Throughout the campaign season, Ron Paul supporters have fought against the odds

Ron Paul's vision lives on through supporters who hope for change

By ALEX BRAUN At 7 p.m. on a brisk Tuesday evening in early March, a small furniture truck all but eclipses the Columbia headquarters for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign at Parkade Plaza. “Aaron’s,” reads the logo on the side, “Driving Your Dreams Home.”
At the moment, it doesn’t matter. Though a Web site lists this as the time and place of the next Paul meeting, the doors are locked, the lights dim. Behind papered-over windows, one long collapsible table sits empty on astro-green plastic carpet, and an artificial wall of signs made with stencils and spray-paint lie on their sides in the background, heralding the Ron Paul Revolution. The largest ones are just tall enough to obscure the vast unused space behind, where 25-foot ceilings stretch toward some lonely and distant origin. To an outsider peering in, it is a curious still life, like stumbling upon the back lot of an abandoned Broadway production.
It was the second time I’d found the Paul office in this lonely state. Later, I’d learn that the original meeting time had been changed twice to accommodate the most dedicated of Paul’s followers, the ones who plopped wads of $20 bills into a letter-sized envelope to pay for the office’s March rent. Some of them were around long enough to remember the first meeting, at Lucy’s bar in McBaine more than a year ago, or the weekly IHOP congregations that became the norm soon afterward.