The Ron Paulites of 2008 were easy to spot. They urged major cuts in defense spending. They critiqued the 17th Amendment. Some of them believed that a government conspiracy was responsible for 9/11 and that Rockefellers and Rothschilds secretly rule the world.

They were isolated and uncompromising. One couldn’t imagine Paul supporters transferring their allegiance to John McCain, or McCain supporters coming around to Ron Paul.

Today, the landscape has changed. On the neoconservative Right, Paul has collected tepid kudos from Glenn Beck and Joe Scarborough, both of whom have said they would prefer him to frontrunner Newt Gingrich. The administrator of HermanCainForums.com, known as “Constitution,” went a step further. After Cain quit the race, 18,000 registered users logged on to discover that HermanCainForums.com was becoming a Ron Paul site.

The barrier separating Paul from mainstream conservatives has suddenly become porous.

Even more remarkable is the infusion of energy from the traditionally apolitical. Public Policy Polling finds Paul now leading the pack in Iowa and “doing well with new voters [and] young voters,” just as Obama did.

Compared to the wonky stalwarts of 2008, these new Paulites are ideologically impure. They embrace Paul’s rejection of the drug war, his noninterventionist foreign policy, and his hostility to the Federal Reserve, but they don’t deprecate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, according to Paul, “increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty,” and they don’t necessarily believe that global warming is “the greatest hoax. . . . that’s been around in many, many years, maybe hundreds of years.”

Paul is often described as a candidate of policies, not personality, but his surge stems less from substance than from style. That might sound counterintuitive, because Paul is an incompetent public speaker and an unprepossessing physical presence. But unlike other candidates my generation has known, Paul is authentic. He sputters because his lines aren’t canned.

He never postures. When an interviewer asked if he had seen “Borat,” Paul said, “Movies I used to see are ‘Sound of Music,’ tonight I was sitting here watching ‘Gone with the Wind,’ so I don’t watch that kind of stuff.” A less honest candidate would have tasked his staff with choosing “favorite” movies that appeal to strategic demographics.

Paul never flip-flops. He has espoused the same philosophy since he ran for President as a Libertarian in 1988. While other candidates let politics shape their positions, Paul runs primarily to give his positions a national platform. Tweaking them to garner votes would defeat the purpose of his campaign.

The media billed Obama as “post-partisan,” but it is Paul who feels no loyalty to political parties. Republican contenders are supposed to appear confused about where Ronald Reagan ends and Jesus Christ begins, but in 1987, Paul accused the president of reneging on “his pledge to abolish the Departments of Education and Energy,” of failing “to work against abortion,” and of letting the IRS grow “bigger, richer, more powerful, and more arrogant.” This got him into trouble during September’s marquee debate at the Reagan Library, but it plays well with my generation, which is too young to understand the ritualistic idolatry.

In a primary where every policy idea sounds like a marketing ploy, Ron Paul doesn’t campaign on gimmicks. Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather Pizza, was responsible for the season’s most electrifying proposal, the “9-9-9” tax, but somewhere deep in their subconscious, most voters know that “9-9-9” sounds suspiciously similar to the price of a large pepperoni.

Paul is rising in the polls for the same reason talking heads consider him unelectable. He doesn’t cater to the brainwashed.