A short-lived barrage of e-mail from Ron Paul fans arrived this morning, all hitting me for daring to wonder whether they’re regular, tried-and-true Republicans. I hadn’t written about the Ian McKellen lookalike in a while, so I wondered what was up.

LewRockwell.com responded to something I had written in May, noting that most Ron Paul supporters have no second choice, while most supporters of other GOP candidates can fairly easily find a second choice. I suspected, and still suspect, that most folks flocking to Ron Paul are hard-core libertarians, traditional third-party voters, and not the folks who show up in Republican presidential primaries cycle after cycle. Finally, if you’re the “REAL Republicans,” then what are the ninetysome percent preferring some other guy in the primary? Is ninety percent or so of the GOP those dreaded “neocons”?

But since one or two of the PaulBearers were nicer than usual, I’ll throw them a bone or two. During my short trip to New Hampshire this week, I saw lawn signs for only one candidate: You Know Who. If lawn signs in the Manchester-Portsmouth-Durham area accurately predict primary results, then we can expect Ron Paul to win the Granite State with 100 percent of the vote.

The second thing is, it’s hard for us outside the bandwagon to separate the candidate from his nuttier supporters, like the ones who accused Giuliani of being in on 9/11 on the ferry, or other supporters’ chants that “9/11 was an inside job.” That kind of talk makes blood boil, and yet somehow it keeps coming from Ron Paul supporters. I know the candidate has rejected those allegations, but it raises the question of why the conspiracy nuts keep congregating around one candidate.

Once the nuts have been trimmed from his operation, there might be some parts of Paul’s campaign to admire and emulate: Every time he mentions going back to the Constitution for first principles, or quotes the Declaration of Independence, he gets a cheer, even at last week’s Morgan State University forum. His die-hard budget cutting stands might be seen as the GOP’s natural allergic reaction to seven years of big-spending compassionate conservatism. (And Bush’s signing of campaign finance reform, and his awful positions on illegal immigration and border control, and his creation of a massive bureaucracy that frisks grandma at the airport and makes me disrobe to get on an airplane and … er, where was I going with this?) He clearly has figured out how to get young people energized like few other Republican candidates.

If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, the right is going to need to appeal to every voter skeptical of big government. Ron Paul’s folks insist they’ll never settle for the lesser evil. Whoever the Republican nominee is, it might be nice if he could get some of these folks to reconsider whether they really want to live under President Greater Evil.