His signs can be seen throughout Bakersfield College, but few people know who he is.
He is presidential candidate Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Lake Jackson, Texas.
Ron Paul placed third in the 1988 election, running as a Libertarian nominee while still a registered Republican. He graduated from Duke University in 1961 and has been a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon as well as a gynecologist and obstetrician.
Paul is known as conservative constitutionalist and libertarian, which is a political philosophy supporting private property and individual liberty. He supports non-interventionist foreign policy and opposed the Iraq war.
He favors withdrawal from NATO and the United Nations.
He opposes birthright citizenship for illegal aliens and has pledged to never raise taxes.
He is a long time advocator for ending federal income tax and wishes to end government spending by removing most federal agencies
Paul opposes the Patriot Act, the federal war on drugs and gun control.
He is strongly pro-life and believes in the states’ rights to determine the legality of abortion.
Ron Paul places in the top tier in the Republican straw polls and recently raised a record 4.2 million in an online fundraiser.
Even with his campaign, few people really know who Ron Paul is much less that he is a presidential candidate. Several Bakersfield College students who have seen the sign posted on the bulletins still don’t know who he is.
Michael Koehmstedt, a CSUB student and avid supporter of Ron Paul and member of the Ron Paul meetup.com group said Paul “is one of the few people I can actually trust. When he says he is going to get us out of Iraq, I actually believe him.”
Koehmstedt said that he is even going to switch from Democrat to Republican so that he may vote for Ron Paul.
According to Koehmstedt, Paul has been successful in getting through to most Republicans, and that most Republicans, as well as Ron Paul, no longer support Bush and are looking for a change. They believe that there is no way that another republican is going to be able to win while supporting the war and Bush.
Koehmstedt said that he supports Ron Paul because of his “methods” and his ideas of peace, prosperity and freedom.
Leslie Mood, finance major at CSUB and member of the Bakersfield Ron Paul meetup.com group, said, “The reason I support him is because he has a strong record for protecting the constitution and his advocacy of freedom and liberty.”
Though few people have heard of Ron Paul, he has appeared on television shows like Jay Leno and held a rally in Philadelphia that attracted over 3,000 people.
According to Mood, Paul is one of the most widely searched Google terms and has more video on YouTube than any other candidate. He has also won more straw polls than any other candidate.
The Ron Paul revolution, which is what his supporters call it, is a “huge movement,” said Mood, and although Ron Paul is not mentioned in the mainstream media as much as other candidates, he has built up a large support base online among younger college students and traditional republicans as well as a few Democrats.
Lance Reed, another supporter of Paul, said, “Ron Paul understands and values freedom and Demonstrates immense courage, personal integrity and deep commitments to the principles of individual responsibility, limited government and rationality that I hold dear.”