George Will goes after Ron Paul in the latest edition of Newsweek... though it's hard to say exactly what his actual point is.  Instead he goes on for several hundred words about how silly Ron Paul is for thinking the federal government is too large:

Some rice farmers from Congressman Ron Paul's district were in his office the other day, asking for this and that from the federal government. The affable Republican from south Texas listened nicely, then forwarded their requests to the appropriate House committee. It may or may not satisfy their requests in some bill dispensing largesse to agricultural interests. Then Paul will vote against the bill.
...
This time he is seeking the Republican nomination, so he will be on the Manchester, N.H., stage April 4 for the first Republican candidates' debate.

There, like Longfellow's youth "who bore, 'mid snow and ice, a banner with the strange device, Excelsior!" Paul will unfurl his banner emblazoned with James Madison's Federalist Paper No. 45: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined." Paul, who really believes in limited government, will infiltrate that confabulation of sedate candidates in order, he says, to find out "how many real Republicans are left." This could be entertaining, meaning embarrassing.

In the end he concludes:

Still, Paul is not only a cheerful anachronism but a useful one. He forces us to consider the continuing relevance of some old arguments, and he reminds us that much of the reverence for the Founders is more rhetorical than operational.

Really, it's nothing more than a mocking tribute to a man who stands next to some strongly held principles.  More importantly, it's the Republicans loss of those principles that lead to their defeat last year.  Apparently George Will forgot that.  It didn't take long... and George is getting older, so I suppose I should forgive his memory loss.

While one can argue, and at one point Will does, that Ron Paul could afford those principles because others don't have them... I think his principles would serve us better at the top.  Being a solitary voice of reason in the crowd hardly serves any purpose but to be drowned out.  Being the man wielding a veto pen means something.

One of the problems with Washington today is how sharply divided Congress is.  The two parties have pulled further and further apart from each other, while the majority of Americans remain somewhere in the middle.  Under Bush, things have only gotten worse, since he hardly ever uses his veto.  The parties haven't tried to work together because they don't have to.  A man at the helm who vetoes more legislation than he signs (which Ron Paul certainly would do) would if nothing else, force the two parties to work more closely in order to override that veto.

Maybe it would grind Washington to a halt... but maybe it would really get it started again.  And maybe, just maybe, it would bring back some of the fiscally conservative days where the money you work for is actually money you can keep, which is the signal that most voters wanted to send last year in the first place.