There aren't many politicians who have ever produced a remotely genuine persona; most speak in the same way that televangelists and car-salesmen do, with the utmost yet most dubious friendliness. Ron Paul is enigmatic in his honesty, whether what he's preaching is a moralist critique of the consensus of the body politic or simply clumsily rambling various insanities, even his most profound critics would never question his fundamental ideological loyalty.
It's difficult to understand both why he has become so well-known and why he is not more so. On one hand, his favorite buzzwords and talking points have become the main staples of the Tea Party movement and the post-Bush Republican Party. His thorough embrace of free market fundamentalism is adored by the political right and is still not enough to keep crowds on the young left from admiring, imitating and voting for him. He has managed to be both thoroughly conservative and firmly anti-establishment, two qualities nearly necessary for political success in the United States.
This said, it's hard to understand why he is still not too well-known for his accomplishments. Network news channels seem to go out of the way to ignore him; even when he had continuously polled at the lead of straw-polls and even with a heavy showing in the Iowa primary, the artificial focus was always on the media-favorite pipsqueak candidates such as Rick Perry, Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain. One should be genuinely confused as to why Fox News does not hail Paul as the Second Coming; he does indeed pass all the litmus tests for stable conservatism. All of Paul's political victories have been won essentially without the aid of any of the old media, relying totally on the Internet, grassroots campaigning and word-of-mouth, strangely enough, without much of his own doing.
Of course on the other hand, Paul may even get more attention that he truly deserves. His ideals are strong, but any charisma he has is exclusively in his candidness. He is an awful speaker and seems to have become increasingly senile. It's not uncommon for him to fuddle over words or even forget how to speak grammatical English when he is nervous or excited. It does indeed mean something to his supporters when a weak and dreary Paul preaches to booing listeners and other derisive candidates in debates (yet even in his early days, Paul still managed to enlist the happy applause of numerous anti-war and anti-establishment Republicans). But the candidate seems to be followed by a public interpretation larger than himself with enthusiastic followers applying whatever values they may like to the man.
Still more love is held for the emotional value of his statements than their actual meanings. Paul's nearly comical lectures given to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke illustrate a tenuous grasp of economic intuition which he often touts as the prize of his platform. His economic thoughts seem to be rooted in his personal interpretation of the Austrian School with a heavy fear of inflation and a nostalgic pining for an imagined dreamland provided by the gold standard. Paul is one of the many American paleo-conservatives who has been intoxicated by the love of the market. Strangely enough, his explicit endorsement of free trade does not translate into actual support of free trade treaties, to which he seems to object on constitutional grounds. What is important for understanding the shifting political ideology of American culture is that Paul has been the intellectual symbol of a movement which has moved the median voter economically rightward, even with the New Left's elated consent.
In a recent climactic encounter with Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on Bloomberg TV, Krugman noted when Representative Paul had mentioned the name of Milton Friedman, that had Friedman been still alive now, in the era of Tea Parties and Occupations, he would be counted among the far left of economic thought. Today is an epoch, thanks in part to Paul and his intellectual offspring, in which even the acknowledgement of the uninteresting consensuses of monetary policy seems treasonous and perhaps even socialist. This paradigm shift has placed the monetarist Friedman, even as the ideological forefather of the Reagan Revolution somewhere behind the Iron Curtain in comparison with conservatives of today.
As stated before, Paul's anti-establishment nature seems to work to his favor in political culture. Paul has interviewed every representative of the Federal Reserve to have presented in front of Congress with the unshakable suspicion that they all are partaking in a massive fraud which involves everything he sees to have gone wrong in American society. Inflation, fiat currency, the federal debt, and trade wars all work into his mind to produce a conspiracy theory in which gold is the only thing of real value in the world and the Federal Reserve tricks the American people into using dollars so they can slowly rob them via inflation.
Most significantly, this kind of rhetoric has seeped into the budding generation of the left. "End the Fed" was a fairly common choice of protest material in the recent camp-outs in various cities across America and the world. The youngest members of the left seem to have lost faith in the government which they see as does Paul, as an organization that when given power, only works to collude with private enterprise to the public expense. For all their mutual spite, the far-left and far-right of the United States are becoming more and more interchangeable; the new dichotomy in politics seems to be between conventionalists and reformists of all stripes.