Ron Paul's mistake: why a message of freedom works better than whipping up white resentment.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

HERE'S HOW FAR American politics, and libertarian politics in particular, have progressed in two short decades: On January 21, 2008, supporters of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul launched an unofficial "money bomb" for the libertarian congressman on Martin Luther King Day, raising $1.9 million online while exhorting participants to "believe in the dream! "What a difference from just 17 years earlier, when, in between congressional stints, Paul was making good money with monthly newsletters that savaged King as a "lying socialist satyr" who "seduced underage girls and boys" and mocked the very idea of dedicating a holiday to the civil rights leader.

"In 1988, when I ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket," the Ron Paul Political Report stated in January 1991, "I was berated for hours by LP members because I had refused to vote, while in Congress, for a Martin Luther King national holiday. I didn't know then about his plagiarism, but the rest of King's crimes were clear. J. Edgar Hoover once called him 'the most dangerous man in America.' Who would have known the danger would continue after his death and threaten to strangle our culture?"

There aren't many libertarians left who would choose the freedom-loving bona tides of the serially abusive former FBI chief over those of the man whose name has become synonymous with peaceful resistance to unjust laws. As Paul himself said on CNN in January, while denying authorship or even knowledge of such racially charged early-1990s quotes, "Martin Luther King is a hero, because [he] practiced the libertarian principle of civil disobedience, nonviolence."

How to explain that 17-year switcheroo? Paul has done an incomplete job of it over the years. In 1996, when the newsletters first became a political issue during his hotly contested campaign to re-enter Congress, Paul did not deny writing such statements as "95% of the black males in [Washington, D.C.,] are semi criminal or entirely criminal," instead maintaining that his quotes expressed a "clear philosophical difference" with his political opponents and were in any case being taken "out of context" by his "race-baiting" competitor.

The congressman changed his tune in an October 2001 Texas Monthly profile, distancing himself from the sentiments while taking "moral responsibility" for their publication. "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me," he said. "It wasn't my language at all...