When a zealous fan captured musician John Mayer on video drunkenly endorsing Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul and posted the video on YouTube, the response was tremendous.
Paul, who has recently cleared the margin of error in national polling, has a strong online following. Before long, e-mails swarmed into Mayer’s publicist by the hundreds, forcing the musician to make a public statement regarding the issue. Mayer officially endorsed Paul last week in a press conference held with national media organizations, in what could prove to be a fateful turn of events for Paul’s struggling campaign.
Mayer appeared to be sober at the time.
His endorsement goes a long way toward securing for Paul the 12- to 17-year-old female vote, a demographic which has traditionally eluded most politicians. The support of this key group could prove decisive in the New Hampshire primary, a state where almost 15 percent of the population is comprised of female teenagers and 98 percent of the population is noted for its poor taste in musical talent, according to a USA Today poll.
Paul is a 10-term Republican congressman from Texas who has campaigned and won as a libertarian-minded conservative since the late ’70s. As a presidential candidate, Paul has pledged to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, eliminate the Department of Education and the Food and Drug Administration, place the dollar back on the gold standard and stand strong against the cabal of reptilian international financiers who secretly run the world’s financial markets and governments through the use of insidious mind control. The latest polls place Paul’s support at 5 percent nationwide, following a statement by Paul that his “body is a wonderland.”
Mayer expressed respect for Paul’s voting record in Congress, as well as his staunch adherence to the principles of the Constitution. Paul has never voted for a tax increase or an unbalanced federal budget, was among the few to initially oppose the Iraq war, recently voted against divestment from Sudan and has long been an advocate of ending birth citizenship and deporting or jailing the estimated 20 million illegal immigrants in the United States, presumably through the skillful deployment of magic ponies.
Paul has drawn support from a diverse array of individuals, among them neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists who are drawn to his limited-government, nationalist aims and his principled stands against black helicopters and members of the Zionist cabal which enslave the world.
Many simply appreciate Paul’s repeated use of the word cabal.
Other supporters of Paul seem less exotic, however. He has gathered a strong following on college campuses throughout the country, a phenomenon that political commentators have a difficult time explaining. Experts speculate that Paul’s platform and libertarianism, in general, are attractive to those who are privileged and generally ignorant of the world at large — two groups into which most college students neatly fall.
Others suggest that Paul’s success is the result of desperation. Harvard sociologist Dr. David Franks, who has studied Paul’s campaign during the last several months, said that his campaign is, more than any other, built on the support of people looking for change.
“This is crucial for the Paul campaign, to connect with this demographic of outraged people,” Franks said. “These people can tell that something is wrong and they can tell that they need someone radical to change it, but they’re not really informed about anything, and they have no idea of who to vote for. So, Paul shows up and says, ‘I’ll abolish the IRS and the Department of Education,’ and they say, ‘Yeah, that sounds ridiculous enough that it just might work.'”
Still, the road to the White House is not quite open for Paul yet. His campaign has a sizable war chest and he is climbing in the polls, but Stephen Colbert is beating him in South Carolina and in Iowa he faces stiff competition from Mike Huckabee, a pastor whose primary political asset is his ability to play bass guitar. For Mayer, the neo-Nazis and a select slice of college students, Paul’s campaign isn’t so much about getting the aging representative elected, as it is about sending a strong message to the political establishment — and according to Franks that message is, “Screw up for another eight years, and the next guy we support might be even crazier.”