Paul in 1995: Say, have you read The Ron Paul Survival Report?

I don’t think I’ll ever run for public office — but if I do, I think I’d hire Andrew Kascynski as my oppo researcher. That’s not just because he’s good, but mainly to keep him from working for my opponent.  Andrew just started a new gig at Buzzfeed, and his maiden post unearths another 1995 interview in which Ron Paul promotes the newsletters he claims now not to have read at all at the time:

Q: As we get started, I’d like if you could, give us, er, tell us a little bit about yourself, and your background and your experience. Thank you.

PAUL: Okay, just as an aside about the book that you refer to, although that book was put together in the early 1990s, it has materials from years before that, too.

Q. OKay.

PAUL: Like the minority views from the Gold Commission Report. That would have been done about ten years earlier. Anyway, I’m a physician here in Lake Jackson. I deliver babies for a living, but I also do an investment letter. It’s called the Ron Paul Survival Report, and I put that out on a monthly basis –

Q: I’ve heard of that.

PAUL: — which is a gold-oriented newsletter, but it’s also, uh, convening — expressing concern about surviving in this age of big government, where there’s a lot of taxes and regulations, and attacks on our personal liberties. I was concerned about this many years ago.  Even in 1974 I had a lot of concern about this, and, uh, advocated some of the things that they’re talking about right now.

This is similar to the clip Andrew found last week, in which Paul promoted his newsletters with very specific recollections of what they contained.  In this interview, Paul presents the more notorious of his newsletters not just as experience, but as the primary qualification for getting back to Congress.  That makes Paul’s recent assertions that he didn’t have a clue what the newsletters that he published, sold, and from which Paul derived a healthy income contained look a little disingenuous and self-serving now.  These two interviews from 1995 show that Paul wasn’t shy about promoting the newsletters when he thought it would benefit his political aspirations.

Video here