I’ve been seeing stories on digg about US Presidential candidate Ron Paul for months now. I’ve seen so much there, that quite honestly, I doubted that Ron Paul was a real person rather than some new internet meme. Well, Ron Paul is real and there’s a story on CNET today.
I don’t have any problems with Ron Paul, but I think that like Howard Dean before him, being too popular on the internet is the kiss of death. So far, internet popularity has not, to my knowledge, translated into big electoral success. There’s still something a bit unreal about the internet to most people. And it is still far too easy to manipulate the internet in ways that the mainstream media is resistant to, at least without a lot of money. So I think that unless Ron Paul can raise some real money to raise his profile in the mainstream media, television in particular, his candidacy is doomed to fail.