Who do you want as the USA president in 2013?

[Mr Khan]

ArnoldRimmer said:
Being from Europe, I am of course much less familiar with the presential candidates.

But I've read some articles about the various candidates and Ron Paul quite impressed me, because he seems to really believe in the original, truely american ideas of the founding fathers (not the kind of crap that neo-conservatives prey), and seems to stay loyal to his beliefs even in cases when they are unpopular. (for example legalizing drugs)

He seems to also be very popular among the american population, but unfortunately I don't think he's going to win. Remember that in US presidential campaigns, the candidate with the bigger campaign funding budget wins with a probability of about 90%. I'm afraid Ron Paul is not going to get that much money, like Obama. The jewish lobby doesn't like them, because they are both not unconditionally loyal to Israel in cases when Israel's and America's interests collide. Ron Paul wasn't even invited to that AIPAC republican presidential candidates event. For that reason, both Ron Paul and Obama will probably collect small campaign funding budgets and also get few votes from both jews and evangelicalist christs.

Ron Paul might just be the best presidential candidate America has seen in a long time. If he gets elected, I think America might actually recover again. If however Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich will be elected (and I'm afraid one of them will), then good night USA, America's situation will become much worse than it already is.

As Kasz has pointed out, money tends to follow popularity, and not the other way around. I mean, Barack Obama more or less came out of nowhere (Illinois State Senator, Illinois US Senator for less than one whole term) against McCain, who was fairly well-entrenched and nominally should have been far better connected with campaign money than Obama was.

Ron Paul is actually less popular than he is made out to be. The issue is that he has a very well-mobilized group of supporters (which is why you see disproportiante support for him on a lot of websites on the internet), but in the end he cannot command real mainstream appeal, which is why his chances never really get up there