While Ron Paul mostly has been depicted in the media as a political oddity whose following is limited to libertarians and bloggers, Paul's past shows he knows how to win tough campaigns - even when he has to fight his own party's power brokers, as he did to win a congressional seat in 1996.

It was just two years after the "Republican Revolution" of 1994, led by Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America. Republicans were trying to expand their first House majority in decades. But Paul was hardly the kind of reliable partisan the party wanted to boost its ranks. Although he had served as a Republican congressman in the late 1970s and '80s, he had run for president against George H.W. Bush as the Libertarian Party's nominee in 1988, and he had a reputation for harboring quirky passions, such as restoring the gold standard for U.S. currency.

He visited the state's Republican congressmen in Washington to discuss his plans before announcing his candidacy. The Texas delegation could have decided to help Paul with valuable financial support and endorsements.

Paul said in an interview that he thought they'd be happy to have another Republican in the delegation, but that's not what happened. "I didn't think they were going to do what they did," he said.

What they did, to hear Paul tell the story, was to recruit Greg Laughlin, the incumbent Democrat, to run as a Republican.

Laughlin said that he had a good relationship with many of the Republican activists in Texas long before his switch and had considered becoming a

Republican soon after the party's resounding 1994 victory in the national elections. Either way, Laughlin's party switch was the first sign of trouble for Paul's nascent bid.

Both Texas senators endorsed Laughlin in the primary, as did Gingrich, who was then the House speaker. Both George Bushes campaigned for Laughlin.

But Paul won the Republican nomination, and then the seat. And he did so in much the same style he's employed in his current presidential campaign. He combined a folksy manner with a savvy political strategy. His ideals inspired dedication in his supporters and staff. He drew on the support of longtime backers who shared his libertarian philosophy, while tailoring his stump speech to mainstream Republicans.

"He was a very competent, very savvy opponent," Laughlin said. "One observer said to me he was almost deceptive in how he delivered his message."

Personal campaigning

In January 1996, Tom Lizardo was preparing to fly to Texas to start working for Paul's campaign. The night before his flight, Paul called him and said that he was polling at 6 percent, far behind Laughlin, at 44. Lizardo came anyway.

"He was the type of person who struck me very clearly as capable of taking an uphill battle and doing something with it," said Lizardo, who is now Paul's chief of staff. Lizardo met Paul in the 1980s, as a member of a conservative activist group called the Young Americans for Freedom.

Paul's district in southeastern Texas comprised 22 counties and bordered the expensive media markets of Houston and Austin. Most of the population was white, conservative and church-going.

Every weekend, Lizardo joined Paul on the campaign trail across the Texas plains, where Paul liked to listen to elevator music or financial news as he drove his pickup truck to the next stop.

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