"All day long, the crowd grows. It is thick with tricorn hats. A singer does a sound check of something called "The Ron Paul Song." The chorus goes "Ron! Paul! Ron! Paul!" A woman comes out and gives the invocation. She says, "Thank you, dear Heavenly Father, for Dr. Ron Paul."

The crowd cheers and waits for its man.

Up in the stands here at Target Center, a woman in Colonial costume is holding a hot dog. Her husband is wearing breeches and a lace collar, and her daughters are wearing lacy mobcaps. It's like the 1700s, sort of, except for the lights and the microphones and the concrete stands and the video screen. The woman, whose name is Charity Davis, says she believes in home schooling and small government and Ron Paul. She says her family would qualify for food stamps but they won't take 'em -- won't take a piece of that welfare state.

She is waiting for her man.

Ditto the kids who took the buses from -- well, God knows where they took the buses from. All over the place. The Paul kids are devoted. They'll sleep in YMCA camps and go without showers for him. ( Everyone must sacrifice.) They call the buses the Ronvoys.

"What is there not to like about Ron Paul?" asks Emilie Eggleston, 24, a college student who took a Ronvoy from Austin. "I didn't know a whole lot about the gold standard," she recalls, but then she discovered Paul. She looked up his speeches from the old days: The guy hasn't changed his positions. That's integrity, she says. "He's my man!"

Forget that other convention. The Republicans wouldn't let Paul speak, so Paul decided to throw his own party, called the "Rally for the Republic." He invited speakers: conservative commentator Tucker Carlson to emcee, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura to excite the crowd. Paul got Grover Norquist to talk about taxes and John McManus of the John Birch Society to talk about problems like "illegals." Paul sold 10,000 tickets at the liberty-loving price of $17.76 each.

And the supporters have come: young and old, hip and nerdy, talking mostly about their favorite topic, libertarian economic theory. They are utterly enthralled by a slight Republican congressman from Texas who sounds like Jimmy Stewart, a man who ran for president and failed and talks about the past and looks every inch his age. Which is . . .

"I just had a birthday," Paul says during a brief interview backstage. "What year is this?" He mulls the question. "I'm 73," he concludes.

But they haven't seen him yet. All day, they wait and cheer and take to their feet to shout "End the Fed! End the Fed!" Copies of a newspaper called USA Tomorrow are strewn about. Top headlines: "McCain's Mob Connections 'Swept' " and "Obama's Communist 'Cover-Up' Continues." An ad in the event program reads: "Say Goodbye to the IRS NOW!"

They wait as speakers talk about what's gone wrong with the nation. As Barb Davis White, who is running for Congress in Minnesota, says she's campaigning against "liberalism, fascism and socialism" and hopes one day "we can send the Fairness Doctrine back to the pits of Hell where it was born." As libertarian Lew Rockwell talks about gas prices and President Bush's "dangerous, Messianic" ambition. As Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus talks about the threat from the United Nations and the travesty of the "War of Northern Aggression."

The speakers talk about John McCain ( booo) and about "Barack Hussein Obama" (more booo). They talk about "the Austrian theory of the business cycle." ( Huge cheers.) They talk of how the Constitution has been trampled on.

"Dictatorship!" cries a man near the stage.

Meanwhile, backstage, at precisely 5:15 p.m. Central time, the gate above the loading dock opens and a white van drives past. Ron Paul is on the premises. He's in the passenger seat and looks as if he might be napping.

If he seems an unlikely vessel for so many hopes, Paul has one thing few in public life possess: nearly pure ideological consistency. In Congress, the OB-GYN is known as Dr. No. He's so old school that he's 18th-century old school. He doesn't like the federal government having power -- not over drugs, not over food, not over the environment, not over schools, not over citizens' money. He doesn't believe in Medicare and he doesn't believe in Social Security. He believes fervently in the free market.

During his presidential run, Paul attracted considerable amounts of money and support for his tiny operation, and maintained that he represented the true roots of the Republican Party, which might explain why he is persona non grata at the convention, which is going on in the other of the Twin Cities. (As one rally speaker puts it, "John McCain will be in St. Paul, but Saint Paul will be in Minneapolis!") During a news conference and a subsequent interview, Paul says he was given a "second-class" floor pass and was told that if he wanted to walk around on the floor, he'd be chaperoned. "It makes them look bad," he says of the convention officials, and adds that he hasn't yet decided if he'll visit the arena at all.

He doesn't seem too upset, though. He talks about balancing the budget and about how people have been writing songs for him about the Federal Reserve. He says, "One of the most exciting issues that we talk about with young people is monetary policy!" He says he's going to be on "The Colbert Report" soon.

As it gets later in the evening, the crowd gets more excited. Audience members toss "RON" balloons. When, at last, Paul walks to the podium, the applause is thunderous. He seems startled by a cloud of confetti exploding nearby.

"This is very amazing," he says, grinning in a grandfatherly way. He talks about how much better things were in the 1950s and then he gets into the meat of all that's bad with the nation. He says "even a 1 percent income tax is morally wrong." He warns of "dictatorship" and of "power gravitating to international governments" and a "new world order."

And then he starts in on the Federal Reserve. The crowd -- it just goes wild." (Libby Copeland, The Washington Post, September 3, 2008)