Last Tuesday evening, political reporters were so absorbed by the increasingly snippy standoff between senators Clinton and Obama that they mostly forgot that North Carolina and Indiana were also holding Republican primaries.

Governors Huckabee and Romney have long since conceded victory to the senator of Arizona, making their trivial tallies on Tuesday totally otiose, but few noticed that a full 8% of Republicans hauled themselves to the polls to vote for the Libertarian maverick Ron Paul.

In another little-noted footnote to this most extraordinary of primary seasons, Mr. Paul, the Pittsburgh-born Texan fundamental-conservative pro-life constructionist Libertarian obstetrician, has yet to formally acknowledge Senator McCain’s triumph and withdraw from the race.

Like the legendary Japanese lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who continued fighting World War II from the jungles of Lubang 27 years after his emperor had surrendered, Mr. Paul battles on. As he told CNN on March 10, “McCain has the nominal number … If you’re in a campaign for only gaining power, that is one thing; if you’re in a campaign to influence ideas and the future of the country, it’s never over. … The true revolution is ongoing.”

“The Revolution: A Manifesto” (Grand Central Publishing, 192 pages, $21) is the title of Mr. Paul’s new book, which even before it was published topped the best-seller charts, boosted by a tribe of devoted followers he estimates to be 350,000 strong. There is nothing much new about the ideas he articulates for those who have followed his 30-odd years as an elected representative or the 20-odd books he has authored.

In the Republican debates Mr. Paul reveled in his role as gadfly and interloping outsider, tweaking the noses of the mainstream Republicans for their political posturing and their wicked Washington ways. But, as his book shows, he is himself something of a conformist, gaily ticking the conventional checklist of traditional conservative principles.

As a rare survivor of a stream of thinking he sources to the “old Right,” or “original Right,” he deifies the Constitution, detests income tax, loves free trade, scorns foreign aid, abominates interpretative judges, abhors abortion, execrates eminent domain, supports gun rights, thinks government is too big, derides health insurance as much as universal health care, dislikes regulation of the free market, rues the day the dollar fell off the gold and silver standard, and deplores the existence of the Federal Reserve.

But he insists he is no mere contrarian and complains that, despite having voted against legislation more often than the rest of Congress put together, his nickname on Capitol Hill, “Dr. No,” is a misnomer.

Where he finds himself almost alone on the right is on America’s role in the world. He hankers after the liberties Americans enjoyed when the republic was in its infancy and Washington was little more than a Southern swamp with great expectations.

Though at pains to point out he is no isolationist, he believes America has no place interfering in the fate of other countries and that Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman besmirched the intentions of the Founding Fathers and set us on a ruinous path leading today to our permanently billeting troops in 130 countries. Yet he supports American military action in Afghanistan because it attempts to seek out and punish those who attacked us.

Mr. Paul reserves his ultimate disdain for neoconservatives, who, he argues, duped us into invading Iraq. While he doesn’t adopt the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s colorful phrase and theatrical gestures to say of the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, “the chickens are coming home to roost,” Mr. Paul believes American interference abroad has antagonized foreigners who have, understandably, retaliated. As he blandly puts it, “actions cause reactions, and … Americans will need to prepare themselves for these reactions if their government is going to continue to intervene around the world.” Above all, he argues, the Bush administrationhas undermined and dispensed with hallowed civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and made America a nation of torturers, a practice he deplores under any circumstances.

“Once home to distinguished intellectuals and men of letters,” the conservative movement, he writes, “now tolerates and even encourages anti-intellectualism and jingoism that would have embarrassed earlier generations of conservative thinkers.”

As much as Mr. Paul’s “The Revolution” makes uncomfortable reading for many Republicans, for his New Model Army of young libertarians it is an indispensable guide to the thinking of an honorable American rebel who believes that those who preside over our fates on Capitol Hill have routinely and without a second thought betrayed the word and the spirit of the American Revolution.

Mr. Paul is a prophet without honor in his own country. He has been marginalized, ridiculed, and ignored by mainstream Republicans and was supported by just 0.5% of American voters when he stood for the presidency in the Libertarian Party interest in 1988. But perhaps if he had enjoyed the good looks and persuasive charm of his hero Ronald Reagan, whose presidential bid he championed in Texas in 1976, American conservatism might have turned out very differently indeed.

If Mr. McCain loses in November, the conservative movement must mount a thorough reappraisal of its thinking if it is to recover the White House. Washington Republicans are likely to try to retool Newt Gingrich’s unproven Contract With America, but they would be rash to dampen the enthusiasm of the young libertarians Mr. Paul has inspired and the potent ideas he has unleashed.

nwapshott@nysun.com