FROM THE CYPRUS SUNDAY MAIL

Little known candidate gets Cyprus’ support for US top job
By Jean Christou

CYPRUS JOINED one hundred other countries out of 170 in an online poll in a virtual vote for a little-known Republican candidate from Texas in the US presidential elections next year.

While a huge percentage of Americans may not know who the 72-year old physician is, the world appears to be well versed on his policies to the point where he comes top of the voting list in counties from Zimbabwe to Taiwan to Germany the UK, and a close second in others such as Turkey and Greece.

The online polling numbers may be small but the consistency in voting for Paul over Democratic favourites Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and above all of the Republican candidates, is telling.

When the number of American votes are deducted from the total, Paul walks away with 8,550 of the world’s votes compared to Barack’s 6,223 and Dennis Kucinich’s 3,953 votes. Kucinich is also a Democrat. Clinton only garners 2,000 votes.

In Europe Paul’s biggest fans were Britons and German, where he clocked well over 1,000 votes in each of the two countries.

Belgium voted for him as did Thailand, Japan, Ukraine, Syria, Switzerland, Portugal, Slovenia, Malta, Lebanon, Israel, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Finland and Norway among dozens of others.
Cyprus cast only 13 votes in the poll, but eight were for Paul. Three went to Obama and one each to Kucinich and Republican candidate Tom Tancredo on the website named ‘Who Would the World Elect for the President of the United States?’

Although his chances of being elected President without his own party’s support are slim to nil, Paul has managed to defeat all the odds to get as far as he has done.

Widely regarded as the candidate for disenfranchised voters, computer geeks and conspiracy theorists, his supporters still raised nearly over $4 million in one day on the Internet towards his campaign.

His rivals have used Paul’s diverse support base to dub him the candidate for the lunatic fringe. But as one observer said: “With his record one-day haul of $4.2 million in contributions, his is no campaign of unpaid college students.”

Paul’s supporters, fed up of the hijacking of the Republican Party by the neocons, say he has a consistent track record in Congress for voting against anything that is contrary to the US constitution.

He is also anti-war and has suggested that if the US kept its nose out of other countries` business, 911 would probably not have happened.

"My message is very simple: more freedom, less government," the Texas Congressman said at a recent gathering of supporters.