The Pitch:

By John Amick

“I hate Republicans!” a young woman screamed out the window of a sedan as she turned left onto 12th Street from Broadway. The targets of her vitriol seemed indifferent; they shifted their focus to the next car approaching the traffic light. Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC’s Sunday-morning This Week and that night’s speaker at the Folly Theater, a few blocks away, had argued on his show that Paul had no chance of being elected the next president of the United States.

Like adolescent boys spewing stats on their favorite basketball players, the citizens on the corner hyped the credentials of their long-shot presidential hopeful, a 10-term Republican congressman from the Texas Gulf Coast. Aside from those dozen or so ralliers on October 30, Paul has a legion of followers on the Internet — more than 72,000 volunteers from nearly 1,300 local MeetUp.com groups, far more than any other candidate. On November 5, Paul’s supporters donated more than $4.2 million, making it the largest single fundraising day in presidential campaign history. Paul is a Navy veteran, a licensed obstetrician and gynecologist and an amateur economist devoted to abolishing the IRS and returning the country’s monetary policy to the gold standard. He’s anti-war, anti-big business and anti-federal government. He was opposed to giving Rosa Parks (along with everyone else ever nominated) the Congressional Medal of Freedom, arguing that Congress has no constitutional authority to bestow such an award upon anyone.

Nationally, his followers range from left-leaning college students to neocons who supported Bush in ’04. Read more…

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