CONGRESSMAN PAUL'S LEGISLATIVE STRATEGY? HE'D RATHER SAY NOT.

Republican Ron Paul missed out on the 19th century, but he admires it
from afar. He speaks lovingly of the good old days before things like
Social Security and Medicaid existed, before the federal government
outlawed drugs like heroin.

In his legislative fantasies, the amiable Texas congressman would do
away with the CIA and the Federal Reserve. He'd reinstate the gold
standard. He'd get rid of the Department of Education and leave the
business of schooling to local governments, because he believes
that's what the Constitution intended.

"Article 1, Section 8 gives me zero amount of authority to do
anything about public education," says Paul on a recent weekday. He's
seated in his congressional office near a sign than says, "DON'T
STEAL; THE GOVERNMENT HATES COMPETITION . "

Paul, 70, has earned the nickname Dr. No for his habit of voting
against just about anything that he sees as government overreach or
that interferes with the free market. No to the Iraq war. No to a
federal ban on same-sex marriage. No to a congressional gold medal
for Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan and Rosa Parks. He says the
medals are an unconstitutional use of taxpayer money and once
suggested each House member instead contribute 100 bucks from his or
her own pocket.

Last year, Congress decided to send billions of dollars to victims of
Hurricane Katrina. Guess how Ron Paul voted.

"Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper
function of the federal government?" he asks. "Why do people in
Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?"

There have been periods in history when the maverick congressman was
not such a rare breed, but this is not one of those periods.
Democrats and Republicans have been quite disciplined in recent years
- -- when party leaders say "jump," the savvy congressman had better
inquire how high.

This makes the presence of a politician like Ron Paul something of a
refreshing peculiarity. He continually bucks the wishes of Republican
leaders -- so much so, Paul recalls, that once while exhorting every
other Republican to vote the party line, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich
announced that Ron Paul was exempt.

Paul is not always alone in his dissent, but more than anyone else in
Congress, he is legendary for it. "When I'm the only no vote," says
fiscal conservative Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), "I can usually rest assured
he's on a plane somewhere."

Paul left his party and ran for president in 1988 on the Libertarian
ticket, traveling the country and speaking to crowds as small as 10.
His iconoclasm may explain why, despite his years in Congress --
first in the late '70s and early '80s, and more recently since 1997
- -- Paul doesn't hold a leadership post, doesn't chair a committee or
subcommittee. He sees this as the price of being right.

"I never had a goal of working up the seniority ladder," he says.

Paul has an easy chuckle and a down-home, friendly manner that
tempers his strong language. (In his columns, which appear online and
are sometimes published in local newspapers, he pronounces a proposed
government program "Orwellian" and calls former Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan a "master of evasion." He once said on C-SPAN
he feared being "bombed by the federal government at another Waco.")

He is father to five, grandfather to 17, and delivered something like
4,000 babies during his career as an obstetrician and gynecologist.
Before he largely retired from his practice in 1996, he refused on
principle to accept Medicare and Medicaid, and sometimes treated
patients for free.

In Texas's 14th District, which runs along the northern Gulf Coast
and includes the cities of Galveston and Victoria, Paul is either a
beloved figure or a mystifying one. He calls himself the "taxpayers'
best friend," and this has led him to controversial stands, such as
voting against federal farming subsidies despite the wide swaths of
agricultural land in his district. Because he won't cooperate with
fellow Republicans in the House unless a bill is in line with his
principles, some constituents feel he puts his libertarian agenda
over the district's needs.

"He's certainly the taxpayer's friend if the taxpayer doesn't want to
get anything done," says John W. Hancock Jr., a rice farmer and
banker in El Campo. "All he does is go to Washington and write
articles and vote no."

Paul's supporters see him as principled. He is known for constituent
services such as getting medals for veterans who never received
theirs. He is also a proponent of gun rights and he personally
opposes abortion, though he thinks the matter should be left to the states.

"He's just consistent, consistent, consistent," says Debra Medina,
the Wharton County Republican chairwoman. "He always talks about the
Constitution and what the federal government ought to be doing, and
he consistently articulates this basic mistrust of big government,
which I think most people have."

