Below The Beltway

Today’s Washington Post spends what I think is an inordinate amount of space discussing the authorship of Ron Paul’s latest book:

[A]lthough the congressman from Texas has repeatedly called the book his own work, it was largely written by an unacknowledged ghostwriter, and it is unclear how much Paul contributed to the final product.

Late last year, Tom Woods, a longtime Paul supporter and libertarian scholar who will be speaking at the counterconvention, sent out copies of the manuscript and indicated that he had written the manifesto on Paul’s behalf, according to copies of a letter from Woods and an original manuscript obtained by The Washington Post.

“Enclosed is the manuscript for a book tentatively titled The Revolution: A Manifesto, to be published under Dr. Paul’s name,” Woods’s Dec. 26 letter says. The name of the letter’s recipient was redacted. “When my agent shopped the idea around (before I’d actually written the book) back in October, a number of publishers were interested . . .” Woods also wrote that he was “happy to report that Dr. Paul is very pleased with it. He called me with a number of minor changes that I intend to incorporate into the text over the next few days.”

Woods confirmed in an interview that the letter is authentic, but said it overemphasizes his role in writing the book. “This is Ron Paul’s book in every way,” Woods said. When asked if Paul used a ghostwriter, Jesse Benton, his spokesman, said “They are all Dr. Paul’s words.”

The Revolution wouldn’t be the first book by a Presidential candidate that was actually written by someone else, but I really got to wonder why it matters.

As I noted when I reviewed the book earlier this year:

In seven relatively short easy to read chapters, Paul touches on issues ranging from economic freedom, to the assaults on civil liberties and personal property that we’ve seen over the past two decades, to monetary policy, and, of course, foreign policy. If you’re looking for a discussion of what’s wrong in America today from a philosophy that focuses on individual liberty, The Revolution is an excellent place to start.

For someone such as myself who has been immersed in libertarian ideas from the day I picked up a copy of Capitalism & Freedom and then moved on to spend the summer after my freshman year in college digesting everything from Atlas Shrugged to John Locke’s Second Treatise Of Government, the ideas that Paul talks about will be entirely familiar, and there will be more than one moment of head-nodding in agreement as you read along. The sad truth, though, is that we don’t live in a country where the majority of the public can really be said to be familiar with the ideas that our nation was founded upon and our Constitution was based upon. And the political leadership isn’t any better; beyond parroting the words of the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July or saluting the flag, politicians on both sides of the political aisle pay little more than lip service to the ideas of the Founding Fathers, especially when they inconveniently interfere with whatever it is they want to achieve, whether that’s health care “reform” or campaign finance “reform.”

But that, I think, is what makes Paul’s book so good. I don’t necessarily think that the American people have given up on the ideals of the Founders, it’s just that they haven’t been presented with a political leaders who even come close to living up to them. That, I think, is why Ron Paul, his faults notwithstanding, attracted the vocal, if small, following that he did during the campaign.

Isn’t it the ideas that matter, not the person who wrote them ?