Occasional TAC contributor, Dave Weigel has a very smart piece at Reason about the success of Ron Paul’s book, The Revolution, A Manifesto, comparing its sales and impact with that of Chuck Hagel’s book, America, Our Next Chapter. Hagel’s book is, by turns, cautious and clichéd.

By contrast, Ron Paul’s The Revolution could have been written if the congressman had passed on 2008. Paul’s arguments about the money supply, foreign policy, and the Constitution have been honed for decades. The only new thing between these covers is confidence. “I have never seen such a diverse coalition rallying to a single banner,” Paul writes of his campaign. “Republicans, Democrats, independents, Greens, constitutionalists, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, antiwar activists, homeschoolers, religious conservatives, freethinkers…these folks typically found, to their surprise, that they rather liked each other.”

Weigel was probably the first journalist in Washington to discover the phenomena that was the 2008 Ron Paul campaign, and I worry that he hasn’t gotten the credit he deserves. He knew that Paul would be a force at the debates, and anticipated the Ron Paul newsletter controversy over a year ago. His report from the Iowa Straw Poll was must reading. That piece guaranteed that I’d check out Paul events when I visited tiny straw polls in rural New Hampshire to report on Mike Huckabee. There I discovered the same kind of enthusiasm for Paul– and the same diversity in his crowds. Anyone who could attract bikers, religious traditionalists, goth kids, Buchananites, and undergraduate economics students to these obscure events was touching on some nerve in the body politic. Even if I might quibble with one or another of his interpretations of the Paul campaign, it’s good to see Weigel still uncovering the lingering effects of the rEVOLution.