Ron Paul's Farewell Address: An Anomaly in American History by Gary North

Recently by Gary North: Ron Paul‘s Age-Gap Politics of ‘No’

On Wednesday, November 14, Ron Paul delivered his final speech at the podium of the United States House of Representatives. It was covered by C-SPAN live, and was later posted on C-SPAN’s site. It was soon posted on YouTube, and from there was posted on numerous sites.

Congressman Ron Paul at an event hosted in his honor at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. Please attribute to Gage Skidmore if used elsewhere. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Within hours, various media outlets began to comment on it, both from the Right and from the Left. From the ones that I saw, all of them were generally favorable. This was remarkable. In thinking about it over the weekend, I began to perceive just how remarkable it was.

I searched Google for “Ron Paul” and “farewell address.” I got almost 200,000 hits.

In the history of American politics, I can think of only four farewell addresses that ever got into the textbooks, and one of them was a fake. The most famous one was George Washington’s 1796 farewell address, and it was not an address. It was a newspaper article. The second came in 1961, which was Dwight Eisenhower‘s famous military-industrial complex speech. The third one was Richard Nixon’s announcement after his defeat in 1962 when he ran for governor of California against Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. I’m not sure that it should be regarded an address; it was more of a press conference, but it counted as a farewell address . . . for six years. In it, he uttered the immortal words, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” It was aimed at the media. Then, a dozen years later, he gave a real farewell address, the day before he resigned in disgrace from the presidency.

Ron Paul’s farewell address was the fifth. This is extraordinary. The media did not ridicule him as arrogant for having delivered such an address. On the whole, the media seemed interested in what he had to say. Yet his speech began with a statement of the fact, namely, that he had never had any measurable political influence in the House in his entire 22 years. He had never had one of his bills passed into law.

His farewell address was taken seriously as a statement of principles, precisely because he never had any direct political influence in passing legislation. He stood as a representative of a constitutional tradition that has had only two other representatives at the national level ever since the end of the Civil War: President Grover Cleveland and Congressman Howard Buffett, who served in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Virtually nobody remembers Buffett, although almost everybody in the financial world has heard of his son Warren.

Whatever the impact of Ron Paul’s farewell address, it is safe to say that no other congressman has ever delivered such an address at his retirement, at least not where the media took him seriously. It is unheard of that any Congressman would deliver such an address, and especially a Congressman who had no political power or the ability to spread election money around to his colleagues.

I regard this as a major historical indicator………….

EXCERPT!!!!!

via Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: An Anomaly in American History by Gary North.

Related articles

• Ron Paul’s ‘Farewell Address’
• Ron Paul’s 32 Questions
• The Character of the Great Libertarian
• The Ron Paul Awakening
• A great piece on how Ron Paul won the debate as Mitt Romney lost the election
• Ron Paul’s Vision of a Virtuous and Moral People: Not Sexual Behavior, But Attitudes Toward Force and Violence
• Ron Paul’s most memorable moments (video)
• The Daily Bell – Republicans Rage as the Great Burning Arrives
• GOP in Deep Trouble, Ron Paul Looking Good
• (Col Sellin) What now, you ask? Political insurgency… By Lawrence Sellin