Blame Ron Paul first.

Dana Goldstein of The Daily Beast calls this summer's grassroots protests "The Revenge of Ron Paul's Army." "Three-quarters of the way through 2009, it is fringy Ron Paul, more so than John McCain ... whose ideology is setting the conservative agenda. Even without the direct influence of their titular leader, Paul's campaign army is marching on, mobilizing by intense opposition to health-care reform."

Goldstein is wrong, but in an interesting way. Establishment Republicans--who are pro-war and didn't have much problem with No Child Left Behind or Bush's prescription-drug scheme--are now selling themselves as born-again constitutionalists. This is nothing new: every time the GOP is out of power, the party of Nixon and Bush reincarnates as the party of Robert Taft and Barry Gold-water. In the last presidential election, while Republicans still clung to the White House, only Paul dared campaign against big GOP government as well as big Democratic government. Today, of course, Republicans can assail federal socialism without having to answer for the budget-busting, Constitution-shredding ways of their man in the Oval Office.

What Goldstein is witnessing owes less to the Ron Paul movement--with its antiwar and anti-Federal Reserve emphases--than to the bizarre, late-campaign rallies of John McCain, where partisan mobs brayed that Obama was a Muslim, a Kenyan, a commie. Liberals like Goldstein might be forgiven for not remembering Republican appropriations of small-government rhetoric in decades past, but can't they at least recall last November?

Their memory is selective because the truth doesn't fit their ideology: Paul has his zealous supporters, but his political program has much more substance than denunciations of putative socialists. To the Left, the idea of a principled conservative--one who holds Republicans and Democrats to the same standard--is unthinkable. Claming that Paul's supporters are behind the often comical, occasionally nasty protests is a way to discredit the one Republican who stands for something different.