Picking up on the point raised by Russ Winter over on his blog, I want to emphasize the wide gulf between the media's coverage of the Republican debate and people's high level of receptiveness to minarchist, "paleo-conservative" candidate Ron Paul afterwards.

Winter writes:

Case in point, MSNBC put up a tabulation allowing debate watchers to rate candidate performance. Almost none of the GOP candidates garnered much of a positive reaction, but after about 81,000 responses as of this writing Sunday, Paul scores 37%, Romney 28%, Guliani 25%, McCain 19%, Huckabee, 13%, and the other five candidates under 10%.

C Span ran a poll asking for best performance and Paul garnered 73%. ABC ran a debate performance poll and Paul scored 87%. Yet Ron Paul is not even mentioned in this ABC article about the debate. Typical of pundit talk is this from Dick Morris of Fox News. Here we see the Washington Post on the debate, again no mention and yet nearly in the whole comment section relates to Ron Paul. Perhaps this is a campaign tactic of “ballot stuffing”, but if so it still indicates a pretty dedicated cadre of supporters, and that’s how revolutions get started. Guess we will see soon enough in the national polls.

Winter is right: something stinks here. But this dissonance between the MSM's coverage and the actual impact of the debate shouldn't be surprising. Paul is thought quite highly of around here, but what is important to note is two things: (1) he is ideologically an "outside" candidate, and (2) he's running as a Republican (which is presently his nominal affiliation in Congress).

Compare with "third-party" candidates like Perot or Nader. These participants always received plenty of media attention, though generally it was vaguely (or overtly) disparaging. The crucial difference between them and Paul is that Paul is formally a part of the mainstream, two-party system. In other words, he actually has a chance of winning if he gets past the primaries, free of the "spoiler effect".

Hence the radio silence: Paul is a true threat to the present establishment precisely because he could win if he were to be allowed to reach the people.

The stunning, overwhelmingly-positive reception to Paul in the polls (which surprised even me) makes the effective blackballing of Paul all the more critical: this is shaping up to be a standoff of major established powers against the people, who yearn for real change.

If this is how it's going to be, we're going to have to go about this the grassroots way: supporters should blog about Paul, talk about him incessantly, and mass-email his YouTube clips to friends and family. Everyone should at least be exposed; then they can decide for themselves on an informed basis.