But What About the Troops, Ron Paul?

I thought Ron Paul did a very creditable job in his Jay Leno moment last night, and as an old-school libertarian movement geek was over the Moon hearing him name-check Austrian economics as the economics of freedom and hard money. (For much, much, much more on Austrian economics and libertarianism, see….wait for it…my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.)

But there was one place where he missed a chance to mention a detail that I think might have really sold with a "support the troops" public. It was when Leno was asking if maybe pulling troops out of Iraq would really just cause more harm than good. I know his campaign is very conscious of this point, since they were flyering about it to a meeting of the Iowa state GOP that I attended over the weekend: the extraordinary level of demonstrated preference for Ron Paul among the military itself. Donations to his campaign from people in or working for the U.S. military the past two quarters running have been far in excess of any of his opponents. Details and numbers here.