Here’s a pretty sympathetic if not uncritical profile of Ron Paul in the New York Times Magazine by Christopher Caldwell.

One of the things I took away from this piece is that Paul’s ability to attract a broad spectrum of support from people who are alienated from the political status quo is the flip side of his tendency to attract people from the political fringes (money cranks, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, etc.).

Still, I’ll give him this: on some really important stuff where all the “sensible” and “serious” people went badly wrong (the Iraq war, civil liberties in the post-9/11 national security state) Paul got it right. Sometimes it pays to stand outside the bipartisan consensus.