A better choice.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Ron Paul - Editorial

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE with voting in a presidential race was enough to turn me off the whole process pretty much for good. It was 1968, and I was in kindergarten in suburban New Jersey, about an hour's train ride from New York. For some reason, my teacher insisted that her tiny charges cast a ballot for one member of the trilogy of terror then vying to become leader of the Free World: Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace. Faced with such choices, each uniquely wretched in his own way, I like to think I uttered my first adult curse word that day.

Since we couldn't write, she assigned each candidate a different color and instructed us to draw a circle in crayon in the corresponding hue on squares of paper. We folded the squares and then put them in a shoebox with a slot cut through the top. The result--a landslide for Wallace--visibly upset my teacher, who happened to be African American. But it wasn't because we were pint-sized segregationists, it was simply that we all loved the color green.

I've never had much faith in electoral politics since then. The only time I've cast a vote for a major party's presidential candidate was in 1984, the first time I was legally eligible to do so. (I pulled the lever for the sad sack Walter Mondale, for reasons as obscure to me now as his "Norwegian charisma" was then to the American voting public.)

This month's cover story is about Ron Paul, the one person running for president who just might restore my faith in politics. In "Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution" (page 22), Senior Editor Brian Doherty follows the 10-term Texas congressman to Iowa and reports on a candidate who actually talks like...