It should be some kind of requirement, according to constitutional scholar Adam Freedman, that every presidential election have a candidate who represents the Constitution.

The “constitutional candidate” wouldn’t have a prayer of winning, of course — the best way to win the presidency, we’ve learned, is to promise to do all sorts of extra-constitutional things, to toss the text and all of its tiresome restrictions and counterweights aside in an orgy of promises and giveaways — but it would be useful, and instructive, to have someone up there on the dais to act as a kind of constitutional ombudsman. Someone tiresome and irritable, probably, who doesn’t mind beginning every sentence with “The Constitution doesn’t give you the authority to do that” or “Where does it say in the Constitution that government gets to tell me to lay off the carbs?” That sort of thing.

The bad news is that the candidate has been Ron Paul.

It was always fun to see Paul’s dyspeptic, curdled expression during the 16,000 Republican debates this autumn. (There were 16,000 of them, weren’t there?) It was bracing to see him shrug off appeals to weasel-word his responses — just shutter the Fed! dump NATO! — and it was especially interesting to watch the other candidates, who, philosophically, aren’t supposed to be all that different from Paul, ballet-step around him, like he was one of those loud talkers at the neighborhood bar who make a lot of sense, mostly, but then every now and then say something — Lincoln was a tyrant! — that makes everyone think, “Oh, I get it. You’re just . . . insane.”

Ron Paul isn’t insane, of course. His views on sound money and central banking, and even his narrow interpretation of the national-defense interests, are principled — and not novel — conservative positions. You and I may not agree with them — I do, mostly, up to the part about allowing Iran to bomb Israel — but on the crackpot scale of 1 to Lyndon LaRouche, they’re barely a 3. And if we’re all really honest about it, the sainted Abraham Lincoln did, in fact, violate the Constitution on several occasions. And over a few beers, say, among friends, these are interesting and diverting topics of conversation.

But like all of those kinds of conversations, they always end up the same way. The conversation winds along interesting abstractions and what-ifs, and then someone — usually the old guy at the end of the bar — says something truly out-there — “There’s no constitutional reason, for instance, why the children of illegal immigrants cannot be eaten” — and then the conversation devolves into weird irrational tributaries, and everyone moves on to something else, but you always have the feeling that one guy — usually the old guy at the end of the bar — really meant it.

In other words, there’s Ron Paul, and there’s the Ron Paul newsletters, and you cannot have one without the other. One, in fact, leads inexorably to the other. First you start talking about sane, grounded stuff — sound money; harmful central banking — and then, eventually, you start suggesting how it might have been the Israeli Mossad that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, or how the AIDS virus is quite possibly a product of secret government research gone awry.