america searchs for ron paul

Let me make this clear. Supporting Ron Paul for President of the US in '08 is not my first choice. I would like to see a viable third party candidate run free from all corporate sponsorship. But short of that, it looks like Ron Paul is the best candidate this country could get.

I say that even though I disagree with quite a few of his political positions. He wants to turn the abortion issue over to individual states which I think is pretty much like doing away with the Supreme Court's decision in Roe V Wade. He has no problem with individual citizens owning automatic weapons and he is weak on the environment. BUT he wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, which means he understands how money really works in this country. He also wants to abolish the IRS and has a foreign policy of nonintervention. He voted against the Iraq war and opposes the US occupation of Iraq. Of all the candidates he seems to me to be the only one who is truly his own man. And most importantly, he's raising money the grassroots way.

On the 5th of November 2007, with a reference to the movie V for Vendetta, Ron Paul raised over 4 million dollars in 24 hours from over 30,000 contributors. That's less than $200 per contributor on average. It's also the Republican primary single day fund raising record. That is how you fund a Popular election campaign.

But I would never have written this post about Ron Paul if I had not stumbled onto another set of interesting numbers. I googled Ron Paul today to check on his current fund raising total and when I did, I noticed an enormous number of results from my search; over 50,000,000. So I began to wonder how many results would show up from similar searches of the other candidates and this is what I discovered.

But when I looked at the top three search results I noticed that all of them had very common names that might have skewed the results so I used quotation marks on a follow up search to try and make it more specific. Then I got this.

Ron Paul has not gotten substantial coverage in the mainstream media. He had to fight his way into a Republican debate in SC and is still considered by the talking heads of television to be a very marginal candidate. But I don't think there is any doubt that people out on the Internet are looking for more information about Ron Paul.

He has already raised 8 million dollars. He says he only needs $12 million by December 31, 2007 to win in IA, NH, MI, SC, & NV. We shall see.

I don't think traditional media understands the power of the Internet. I don't think the corporate powers who have sponsored previous elections understand the fund raising implications of the Internet. I think the potiential for a real change is possible because citizens who have been looking for an answer to the corrupt system of government in place in the the US are finding answers to their problems. They're searching them out on Google.