Nik Ritchie helped start the Ron Paul club at the University of Central Florida. Although John McCain appears headed for the Republican nomination, Ritchie feels that Paul accomplished a lot. “No one knew who he was before he ran for president, and he did very well considering how unknown he was,” he said.

Ritchie did his best to make Paul known. He and other volunteers set up tables on UCF’s campus promoting Paul and answering questions, and they spent many Saturday mornings going door-to-door to tell people about the candidate and give them reading material.

Ritchie says he has to do some research before he knows whom he will vote for in November. If he can’t find someone who best represents his values, he says he’ll write in Ron Paul.

What do you consider your biggest success?

I would say, as far as the Ron Paul campaign, one big thing that we did was we got a picture of our table at our school on the cover of The Orlando Sentinel, which is the biggest newspaper in Orlando. We had a big picture of us with a big Ron Paul sign right on the front cover. That was really big because Ron Paul didn’t get a whole lot of attention in the newspapers and on TV.

Did you make any mistakes?

We didn’t start (campaigning) until about January, and the (primary) election here in Florida was at the end of January. We should’ve started sooner. But we didn’t really know because we were all volunteers and we weren’t being told what to do by anyone.

What do you plan to do as the country gets closer to the November election?

My club at school is still doing stuff. We’re actually probably going to be working with some local politicians in local elections around here because that’s just as important, if not more important, than the presidential election. We can make an even bigger difference by working and helping out with local politicians, running for governor or mayor or Congress.

If you could talk with candidates about any issue, what would it be?

The biggest issue that I would like to talk to candidates about is the economy, especially the Federal Reserve, which is an issue that most candidates do not talk about at all. And that’s why I liked Ron Paul so much, ’cause he’s the only one that would talk about the Federal Reserve issue.

If I were a president, I would probably say we need to stop the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is a bank that prints all of the money that every American uses. And they have not been doing a very good job because they have been printing too much money, and that causes bad things to happen in the economy.

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