LOS ANGELES, Sept. 13 (Xinhua) -- U.S. congressman Ron Paul, a long-shot contender for the Republican nomination in the 2008 presidential election, has been standing him out of the party's largely warlike candidates by his outspoken opposition to the White House's Iraq policy.

    Paul, a House member representing Texas, is in West Coast this week for a series of fund-raisers and supporting rallies in major western cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

    Reiterating his opposition to U.S. involvement in Iraq, the 72-year-old presidential hopeful told a crowd of some 500 people at the University of Southern California Wednesday that the Bush administration should bring the troops home immediately.

    "Bring them home, stop the killing and stop the bleeding," Paul said at the USC rally.

    "This war has cost more than 3,000 American lives, thousands of seriously wounded and hundreds of billions of dollars," the Republican candidate said. "We must have new leadership in the White House to ensure this never happens again."

    Known as the only Republican presidential candidate to oppose U.S. involvement in Iraq, Paul has said that "the war in Iraq was sold to us with false information" by President George W. Bush.

    Paul's campaign describes him as "the leading advocate in the nation's capital of limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies."

    He also proposes that the U.S. government should withdraw from any organizations and trade deals "that infringe upon the freedom and independence of the United States," and supports the rights of parents to home-school their children.

    According to his campaign, Paul has never voted for a congressional pay increase, taken a government-paid junket, does not participate in the congressional pension program and returns a portion of his congressional office budget to the U.S. Treasury each year.

    Born on Aug. 20, 1935 in a Pennsylvania town near Pittsburgh, Paul graduated from Gettysburg College and the Duke University School of Medicine. He was a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist when he decided to enter politics in 1971.

    Paul was first elected to the House in a 1976 special election, then was elected again in 1978 for the first of three consecutive terms. He is currently in his 10th Capitol Hill term.

    He was the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in the 1988 election, receiving 0.47 percent of the vote.

    Paul's presence in the Republican presidential field highlights the fact that there is some concern over the president's stance on the Iraq war and it certainly pushes the other candidates closer to the president on an unpopular war, political analysts said.

    Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior scholar at USC's School of Policy, Planning and Development, said that Paul is "smart enough to figure out he wasn't going to get any exposure" as the Libertarian Party candidate and entering the Republican race instead, making him part of its debates.

    "He's gotten access to a significant forum that would not have been available to him and he's used it pretty well," Jeffe said.