As one of the 6.3 billion citizens of the Earth who will not be voting in the American presidential election but will nonetheless be stuck with the results, my interest was piqued by a website called "Who Would the World Elect?" The site asks visitors from around the world to choose one of the smiling mugs of the 17 presidential contenders - eight Democrats, nine Republicans.
With about 80,000 votes tallied so far, we can declare an early winner, since one candidate alone has snapped up more than half of them, dominating the regional standings from Gibraltar to Uruguay, Cambodia to Canada - and, most of all, the United States. Ron Paul has struck again.
Whatever country you're from, it's becoming increasingly difficult to navigate the Internet without bumping up against the "Ron Paul Revolution," as the long-shot's presidential campaign styles itself. The Who Would the World Elect? poll was hardly the first to be spammed by supporters of the anti-war, pro-gun libertarian; they seem to arrive on the scene as soon as any website mentions his name.
It's everywhere. In real-world polling, the Texas congressman is scoring only about 5 per cent of decided voters for the Republican nomination, leaving him in a distant fifth place. But post-debate polls conducted online and via text messages by the big U.S. networks have resulted in massive Paul victories. Blogs and message boards have been flooded with responses by his followers, to the extent that one popular conservative site banned his supporters outright.
Another took Paul off the ballot of an online poll in frustration, and was so inundated with complaints that it snidely re-ran the poll, this time with each one of the 10 options reading "Ron Paul."
Open online polls, of course, have more or less zero real-world validity, saying less about the popularity of the given options than about the ability of special-interest groups to mobilize Internet-dwellers. On this count, the Ron Paul campaign has succeeded in spades.
The problem is, even as Paul's online brouhaha turns heads and raises money, the throngs that have boosted his campaign might not be the exact ambassadors he really wants.
Paul himself certainly cuts an interesting figure: He's an iconoclast who appeals to the deep libertarian vein that runs through American politics. Paul advocates a strict and literal reading of the U.S. Constitution, eschewing anything that doesn't fit with his view of it, including things like state-run health care, gun control and, critically, overseas military adventures.
With a soft-spoken, doctrinaire attachment to "freedom" - that's freedom the concept, not freedom the war-mongering euphemism - the man comes across as a thoughtful firebrand.
The Internet responded. "The Web Finds Its Man, and Takes Him for a Ride," declared a New York Times headline, which summed it up nicely. Donations flooded in to his website, including a $4.2-million haul on Nov. 5 that set a one-day record for any candidate. Meanwhile, in one interview after another, Paul himself pleads ignorance about the phenomenon, saying his message is what's important, not the technology.
But then came the Ron Paul brute force squad, the online fanatics with whom his campaign is increasingly associated. With every online poll that has its ballot box stuffed past any pretense of plausibility, and with every forum overtaken by rabid supporters, his base begins to look ever more suspect.
