Standing on stage in the Reagan Library during the first Republican debate, Ron Paul looked a lot like the ten other men on stage: a dark suit, white shirt, striped tie, the concerns of the highest office in the land on his mind. And on numerous occasions, he even sounded a lot like them, too. Though Paul lacked the practiced ten-word answers and poll-tested polish of the top-tier candidates, he spoke adamantly, defending one of his answers by declaring that “it’s conservative, it’s Republican, it’s pro-American, it follows the Founding Fathers, and besides, it follows the Constitution.” It would’ve all been par for the course, boilerplate political assertion of exactly the sort one should expect at a gathering of GOP presidential hopefuls — except that Ron Paul was talking about his opposition to the Iraq war.

Since entering into the crowded field of Republican presidential-primary candidates, Paul has become a lightning rod for conservative criticism as well as an unlikely Internet phenomenon. After serving in Congress for just over 16 of the last 31 years and attracting minimal national attention during that time, Paul has, in just a few weeks, begun to stand out — and apart — from the rest of the Republican candidates. Among fiscal conservatives, he is the purest of the pure, having steadfastly refused to enter into the sort of deal-making and political compromise on which Washington thrives. And, in a party where support for the war in Iraq runs high and often tops the list of voter concerns, Paul’s apostasy on the issue puts him decidedly outside the GOP mainstream, provoking harsh judgments from several prominent conservative pundits. Yet he is not without supporters either, most notably a zealous Internet fan base that no other Republican candidate can claim.

Part of Paul’s Internet appeal likely derives from his libertarian roots. Libertarians were early colonizers of the net, and, whether with more political bloggers like Glenn Reynolds or the crowds of government-wary geeks at technology websites like Slashdot, they remain an outsized presence there compared to their real-world influence. Paul has always served as a Republican in Congress, but in 1988 he was the Libertarian party’s presidential nominee. And it shows: As a congressional representative, his steadfast refusal to support government expenditures of nearly any kind has earned him a reputation as a principled economic conservative in a time where political deal-making is the norm. He has been referred to as “Dr. No” for his lengthy history of opposition to bills that would have the government do, well, pretty much anything. On a question about government-cutting at a recent debate, other candidates hemmed and hawed about which programs they might like to cut; Paul responded that he’d get rid of the entire department of education.

Even on issues like global warming, where many Republicans — including staunch government-cutters like Newt Gingrich — have begun to warm to ideas like a carbon tax or an emission-trading system, Paul stands firm. “Nobody has a right to pollute, but I would rather approach the issue through property rights than through regulation,” he says. “Government should be there to protect property, not to divvy it up.” He departed from the free-market line to vote to give the government power to negotiate prices with drug companies, but only because he believes that, as long as the government is buying the drugs, it might as well get a good deal on them. On nearly every issue of note, he’s a small-government absolutist’s dream come true.

Yet Paul departs from his libertarian brethren on some major issues. A longtime obstetrician who has reportedly delivered more than 4,000 babies (he even took two days a week to perform deliveries during the early parts of his congressional career), he is firmly pro-life. “I could get paid for killing a fetus one second before birth, but I could get arrested for killing it one second later,” he says, “and there’s something very strange about that.” Nor does Paul side with other libertarians on immigration. He’s doubtful that the Senate’s immigration bill will accomplish much, and, in an interview with National Review Online, agrees with those who’ve called it “amnesty” — which, he’s quick to add, he’s always opposed.

One might think that Paul, as a pro-life, anti-amnesty, government-cutting economic conservative would find a welcome home in conservative circles, but in recent weeks, the congressman has been lambasted for his longstanding opposition to the Iraq war. Michelle Malkin wrote that Paul “has no place on the Republican stage,” and Townhall.com’s Dean Barnett called him “the very definition of a crank.” He’s been accused of America-blaming and suggesting that America “invited” the 9/11 attacks, but despite saying that terrorists attack us “because we’ve been over there…bombing Iraq for ten years” at the first Republican debate, he denies that he ever has or would ever imply anything of the sort. “It’s preposterous to say that I’m blaming America,” he says. “That’s a complete distortion, like blaming a person for being murdered. No, I’m looking at the motives and reasons that elicit such hatred and willingness to kill.”

