping out of graduate school, college, maybe even high school, to devote themselves 24/7 to what they called the ‘revolution,’ ” said Rick Perlstein, author of “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” (Hill and Wang, 2002).

And such movements don’t always stay in the margins forever, he said, adding that the young supporters who stumped for Goldwater’s failed presidential bid helped lay the seeds for the Reagan revolution 16 years later.

The figure at the center of the tempest looks like an unlikely political idol. Waiting in an empty green room at the Palace Theater before taking the stage, Mr. Paul looked slender, stooped, slightly sad. But that image dissolves when he begins to speak about the unlikely sense of community spawned by his traditional libertarianism.

“It does bring people together, people who were totally apathetic,” he said in an interview afterward. “They’re very diverse. But they understand the issue of freedom. There’s a reason for this. If you’re free to live your life as you choose and spend your money as you wish, you’re not competitive with other people, you don’t tell people how to live.”