Ron Paul. Who is this man? Actually, he is the leader of the polls in the Republican Party by a clear majority. That is, if you watch the debates and voted who was the winner.

An MSNBC poll during the California Republican debate asked who stood out among the pack. 14% chose Rudy Giuliani. 19% chose Mitt Romney. 48% chose Ron Paul. Over 75,000 voted.

On the issue of who showed the most leadership qualities, Paul was again the clear winner with 44% of the vote (Romney was second with 18%).

Is this an aberration? No.

In ABC’s poll on the Ronald Reagan debate, over 27,000 people voted. At third place was Mitt Romney, with 396 votes. Taking second was a vote for “It doesn’t matter who won. I wouldn’t put America in another Republican’s hands” with 1,875 votes. And the winner of the poll?

With 23,694 votes, Ron Paul. That’s 87% of the vote (assuming I did the math correctly).

Fox News even had a poll, in which over 40,000 voted. Romney was first with 29%. And who did the conservative viewers of Fox News vote for into second place? Not Giuliani. Not McCain. Ron Paul, with 25% of the vote.

With red hot numbers like these, I’d expect more media coverage on Ron Paul. How many articles does the New York Times have on Paul? Just one for the year 2007. And it’s about hemp. I am not making this up.

The last article to feature Paul, according to the New York Times page on him was in 2005. Before that, 2003.

I don’t get it.

What does it say about the nature of Presidential (or political) campaign coverage that a clear winner in a poll taken during a debate, where ACTUAL ISSUES are discussed and not the cost of someone’s haircut, gets completely ignored?

Let’s look at Ron Paul for a second, shall we? He’s from Texas and is a traditional Republican conservative. He has never signed up for Congressional pension. His office returns money to the government each year. He rarely takes money from Political Action Committees (PACs). He does not vote for bills that he feels wastes the taxpayer’s money.

He is, most importantly, a staunch supporter of the Constitution and steadfastly opposes bills that infringe upon Constitutional rights. He also believes in individual’s rights, a smaller government and free enterprise.

Ron Paul has overtaken Barack Obama in YouTube subscribers. That’s like John Denver suddenly becoming more popular than the Rolling Stones. He has nearly 24,000 friends on Myspace. (By comparison, Giuliani has 1,100 and Romney has 22,000).

Ok, back to media coverage on Paul. During the Reagan debate Paul explained (accurately) that interventionist policy and heavy-handedness in the Middle East has created hatred towards Americans. He said:

Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we’ve been over there, we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years. We’ve been in the Middle East. I think Reagan was right. We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. Right now, we’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s bigger than the Vatican, we’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.

Giuliani answered:

That’s really an extraordinary statement. As someone who lived through the attack of September 11th, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq.

Paul replied:

They don’t come here to attack us cause we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us because we’re over there.

(You can watch the full debate/exchange on YouTube here.)

Afterwards, the big media coverage came from the Washington Post, because Ron Paul realized that Rudy Giuliani knows NOTHING about terrorism and why terrorists hate the United States of America. So Paul gave Giuliani a stack of books, including the 9/11 Commission Report (which verifies everything Paul said; which Giuliani never read).

But there’s one line in that Washington Post article that bothers me:

Paul barely registers in opinion polls of Republicans hoping to win their party’s nomination to contest the November 2008 presidential election.

Oh really? I don’t think so. It’s time the media re-evaluated their look at Ron Paul.