Still, for most conservatives, Paul’s position on the war might as well be from another party. He says that the U.S. ought to “listen to Osama bin Laden,” and argues that suicide bombers are motivated far more by political concerns than by religious ones. He especially takes issue with the idea that terrorists attack America out of hatred for “our freedom,” sticking to his guns even when presented with a passage from Osama bin Laden’s letter to America, “Why We Are Fighting You,” that reads: “You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of ‘personal freedom.’” In a speech on the floor of Congress on April 17, he was blunt, saying, “All the reasons to justify the preemptive invasion of Iraq were wrong.” He accuses supporters of the war of lacking understanding of the nuances and complexities on the ground in Iraq, but offers a rather simplistic course of action in response: “We just marched in, and we can just march out.”

Despite vying for a nomination from a party that strongly supports the war and, according to a recent Pew poll, is concerned almost exclusively with issues of military, terrorism, and foreign policy, Paul believes that his way is the only way for Republicans to move forward. He argues that continued support for the war has cost the party support amongst the public, and thus feels that it’s his challenge “to convince the entire Republican party to embrace change.” If the party’s position on the war stays the same, he believes that “it doesn’t have a prayer to win next year.” That remains to be seen, but if the party’s support for the war remains at anything close to its current levels, an antiwar candidate has an even slimmer chance of winning the GOP nomination.

Paul’s ideas about the war have turned off many in the Republican party, but he has become an unlikely icon on the Internet. YouTube has exploded with videos by Paul’s devotees. It lists more than 3,500 video results in a search for the candidate, including recut a version of the first GOP debate that feature only Paul’s answers, a still-image montage set to the Beatles song “Revolution” called “Ron Paul Revolution,” and numerous other fan-made productions. On multiple occasions, he has shot to the top of blog aggregator Technorati’s most-searched list. And on the user-promoted links site Digg, articles about Paul have been so dominant that they’ve inspired other users to call for investigation into the number and prominence of the stories.

Paul’s supporters act in swarms, mass-e-mailing Paul’s detractors and voting repeatedly in online polls. In February, they stormed the Pajamas Media Republican straw poll, putting Paul ahead of Rudy Giuliani with more than double the votes. And numerous journalists, including NR’s Byron York, have reported receiving waves of e-mail, some of it fairly crude, after writing anything perceived to be critical of him.

The fervency of Paul’s fans his riled his growing opposition. Popular conservative blog Little Green Footballs removed Paul’s name from its polls after his supporters pushed him to the top. John Hawkins, who runs RightWingNews and is an adviser to Duncan Hunter, another Republican-primary candidate, recently told the antiwar American Conservative, “Ron Paul’s people spam these polls… Paul’s our Dennis Kucinich. He’s not a conservative. He’s a libertarian. He’s a kook, and his supporters are pretty obnoxious.”

Paul disavows responsibility for the actions of his followers, responding simply that his supporters make their own decisions and aren’t his to command. And he admits to being at somewhat of a loss to explain his web celebrity. It certainly didn’t happen by design. “It’s not how I’ve used the internet, it’s how the internet has spontaneously jumped to my support,” he says. His campaign is delighted by the attention, but, he says, his internet presence is largely unguided by his staff. “Most of the net is out of our control, and we’re trying to tame it a little bit to have direction and use it to raise funds.” And the campaign is seeing some success. After the second debate, Paul claims, there was a “tremendous boost” in donations.

Paul sounds weary but upbeat when he says this, enough so that it’s almost possible to forget, for a minute, that his national poll numbers are more or less nonexistent. But that’s Paul’s signature: stubborn defiance of convention, party standards, and whatever else doesn’t fit with his own sharply defined, idiosyncratic ideology. He’s a man who sponsors bills that are clearly destined to go nowhere and eschews press-friendly sound-bites in favor of raspy-voiced run-on sentences explaining his philosophy of the role of government. The pragmatic concerns of everyday politics hold little interest for Paul, who puts determined ideological purism ahead of all else — even to his political detriment. Voters and politicians on both sides of political aisle will doubtless find many reasons to disagree with Paul’s rigid positions. But compromise, even of the kind that most believe politics sometimes requires, won’t be among them. Like it or not, Ron Paul calls it the way he sees it.

–Peter Suderman is managing editor of National Review Online.