Republican Party leaders supported a rival Republican in 1996, when
Paul campaigned to return to Congress after a 12-year absence. Paul
proved himself to be a strong fundraiser, gathering much of his money
from out-of-state donors. He won a primary runoff, then eked out a
three-point victory against his Democratic opponent in the general election.

The next time around, Democrats made him a top target, supporting a
rice farmer named Loy Sneary. (Be "leery of Sneary," Paul warned. "Be
cheery about Sneary," his opponent replied.) Paul won again. Since
then, his margin of victory has gotten bigger in every election. This
time around, he faces a Democrat named Shane Sklar, who is trying to
paint Paul as out of touch with his district.

Paul's wife of nearly 50 years, Carol, quilts and came up with the
idea to put together cookbooks that his campaign sends to
constituents, many of whom also receive cards on their birthdays. His
campaign Web site recently featured a recipe for chicken salad
casserole, "a favorite of Brazoria County Republican Women." Paul
almost always goes home to Lake Jackson on weekends.

"He doesn't want Potomac fever -- he thinks it's very contagious,"
says Carol Paul, who happens to be in Washington on a visit.

"I have a meeting with veterans on Saturday, and I have to check my
tomato plants," the congressman says.

Ron Paul may seem an unlikely advocate for the repeal of federal drug
laws, but this stance stems from the same impulse that leads him to
call for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration and its
"health nannies." He says that decades of government programs can
soften Americans' sense of personal responsibility and that the free
market can do a better job of keeping people safe and healthy than
the government can.

He also wants America to withdraw from the United Nations and NATO.
He is against the government's "delusional, feel-good" policies of
giving aid to needy countries in places like Africa; instead, private
citizens and private groups should give charity if they want to. He
has written that Americans "don't need to be forced to pay for
foreign welfare at the barrel of a government gun."

Mainstream party platforms are riddled with inconsistencies; Paul
tries to run what he believes is a straight course through every
vote. Smaller government is better. That's why he winds up aligned
with the most liberal of Democrats and the most conservative of
Republicans. He takes inspiration from free-market economist Ludwig
von Mises, whose photograph is mounted on a wall by his desk.

"He's like a gyroscope," says Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), who is
allied with Paul in opposition to the Iraq war. "No matter what
happens, boom , he comes back up and goes exactly where he wants to go."

Paul doesn't just question conventional wisdom. He stomps all over
it. According to him, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war;
there were better ways of getting rid of slavery. He often attempts
to prove his political theories by pointing to how things used to be.
For instance, the federal government banning drugs like heroin
doesn't work for the same reasons Prohibition didn't. The IRS doesn't
need to exist for the same reasons it didn't exist before.

"We had a good run from 1776 to 1913," he says, referring to the
years before the modern income tax. "We didn't have it; we did pretty well."

As for Social Security, "we didn't have it until 1935," Paul says. "I
mean, do you read stories about how many people were laying in the
streets and dying and didn't have medical treatment? . . . Prices
were low and the country was productive and families took care of
themselves and churches built hospitals and there was no starvation."

("Where to begin with this one?" asks Michael Katz, a historian of
poverty at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied charity
case records from the early 20th century. "The stories just break
your heart, the kind of suffering that people endured. . . . Stories
of families that had literally no cash and had to kind of beg to get
the most minimal forms of food, who lived in tiny, little rooms that
were ill-heated and ill-ventilated, who were sick all the time, who
had meager clothing . . .")

Paul views his opposition to the status quo practically. He'd prefer
no federal income tax, but barring that, he'd love the government to
cut spending enough to bring the income tax rate down to 2 percent.
He envisions a transition period for eradicating the Federal Reserve
and for Social Security, to ensure that no one is cheated of the
money they put in.

He figures party leaders get irritated with him sometimes, but for
the most part, they leave him alone. On his opposition to war in
Iraq, he told a radio interviewer a few years ago, "I'm generally
very much ignored." He says he doesn't trade votes and as a result is
rarely pressured.

Still, he says, if his fellow Republicans are "very desperate," he
may allow himself to be talked into changing a "no" vote to "present."