As a protest vote against the utter insanity and mockery of American democratic values and degradation of an honest and responsible conservative alternative that the republican party has become? Yes.
As a serious solution to very real challenges facing the American republic? Not so much.
Brush up on your penmanship skills Paul fans, you will need to write him in. There is next to zero chance Paul will seek a nomination on any third-party platform. Doing so would jeopardise his son's career in republican politics.
A Paul administration would very likely result in even more gridlock and disfunction in DC than there is now. Most Democrats reject his platform of eviserating the federal government. Republicans would obstruct his agenda more out of spite than anything. While as chief executive, Paul would likely take the veto pen to any legislation sent to him that involved spending any money.
Objectively, the Paul platform is just too radical. His agenda involves immediate and deep spending cuts that would cause a great number of contracting companies to go bankrupt in short order. The loss of income and purchasing power by all those employees inside and outside of government would cause a depression of unmatched magnitude. Possibly millions more would lose so much confidence in any products and services (food and medicine to say the least) regulated by the government. Beyond the physical damage caused by chaos in all sorts of commercial and financial sectors as companies big and small would jockey for position to outdo each other, the psychological impact of each death or injury would resonate in the real economy far out of proportion to real effects.
The American public tolerates the slow moves toward complete feudalism, debt peonage, and complete economic atomization. But the radical shock Paul's agenda would create in the public would almost certainly seize up the gears beyond repair. While multinationals and the very wealthy would benefit, they would be more dependent than ever on foreign markets and most likely mercenary guards to maintain their privilege.
But by all means, write him in. The practical ramifications of losing the presidency again will not do much to the republicans. It will buy the larger society four more years to try and fix things. Putting Paul's demostrated racism aside, it would be at least a symbolic rejection of the current republican values of war on everyone by young conservatives. The rigid hierarchy and totalitarian structure of the conservative movement today means the Paul supporters have no other option than complete abstention in order to have any hope of influencing republican policy orientation.
UPDATE.
There seems to be some confusion with this post. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I am in no way endorsing screwball Ron Paul for anything. It started as a joke, then got serious, then went back to being a joke. Part of me wants his fans to write him in so they don't vote for Romney. While this wouldn't affect the same kind of protest that Naderites did in 2000, it would at least help keep lunatics out of the white house for a little longer. Visible conflict on the right would be a good thing though, if they are busy fighting each other as during the primaries, maybe the rest of us can try and fix a few things.
Laying my cards on the table. Yes, I was trying to pull a fast one on a not-too-politically-sophisticated friend who has been seduced by the dark side. Apparently, throwing something together like this in about five minutes wasn't bright, but I had to get back to work. Rereading it, my writing was rather confusing. If you're going to try and mess with people, don't halfheart it and throw in some legitimate criticism. I believe my state of mind was something along the lines of realizing that the self-proclaimed sophisticates who drool over Paul will fall in line for the general election, but many others who may be voting for the first time or not paying that much attention might be conned into throwing away their vote for him.
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