If the election was held today. Paul or Obama

A key fact about this development - largely missed by most media - is the extent to which it is driven by Democratic and independent voters planning to vote for Paul as a means of opposing endless war. While media may miss this story now, if election-night exit polls show antiwar Democrats and independents gave Paul the margin of victory, that story will appear in media around the world.

A survey published by Public Policy Polling on Sunday gave the following numbers:


Ron Paul: 23 percent
Mitt Romney: 20 percent
Newt Gingrich: 14 percent

But what was more interesting about the Public Policy Polling survey is what it revealed about who was planning to vote in the caucus for Paul:


Paul's base of support continues to rely on some unusual groups for a Republican contest. Among voters under 45 he's at 33 percent to 16 percent for Romney and 11 percent for Gingrich. Paul is also cleaning up 35-14 with the 24 percent of voters who identify as either Democrats or independents. Romney is actually ahead 22-19 with GOP voters.

So, according to this poll, if the Iowa caucus were restricted to "GOP voters," Romney would be narrowly ahead. But since Democrats and independents can vote, Paul is narrowly ahead.

If the election were held today, and this poll were predictive of the result, then exit polling would show that the margin of victory for Paul was provided by antiwar Democrats and independents. And that would be a key election-night story, on the front page and TV across the nation and around the world.

Note that if this result occurs, then it will be driven by the actions of roughly 8,400 people. Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post gives 100,000 as a rough expert consensus guesstimate of turnout. If 24 percent of those are Democrats and independents, that's 24,000 people. If 35 percent of those Democrats and independents support Paul at the caucus, that's 8,400 people.

But the point that she?s making is important, if not too subtle for the with-us-or-against-us ethos that dominates the protracted presidential campaign: even though I don?t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits.

Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform ? certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party ? who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote ? Barack Obama ? advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

As Matt Stoller argued in a genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough: ?the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.? Ron Paul?s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America?s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it?s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute ?Ron Paul? is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here ? the game that?s being played ? is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives ? President Obama ? himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians ? Muslim children by the dozens ? not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents ? in secret and with no checks ? to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish ? a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He?s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world?s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America?s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal?s Michael Hirsh just christened ?Obama?s Romance with the CIA.? He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed ?a vast drone/killing operation,? all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama?s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called ?Top Secret America? has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the ?austerity? measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America?s middle and lower classes.

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that ? things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. I know it?s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these facts ? like the history laid out by Stoller in that essay ? negate that desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to pretend they don?t exist. And there?s a corresponding hostility toward those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored.

The parallel reality ? the undeniable fact ? is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul.