Too intellectual for his own good
Watching this interview of Maher with Ron Paul was somewhat painfully. It was painful because the public debate is reduced to sound bits and slogans and if you can’t fit your ideas into a simplistic slogans, and it seems that Ron Paul is to intellectual to do that, you are out of the game.
I don’t know if Libertarian ideas can permeate into larger segments of the society, but it seems that our inability to generate the sound bits and the slogan, and not our ideas, will keep us from become part of the mainsteem conversation.
On the other hand, don’t we like the idea that our claim to fame is that we are too intellectual? 
And one last comment, and although it is not directly important to the 2008 elections, I think that Ron Paul position regarding the civil war isn’t wrong. Maher can try to make a joke out of Paul’s position, and to use it to demonstrate how extremist and out of the mainstream are his positions, but his claim that the civil war was not fought to liberate the slaves is correct. The civil war was fought to serve the industrial interests of the north, that wanted to consolidate the power in the hand of strong federal government. Slavery was an excuse, and damn good one, but it was never the real issue, as Lincoln own behavior and policies during the war demonstrated.
Tags: Libertarianism 2008 Campaign Ron Paul
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Rogel @ April 1, 2007
[...] Rogel has a good point though. Ron Paul may be to intellectual for his own good. Uncategorized [...]
It’s good to know I wasn’t the only one who was uncomfortable with the interview - two of my friends got a poor impression of Ron from that, and they both think of Maher as a Libertarian (or at least sympathetic), so it wasn’t helpful at all. I totally agree with your point that in such a brief time, Ron’s defense of positions he takes come across as inadequate.
The problem is, and I don’t have a good answer how to solve it, how to deliver rather complicate issues in a five minutes interview? are we doomed for banal arguments and marketing style debates? if the answer is yes, what is it telling about us?
I think the main problem was that Dr. Paul was not asked the usual kinds of RELEVANT questions as some other candidates have been…Medical Marijuana, the GWOT, the elimination of habeus corpus (and others).
After looking at a lot of other sites that discussed the Paul interview by Maher, it seems that all of us who love Dr. Paul think he got a lousy interview from a person who (falsely) claims to be Libertarian.
I don’t know whether it would do any good to write Bill Maher, but he obviously was NOT objective and decided to make himself look “clever” for no apparent reason. I don’t understand why he could not have just been straightforward. His show is popular, and he does libertarians a great disservice by his slanted interview.
I agree that the interview was not fair, and it seems like Maher tried to paint Dr. Paul as wired. But I don’t think that a less intellectual politician would have fall into this trap.
I thought that Maher is an ex-libertarian who “saw” the light and moved to the left, Am I wrong?
He may very well have moved left. I had thought that even quite recently he had given off the impression that he was a libertarian, perhaps I was mistaken.
I hope that I can use (show to my friends) the new interview that MSNBC did with Ron Paul (”Under the Radar”, their series on lesser-known candidates) to mitigate the perception of Dr. Paul as “weird”. The interviewer for that seemed more objective, and not as having an agenda, and because of that, Ron seems much more sensible in that piece.
I’ll be glad if you will send me the link as well:)
Update: I found the link here