It’s about 8 o’clock on Saturday night, and Murphy’s Taproom is going nuts with flash bulbs and cheering…
About 10 minutes earlier, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a lithe 72-year-old obstetrician running a quixotic Republican campaign for president, arrived at the bar with a wide-eyed state policeman in tow. You would have thought Bono had come to Murphy’s. Young and old crushed to the door, waved their arms and stood on chairs to get a glimpse of the man….
After circling the room with his security, Paul is again bombarded with chants. “Speech, speech, speech,” holler his supporters. The congressman climbs onto a chair, looking giddy. “You have gotten rid of my skepticism. I was a skeptic,” he calls out. “You are the campaign. I have joined the revolution.”
There is a roar. The ‘What’s Next’ Series
So went a Salon.com article on the Ron Paul Revolution in early December. Those of us who have seen Dr. Paul speak on multiple occasions – and at this point I’d guess that’s most of us – recognize the bit as a standard component of his stump speech and one of the most integral, not just to the speech but to the campaign, to the man, to the movement.
Today, The Revolution is at a crossroads. Our own spinning giddiness has to meet the road of reality. Ron Paul is not going to win the Republican nomination. Ron Paul is, more than likely, never going to be President. Frankly, Ron Paul has never had much of a chance to do either, as most of us probably recognized from the very beginning.
These are not somber facts, or ones we should apologize for; the deck has been so handedly stacked against us that no one campaign was ever going to be enough. But our saving grace, our common thread, our guiding purpose, is that neither of those goals are, or have ever been, the point at all.
The point, all along, has been the realization that we – we – are out there.
And that we can still create American revolutions.
