All Blog Posts from Public Eye

We had a nice run, but it’s time to pass along the tiera. Our era as Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” is coming to an end.

Today the magazine is holding a panel to discuss who’s going to be the big newsmaker this year, and it’s going to be a tough call. After all, who stood out in 2007?

There’s a little more to the equation than you’d think, remember. It’s not an award. It’s not even a compliment. The magazine says the distinction goes to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill.” Heck, Person of the Year doesn’t even have to be a person – Earth won once, and so did The Computer.

Time is holding an online poll right now, listing off ten possibilities. (Look! There go all the Ron Paul readers!) Some of the ones they’re tossing out? Al Gore, Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, J. K Rowling, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, General David Petraeus.

All notable public figures, to be sure. But none of them has a chance. The Time magazine is a complicated calculus of risk and PR, with a dash of quirk tossed in. It’s definitely a good annual publicity ploy by the magazine, but it always has a financial angle as well. Over the past 25 years, the magazine's decision has devolved into choosing a safe, newsworthy and palatable cover person or people.

So who might get it? It’s easier to say who won’t. And why.

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If you build it, they will come.

If by ‘it’ you mean a campaign war chest, and by ‘they’ you mean the media.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the newly validated Ron Paul, who set an all-time GOP mark for one-day campaign fundraising on Monday, according to the Associated Press:

Paul's total deposed Mitt Romney as the single-day fundraising record holder in the Republican presidential field. When it comes to sums amassed in one day, Paul now ranks only behind Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, who raised nearly $6.2 million on June 30, and Barack Obama.

Ron Paul’s big haul was proof that he is the candidate of the Internet constituency this year – devoting a website to the one-day effort – no doubt aided by linking it to Guy Fawkes and the Wachowski Brothers’ film “V for Vendetta.”

(I mean, really. Can you imagine a better hook for Internet people than the guys who made the “Matrix” movies?)

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You can feel it in the air: Ron Paul fever – it's sweeping the nation!

OK, maybe not the entire nation, seeing as Paul, a libertarian congressman from Texas trying to win the Republican presidential nomination, still isn't polling above 2 percent. But of all the minor candidates trying to break into the "Rudy McRomney" elite, Paul may be getting the most attention lately from the press corps. (Well, other than that actor guy.)

And it seems to have as much to do with his ideas – Paul, love him or hate him, articulates a coherent ideology better than many of his competitors – as the fact that he seems to inspire near pathological devotion in his followers. Look at the press coverage: The Washington Post profiled Paul's young campaign coordinator in New Hampshire; CNN.com today posted among its top stories a piece about how Paul's fans inundated the site after the recent presidential debate. He's even winning over Jon Stewart, who had Paul on the "Daily Show" and said to him, "[y]ou have accomplished no small feat, which is, you’re running for President, very much as an underdog, yet you’ve created a nice little buzz going about the Ron Paul candidacy."

When deciding which candidates to pay attention to, members of the press corps usually focus less on what a candidate is saying than how people are responding to him or her. And Paul's ability to inspire passion in his followers – even if they are still an insignificant chunk of the population – is starting to get reporters to take notice. (They don't want to get caught off guard as they did when Howard Dean created a similar buzz back in 2004.) A little attention from the media is probably not going to propel Paul to the nomination, of course. But for a minor candidate, simply getting reporters to notice you is still quite an accomplishment.