Who is this Ron Paul guy?

The eccentric Texan wants to make gold and silver legal currency in a "new gold standard," and thinks the federal government should simply butt out of everything from levying taxes to fighting drugs to regulating abortion.

Oh, and did we mention that he raised a whopping $4.3 million in a single day earlier this month, shattering a record for Republicans? And that he has more dough than Sen. John McCain and Gov. Mike Huckabee — combined?

And yet ... he remains sort of a Republican version of Dennis Kucinich, a curiosity who's light years outside the GOP mainstream and polls at only 6 percent, well behind fellow Republican candidates.

In other words, Paul's not going to win the Republican nomination for president in 2008.

But for his relatively small but passionate band of followers, mostly conservatives who recoil at the idea of voting for Rudy Giuliani given his views on abortion, gun control and gay rights, there might be some good news:

A potential third-party candidacy.

Lancaster attorney James N. Clymer, who chairs the national Constitution Party, is trying to recruit Paul to run on his ticket.

"We have been told enough to know that his campaign is very sympathetic to what we're about, and that given the right circumstances it may be something they would like to do," says Clymer. "But they have not given us any clear indication or commitment or promise."

So is it a possibility?

"It is a possibility," Clymer says.

Though Paul has said he won't run a third-party campaign, such a candidacy wouldn't be that much of a stretch. He ran for president as the Libertarian candidate in 1988, and his strict interpretation of the Constitution endears him to members of Clymer's party.

"With the exception of Rep. Ron Paul — who has been ignored by his party — we have 'Tweedle Dee' and 'Tweedle Dum' candidates once again," Clymer said in a September statement, sent out to announce his party would nominate a presidential candidate at its convention in Kansas City in April.

We should note here that Clymer and Paul go way back. Clymer brought the congressman to town in the spring of 2001 for party banquet.

We would love to recruit him," says Clymer. "I don't know what his plans are, of course. But I think it's fairly safe to say he's not going to win the Republican nomination. We would certainly encourage him to come on over and run as our nominee."

The punditocracy is abuzz about the potential for a third-party Paul candidacy.

Here's Ross Douthat, writing for TheAtlantic.com: "Those Republicans who say that Paul is too far outside the party, ideologically-speaking, to be running for its nomination aren't that far wrong: I suspect that if the Democrats take the White House, certain elements in the GOP will rediscover their 1990s-vintage fealty to a Quincy Adams foreign policy, but for now at least Paul's positions are at once popular enough for him to run a well-funded campaign and almost completely unrepresented in the mainstream of either party.

"Which is precisely the stuff of which principled third party runs are made."
Daniel Larison, a contributing editor and columnist for The American Conservative, argues that Paul should stay true to his word and sit out 2008 if he doesn't get the GOP nomination.

"... to split off into a third-party campaign and guarantee a Democratic victory that is likely to happen anyway will simply provide the militarists with an excuse for their repudiation at the polls and will change nothing.

"... A third party run would make sense only to the extent that it could realistically force the Democratic nominee to become seriously antiwar and less belligerent on Iran. Both of those seem unlikely."

The Dallas Morning News editorialized thusly: "The Republican Party once produced a principled libertarian presidential candidate widely denounced as a crackpot. Barry Goldwater lost badly, but the seeds he planted in that 1964 campaign later bore fruit — especially among his idealistic young campaigners — and changed American politics forever. Hey, you never know."

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