In Response to George F. Will

Dear Mr. Will,

I appreciate your historical reflecting in your opinion piece. I must point out a few flawed assumptions you've made regarding Mr. Paul's candidacy. First, you dwell on a highly speculative and hypothetical independent bid instead of his real, growing, GOP candidacy even though Paul has repeatedly stated that he's not considering an independent move. You say, "his ceiling is low". Why would you say that unless you're buying into the system that enables wealthy, establishment candidates to selfishly use media organizations as puppets? Mainstream media polls such as MSNBC, ABC, CNN, NYT, WP, FOX...are all firmly nestled in very liberal areas, their CEOs operating under the requisite biases.

We have never had an election (in the past 150 years at least) when a third party candidate spoiled votes away from one of the established two parties. In fact the mainstream party candidate takes votes away from the third party candidate in all cases. This is very obvious from the data, look at John Anderson, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader. Nobody supporting Gore voted for Nader instead. There were thousands of Nader supporters who voted (insincerely) for their second choice. The same was true with Bush and Perot.

You say that Ron Paul's votes would "come at the expense of the Republican nominee." But I say any electoral system that gives voters strong incentive to vote insincerely is wrong. This is one way politicians keep power to themselves. Republican and Democrat politicians are in the same damn club.