Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

Texas Republican congressman and long-shot presidential candidate Ron Paul is "another kind of conservative," says this writer.

Emerging from the back of the stage to a vociferous round of applause from the audience, Ron Paul quickly took a seat next to the show's host, a visible look of surprise on his otherwise placid face. Leaning into him, the host quipped that he had never seen such an animated audience before and attributed the tangible excitement in the room to Ron Paul and his appearances at the Republican debates and other talk shows.

With the recent surge of support for Paul's once obscure presidential candidacy, spurred in part by the tremendous amount of buzz he's garnered online (his name was the #1 most-searched-for term on blog search engine Technorati), the overwhelming approval he met on the show may not seem that surprising. What was surprising was the audience that accorded it to him: the mostly liberal crowd that had come to watch HBO's "Real Time" with Bill Maher.

Ron Paul's blog boomlet aside, he is not going to be on the GOP's 2008 ticket. You can mark that down in stone. Ron Paul excites a few Republicans with his anti-war stance, and he deserves a lot of conservative love for his strong stand for constitutional principles, but he's not going to get the nomination. Republicans, by and large, still support the war on terror and aren't going to nominate a candidate who they believe won't take the fight to the enemy.

Paul's popularity with Bill Maher's audience is a bit like John McCain's popularity with independents - it pleases the liberal media and generates some positive press, but ultimately it doesn't help you win the GOP nomination and in fact may hurt you in primaries.