Sometimes it takes a foreigner to offer a concise viewpoint of a phenomenon occurring in another nation, and that is what Toby Harnden has done about Ron Paul in the London Telegraph.
On the plus side for Paul, no where in the article does Harnden state that Paul has no chance of winning the Republican nomination for president--although the best hope Harnden gives him is scoring "a major upset by leaping ahead of one or more of the major contenders." And he's talking about Iowa and New Hampshire, not a big state like Florida or Illinois.
On the downside, Harnden makes the inevitable, but accurate, comparison to the 2004 Howard Dean phenomenon:
Instead, the voters found Dr. Paul and his campaign, like that of Howard Dean, the early Democratic front runner in 2004, has been taken in a direction the candidate himself had never anticipated.
Like Dean, Paul will flicker out too, he'll be largely forgotten after February 5. Oh yeah, sure he may run as a Libertarian in the general election--and end up with 2 percent of the vote.
Paul's signature issue, Iraq, is slowly moving off center stage in the minds of most voters. And other than lowering taxes--hardly on original idea among Republicans--Ron Paul doesn't have much of an economic plan. Now there's a topic on the minds of many voters.
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