• Tweet
• 

The second reason Ron Paul’s adamant denials of racism are credible is that, as Andrew Sullivan points out, Ron Paul is “not exactly known for self-editing” — and that’s an understatement. Ron Paul has an almost pathological inability to filter anything in his mind on its way out his mouth. It’s not just that he compulsively tells the truth — he compulsively tells the whole truth about whatever he’s thinking; the more passionate he is about it, the more impossible it is for him not to wax indignant about it. If it’s on his mind, he can’t hold it in.

You’ve seen him in the debates. One can easily picture frustrated campaign staffers coaching Ron Paul to stick to a more disciplined message during debates, only to watch nervously as he shares every stray thought he may have on an issue in jumbled fashion, whether it is likely to help him win the primary or not. As Ron Paul’s mind wanders, so wanders his mouth. If Ron Paul were really a racist, why has he never, ever publicly — or even privately to anyone’s account — said anything remotely racist? Surely we would have witnesses to Paul’s racism piling on at this point in the news cycle. Surely there would be at least one video capturing an errant word of racism escaping the kind country doctor’s lips. Surely Ron Paul would have had a macaca moment by now. But we don’t, there isn’t, and he hasn’t. Because Ron Paul isn’t racist.

The third reason we can trust Ron Paul is his frequent and close association with racial minorities. Throughout his career, Ron Paul has employed racial minorities in his office staff, including Hispanics, African Americans, and Jews: most notably Eric Dondero, his chief of staff and travel aide for over a decade. Dondero bitterly parted ways with Paul over foreign policy after 9/11, but despite his general hostility toward Ron Paul, Dondero, who is half Jewish on his mother’s side, recently stated:

I worked for the man for 12 years, pretty consistently. I never heard a racist word expressed towards blacks or Jews come out of his mouth. Not once. And understand, I was his close personal assistant. It’s safe to say that I was with him on the campaign trail more than any other individual.

Noted African-American economist Walter Williams also endorsed Ron Paul for president in 2008, and Paul even suggested Williams as a possible VP pick. There’s also Nelson Linder, the president of the Austin, Texas, chapter of the NAACP and a personal acquaintance of Paul’s for 20 years, who stated in an interview that he had never found Paul to exhibit any racist tendencies, “adding that he had heard Ron Paul speak out about police repression of black communities and mandatory minimum sentences on many occasions.” Moreover, Paul polls better among minority voters in hypothetical matchups against Obama than any other GOP contender.

So why is the media following this story so closely?

Because it can no longer avoid talking about Ron Paul, as it has conspicuously done ever since he announced his candidacy, as it did after he statistically tied for first place at the Ames Iowa Straw Poll in August, as it did during the CBS foreign policy debate during which Ron Paul (a veteran who serves on the House Foreign Relations Committee and gets more donations from active duty military than the other GOP candidates combined) was only given 90 seconds to speak during an entire televised hour of debate … and the examples go on and on.

As Ron Paul surges in the polls and the possibility of a Ron Paul win in Iowa becomes all too real, the mainstream media would look stupid — instead of merely biased — if it continued to ignore him and he actually pulled off a win in Iowa and a strong second-place finish in New Hampshire. But if the media doesn’t smear Ron Paul with these racist newsletters from over 20 years ago that Paul did not write and does not agree with, reporters and pundits will have to talk about the actual issues that Paul’s campaign raises, issues that matter deeply to the American people, issues that Ron Paul has always been on the right side of throughout his 12 terms as a U.S. congressman, both in word and in deed.