Ron Paul is in negotiations with the McCain campaign for an agreement that would allow Paul to travel through the convention perimeter in exchange for access to Paul's supporter list. Technically, Paul is already allowed to travel to the convention floor as part of the Texas congressional delegation, but the agreement would allow him to bring some staff, including a bodyguard. Personally, I thought it would only be a distraction to have Paul participate in any formal capacity. But reading Ralph Hallow's story today, and the accompanying video interview with Mr. Paul, is definitely giving me second thoughts.

Is there any way having Ron Paul on the convention floor could turn out to be a smart move by McCain? Doug Mataconis says he'd be shocked if any such agreement was reached:

Ron Paul barely made a dent in the Republican primaries and he's openly attacked the Republican nominee and suggested that it would be best if his supporters voted for a third-party candidate such as Bob Barr or the Constitution Party's Chuck Baldwin,

Of course, Sarah Palin herself once had some nice things to say about Ron Paul in an interview with MTV:

Governor Sarah Palin: He's cool. He's a good guy. He's a good guy. He's so independent. He's independent of like the party machine, I'm like, right on, so am I. The party machinery, on both sides of the party, ya know, Americans are tiring of the incessant partisanship that gets in the way of just doing the right thing for this country.

I spoke with Ron Paul’s campaign spokesman Jesse Benton earlier today about the Paul/MLK video. Benton said he had not seen the video or heard of it before being contacted by CQ Politics. “It’s a powerful video put together by an independent supporter,” he said.

When asked about the specifics of the video, Benton said, “We would never make those kind of comparisons ourselves. We’ll leave that to the American people to sort out.”

However, Benton went ahead and compared his boss to Dr. King, saying:

“Dr. Paul and Dr. King do share some things in common, including a belief that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. And both were supporters of civil disobedience through non-violence.”

“He is someone that Dr. Paul considers a great personal hero,” Benton said, adding the campaign does not plan to return any of the cash raised through the effort. In fact, the daily fundraising total is being touted on Paul's website.

When asked about New Republic reporter Jamie Kirchick’s story revealing a Ron Paul newsletter from 1990 that made disparaging comments about Dr. King, Benton said, “That’s old news. Everyone knows what Dr. Paul believes in.”

I put in several calls to the King Center in Atlanta and to the Washington, DC office of the NAACP. Oddly enough, the websites for both groups were down today. The King Center’s phone system was a mess and I haven’t heard back from them today.

But I did get through to the NAACP. Waiting on a call from their DC Executive Director, Hillary Shelton.

In the meantime, I touched base with Jamie Kirchick, who says of the fundraising video:

"It's ironic -- though perhaps expected -- that Ron Paul's supporters would now try to compare him to Martin Luther King, considering that newsletters published under his name repeatedly slandered King and showed an obsession with the late civil rights leader's sex life. He also seems to think that the wrong side won in the War of Southern Aggression, a view which I doubt King shared. Ron Paul constantly talks about restoring the Republican Party back to its roots. He forgets that the GOP is the party of Abraham Lincoln."

First, Ron Paul is accused of harboring racist sympathies. He did a pretty good job of deflecting the direct accusation, but the evidence that Paul was willfully ignorant of the less-than-reputable supporters in his circle was hard to shake.

But rather than play it safe, Paul supporters have instead launched a new fundraising pitch directly comparing their candidate to Martin Luther King Jr. in a new fundraising video. From the video text: "Two great men ... With one great message."



Rough timing. A story from Fox News yesterday notes that one of the Paul newsletters in question referenced Dr. King directly:

In a 1990 newsletter called the Ron Paul Political Report, which resurfaced earlier this month in The New Republic, Ron Paul — or his ghostwriters — called King an adulterer and seducer of young children, and questioned why the nation should celebrate the Civil Rights leader with the same glory as that given to its first president.

The site, "FreeAtLast2008.com," which says it is in no way directly affiliated with the Paul campaign, claims more than 10,000 donors have gone through the site. Meanwhile, the You Tube version of the video has nearly 60,000 views with more than 1,100 comments and 561 Diggs.

Retreating from their earlier decision to bar Ron Paul from the last Fox News Channel sponsored Republican forum, the cable news network has decided to include him in tomorrow's debate in Myrtle Beach:

To be invited, candidates must have placed in the top 5 positions in the New Hampshire poll -- McCain, Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani and Paul -- or be polling at least 5 percent nationally, such as Thompson.

UPDATE: My CQ Politics colleagues remind me that Paul was invited to this debate all along. Which makes his earlier exclusion all the more interesting.

The New Hampshire primary is the biggest story in politics today, but the biggest story in the blogosphere is regarding newsletters from the past three decades attributed to Ron Paul that contain homophobic and racist sentiments.

The New Republic’s Jamie Kirchick, who wrote today's story, has been investigating Paul for months now, earlier unearthing a campaign contribution from a Nazi sympathizer that Paul’s campaign refused to return. Kirchick traveled to Kansas where he was able to track down the newsletters in question and has even posted some of them on TNR's website.

Paul granted a quick interview to Reason’s David Weigel today that was evasive at best. When Paul can't give definitive answers to Weigel and Reason, who have basically been supporters of his campaign, that's not a good sign.

The Texas Congressman described the newsletters to Weigel as “old news,” and his campaign spokesperson has said that Paul did not author many of the offensive pieces himself. But as several bloggers have already pointed out, the offensive statements are not an isolated incident. There isn’t absolute evidence that Paul himself is racist and/or homophobic, but there is now a growing trail of evidence that he has, at least, turned a blind eye to those elements in his circles.

Conservative Ann Althouse says she knew all along:

The things Ron Paul has been saying made me suspect that his libertarianism was a cover for racism.

The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb mentions the racist campaign contributor:

Kirchick and others attacked Paul a few months back over his failure to return a $500 check from a prominent white supremacist. At the time, Paul had explained that he couldn't possibly screen ever donor. Of course he couldn't, but the media had screened this one for him, and he refused to give back the money anyway. Now we know why. He's been speaking in code to the dregs of American society this whole time. And he had no intention of alienating his base of support.

And Roger L. Simon says you can only excuse so many individual incidents before a pattern is formed:

Whoa. The only name on those newsletters is Ron Paul, no matter who wrote the actual articles. We all know that most politicians do not write their own speeches, but we certainly hold them to the contents. Why not Paul? And this creepy stuff went on for over ten years. It's not like one week slipped by.

Can’t wait for next week’s New Hampshire primary? National Review’s Jim Geraghty reminds us that Wyoming’s GOP caucus is tomorrow and could provide at least a small boost for Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson or Ron Paul. That’s because while most candidates have ignored the state, the Romney and Thompson campaigns have spent organization time and/or money there, while the Paul campaign has been taking out newspaper ads:

Who wins is anybody's guess, as no polls have been conducted or released. The Billings Gazette notes, "some Republican committee members say a couple of candidates - Romney and Thompson - may be rising to the top." Ron Paul has been buying newspaper ads in the state.