LAS VEGAS - To begin: This is not a story about Ron Paul.

Not exactly, anyway. And yet to get where we want to go we will start at OPA!, a Greek restaurant on the edge of town where Clark County Republicans and tea party conservatives gathered on Nevada primary night for what looked undeniably like a Ron Paul rally.

In one corner was Cindy Lake, acting chair of the Clark County Republican Party and a delegate to this summer's Republican National Convention. A self-described "libertarian Republican constitutional conservative," Lake became a Paul convert in 2007 after she heard him advocate for something she passionately supports: the freedom to buy raw milk.

Nearby stood Megan Heryet, celebrating her GOP primary victory in a state Assembly race. Heryet, a real estate agent, substitute teacher and mom, is hardly a Paul fanatic. But she did back him in Nevada's caucuses earlier this year, primarily because she is a big proponent of being free to make decisions such as choosing to give birth to her second child at home instead of a hospital. "It's about being left alone," she said.

And there were the Bunce brothers, Richard and Carl, who marshaled a four-year "Paulist" takeover of the Nevada Republican Party. The tax system is their biggest irritation. "This is the land of the free," said Carl. "How free are we when we've got a government that can choose how much money we keep in our paycheck?"

But we promised this wouldn't be about Ron Paul and, in fact, it really isn't. Rather it's about unpasteurized milk and home births and taxes and, yes, freedom.

Something's going on in America this election year: a renaissance of an ideal as old as the nation itself - that live-and-let-live, get-out-of-my-business, individualism vs. paternalism dogma that is the hallmark of libertarianism.

FreedomFest

Paul, the Lake Jackson congressman and GOP presidential hopeful who champions small government and individual liberty, is one manifestation of it. We saw that with his rising popularity during the Republican presidential primary season and, now, the recent "takeovers" of political conventions in Nevada, Minnesota, Maine, Louisiana and elsewhere that will result in a sizable faction of Paul delegates at the GOP convention.

There are questions of how all of that might affect the choice of a GOP vice presidential candidate and the Republican Party platform.

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Libertarian ideas taking hold