The latest Rasmussen Poll rocks the Washington Establishment. Ron Paul actually can win!

If the 2012 presidential election took place now, Barack Obama would defeat Ron Paul by just 1 percent of the national vote, 42 percent to 41 percent, according to a Rasmussen Poll released Wednesday.

Only a sliver separates the popular president, beloved by the media and the national establishment, from an insurgent candidacy that calls for an end to foreign interventionism, government intrusion into our private lives, and bailouts of big banks and private businesses.

Even more stunning, only 11 percent prefer some other candidate and 6 percent are undecided, according to the poll.

This is earth-shattering news in the corridors of power of New York and Washington, D.C. Hey, it is stunning news in Peoria, Ill.

Two years ago, I wrote a blog entitled The Mouse that Roared. It told the surprising story of how a little-known congressman from Texas, Ron Paul, had surged too late to win the Republican nomination but not too late to awaken the nation to his remarkable political platform.

Just as John McCain clinched the nomination, Paulistas appeared everywhere, like mushrooms after the rain. The GOP went into emergency mode to change state party rules and sometimes shut down their own conventions to kill the embarrassing phenomenon of Ron Paul supporters winning delegates after the mathematical certainty of the McCain win was in the bag. (See How a GOP conspiracy continues to hurt Ron Paul.)

Even as the Republican Party experienced the Sarah Palin boomlet and then tanked in the general election, the Paulistas were growing and spreading across party lines. Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, evangelical and gay, black and white, old and young, they resonated to Ron Paul’s message of limited government.

When the Obama stimulus plan appeared to be nothing more than a looting of the U.S. Treasury for unions and narrow Democrat activist groups, and none of the most basic tweaks of the mortgage crisis were addressed, the Paulistas began to pick up steam.

How could the public turn to establishment Republicans when the Bush administration had started the most recent mess?

And yet, what was Barack Obama doing? Looting the treasury for his party at a time when unemployment was still soaring?

Ron Paul offered something different. It appeared to most to be a libertarian message, although Paul himself pointed out that it was pure Republicanism, a message that has been missing from the public debate since the days of Robert Taft. Ronald Reagan had espoused much of the same thing but the pragmatic realities of the Cold War had put his plans on the back burner.

Ron Paul was saying that in the name of one emergency or another America was playing loose with the constitution, that our foreign policy was out of control. It was time for America to back away from its arrogant “rule the world” philosophy. We were going bankrupt, he warned.

“Why are we borrowing $10 billion from China,” Paul asked, “Only to give it to Musharraf [in Pakistan,] who is a dictator, who overthrew an elected government, and then we go to war to promote democracy in Iraq?” Good question.

But nothing drew more support than Ron Paul’s campaign against the inside power brokers of the American establishment. Paul was making the point that no group of men and women, no matter how important or well connected, had the right to loot the U.S. Treasury or devalue the money supply by printing more money, all without accountability.

His calls to audit the Federal Reserve were portrayed as “goofy,” until citizens began asking the obvious question, “Well, why not? It’s our government, our money. Who is the Federal Reserve?”

It was like a scene out of the Emperor’s Clothes and the public was saying that the Wall Street Princes of Power were naked. And so they are.

This blog has followed this unlikely Cinderella story for the past few years. It chronicled how Paul heroically stood up in the Republican national debates in 2004. (See Ron Paul’s best YouTube moment.) How his opponents will try to defeat him. (See Is Ron Paul too old?) And how he can pull an upset? (How Ron Paul Wins.) But who would have thought the numbers would look this good this early?

During the 2004 Fox News debate, an anchor brought up the dilemma, “Congressman Paul, another question about electability. Do you have any sir?” There followed raucous laughter and ridicule at the congressman’s expense.

But Paul patiently let the laughter pass over him and then made his passionate point, that he would win when the American people began to see the truth.

Well, it has begun to happen. Ron Paul is not only in double digits but also just 1 percent away from the incumbent president.

GOP experts were quick to dismiss his recent win at CPAC as meaningless. Only the result of young voters. But 41 percent of the American electorate represents a lot more than that.

Welcome to the revolution.