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IowaPolitics.com: 'Too early' for 2012 presidential talk, Paul says
11/14/2009

By Andrew Duffelmeyer
IowaPolitics.com

AMES -- U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, a Texas Republican that ran for president in 1988 and 2008, said before speaking to a crowd of about 1,000 Friday evening that he is not considering another run at this time.
 
“It’s not on my mind, it’s too early, and I will be filing for my congressional seat,” Paul said. “I don’t have any plans made.”
 
Paul did have plenty of other issues on his mind, though, including health care reform, the war in Afghanistan and the future of the Republican Party.
 
The physician and lawmaker – known as “Dr. No” for his opposition to any legislation that isn’t explicitly authorized in the Constitution, including the health care bill that narrowly passed the U.S. House – said the whole health care system is sick, and “what they’re doing now is making it much sicker.”
 
IowaPolitics.com audio
“We’re turning the whole thing over to the government,” Paul said. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s going to cost a lot more money than they say and we don’t have any money and it’s, to me, the most foolish thing in the world, what they’re doing.”
 
Paul said the solution would be “to get government out of the way” and increase competition with the delivery of medicine and in insurance companies.
 
“The system is going to get much worse,” Paul said. “It’s going to cost us a lot more and the patients and the doctors are going to be very unhappy.”
 
Foreign policy is an area where Paul admits he breaks with many of his Republican counterparts. He is against sending more troops to Afghanistan, and instead advocates bringing all the troops home; not just from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from every country where U.S. troops are stationed.
 
“We should have a strong national defense, we should obey the Constitution, we should mind our own business and we can start by bringing all our troops home from around the world,” Paul said.
 
Paul said his greatest foreign policy fear is some event drawing the country into another war and forcing a reinstatement of the draft. Paul, who served in the Air Force and the Air National Guard, was drafted himself in 1962.
 
“Afghanistan has nothing to do with our national security except it exposes us to greater danger,” Paul said.
 
Finally, Paul said the Republican Party struggled in 2008 because “they’ve lost all credibility,” and they’ll have to “fulfill their promises” to regain seats in the U.S. Congress.
 
“They talked about limited government for all those years, just let us get in charge and we’ll shrink the size of government and balance the government,” Paul said. “They finally get in charge ... and everything got worse. They spent more money, they got us involved in wars we shouldn’t be involved in, the deficits exploded, they doubled the size of the Department of Education.”
 
Paul said what brought him to the state that hosts the first-in-the-nation caucuses was an invitation by Iowa State University students to talk to them about the issues he considers important: individual freedom and the constitution.
 
The Iowa Campaign For Liberty and the ISU chapter of Young Americans For Liberty hosted the event at Scheman Auditorium.
 
Paul will be in Des Moines today at a fundraiser for Rep. Kent Sorenson, R-Indianola, as he prepares for a run for Iowa Senate. After that, he doesn’t know if he’ll be back in the state any time soon.
 
“I usually just take about a week or two at a time,” Paul said. “We’ve done several of these since the campaign was over, my guess would be this is the fifth campus I’ve been on, and I’ve been very pleased with it, so I will go where the invitations come. I know we had a large number of young people here that certainly were supportive before.”



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