Throughout last fall's several thousand Republican presidential debates the candidates would on occasion be asked to compliment one of their competitors, at which point an almost singular admiration would erupt for Ron Paul. Mitt loved him, Newt loved him, the Ricks loved him and so on, although it cannot be denied that much of this public adoration was privately pragmatic: Warm to the Paulites, because when their avatar flames out -- which Paul and only Paul is absolutely sure to do -- they and their mass organizational skills will have to go somewhere.
Yet that pragmatic choice to cozy up to Paul went deeper; it went also to the historical and psychological core of the contemporary GOP. The University of California's Jeffrey Stewart, in Politico's "Arena," does a nice job of summarizing:
That [Paul] is so popular and will remain popular despite these newsletters reveals how much an anti-black motivation underlies the frenzy of the Republican presidential campaign....
Paul is not atypical--he was just impolitic enough to put in print what the Republican rank and file still believes.
Whether presidential-candidate Paul is or isn't a racist is essentially immaterial. The same holds true for the others. For their political reality is that they, notwithstanding whatever their private views, must pay tribute to the coded malice of states' rights and the implied, oppressive anarchy of a shackled central authority in the federal government. That this professed ideology of inflated local power and limited federal authority is more personal and opportunistic than conceptual and genuine becomes apparent when the GOP base advocates for a U.S. marshal stationed in every bedroom, as well as over the shoulder of every gynecologist.
In the early 1960s Barry Goldwater, the actual originator (not Richard Nixon) of the Southern Strategy, pithily metaphorized the essence of capitalizing on white backlash: Republican candidates should "go hunting where the ducks are." If Goldwater, like Paul, hadn't been a libertarian crackpot, he might have had a shot in '64. Today, demographic pressures have thinned the ducks' ranks, thereby leaving Republican candidates to desperately appeal to an ever-shrinking target audience. They just can't quit the racists -- still the base ingredient of the whole goddamn party.