is that he's the face of a pretty diverse group, and the members of that group do not align 100% with him on every issue. It's a largely libertarian group, but many libertarians have more shades of blue or shades of red but still identify with the overall philosophy (though many of these people don't identify with the word itself, "libertarian").

Paul is not a perfect libertarian. His stances on abortion and immigration, for example, are a bit to the right of many libertarians. I think it's easiest to view Paul and libertarianism using a Venn diagram. Forgive me for using squares instead of circles, but it was the only way to get the overlap between the three groups to work out well.

Note: the big green box for Libertarians do not represent the Ron Paul group, or at least not perfectly. The reason Paul has gained traction is the purple area. Many Americans right now are simply anti-purple; some of these people are green (libertarians) but many of them are red/brown (republicans) or blue/yellow (democrats) and want to distance themselves from the purple parts of their established parties, and it's those people that have joined up with the libertarians and rallied behind Paul.

You are probably drawn to Paul based on his yellow tendencies and turned off by his brown and red tendencies (sorry if I am being presumptuous). The degree to which you are anti-purple determines whether you can get behind him or not.

This is how I look at it anyway. We can quibble about the details of the text I put in the diagram but I think this is a pretty reasonable representation of where libertarians are, and where Paul is getting his support.