The Spirit of $17.76

Thousands of Ron Paul Supporters Are Happy to Pay a Price for His Own Grand Old Party

MINNEAPOLIS, Sept. 2

All day long, the crowd grows. It is thick with tricorn hats. A singer does a sound check of something called "The Ron Paul Song." The chorus goes "Ron! Paul! Ron! Paul!" A woman comes out and gives the invocation. She says, "Thank you, dear Heavenly Father, for Dr. Ron Paul."

The crowd cheers and waits for its man.

Up in the stands here at Target Center, a woman in Colonial costume is holding a hot dog. Her husband is wearing breeches and a lace collar, and her daughters are wearing lacy mobcaps. It's like the 1700s, sort of, except for the lights and the microphones and the concrete stands and the video screen. The woman, whose name is Charity Davis, says she believes in home schooling and small government and Ron Paul. She says her family would qualify for food stamps but they won't take 'em -- won't take a piece of that welfare state.

She is waiting for her man.

Ditto the kids who took the buses from -- well, God knows where they took the buses from. All over the place. The Paul kids are devoted. They'll sleep in YMCA camps and go without showers for him. ( Everyone must sacrifice.) They call the buses the Ronvoys.

"What is there not to like about Ron Paul?" asks Emilie Eggleston, 24, a college student who took a Ronvoy from Austin. "I didn't know a whole lot about the gold standard," she recalls, but then she discovered Paul. She looked up his speeches from the old days: The guy hasn't changed his positions. That's integrity, she says. "He's my man!"

Forget that other convention. The Republicans wouldn't let Paul speak, so Paul decided to throw his own party, called the "Rally for the Republic." He invited speakers: conservative commentator Tucker Carlson to emcee, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura to excite the crowd. Paul got Grover Norquist to talk about taxes and John McManus of the John Birch Society to talk about problems like "illegals." Paul sold 10,000 tickets at the liberty-loving price of $17.76 each.

And the supporters have come: young and old, hip and nerdy, talking mostly about their favorite topic, libertarian economic theory. They are utterly enthralled by a slight Republican congressman from Texas who sounds like Jimmy Stewart, a man who ran for president and failed and talks about the past and looks every inch his age. Which is . . .

"I just had a birthday," Paul says during a brief interview backstage. "What year is this?" He mulls the question. "I'm 73," he concludes.

But they haven't seen him yet. All day, they wait and cheer and take to their feet to shout "End the Fed! End the Fed!" Copies of a newspaper called USA Tomorrow are strewn about. Top headlines: "McCain's Mob Connections 'Swept' " and "Obama's Communist 'Cover-Up' Continues." An ad in the event program reads: "Say Goodbye to the IRS NOW!"