Rand Paul Fear-Mongers on Ebola - Rachel Maddow Show
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Rand Paul Fear-Mongers on Ebola - Rachel Maddow Show - Video
In a new interview with Politicos Mike Allen, Kentucky senator and likely 2016 GOP presidential contender Rand Paul asserts that the next Republican nominee could win one third of the African American vote by running on a platform of criminal justice reform, school choice, and economic empowerment. That agenda, however, wont bring the GOP anywhere near the 27 percentage point improvement over 2012 that Paul insists is possible.
If Republicans have a clue and do this and go out and ask every African-American for their vote, I think we can transform an election in one cycle, Paul told Allen. That doesnt mean that we get to a majority of African-American votes in one cycle, the senator added, but I think there is fully a third of the African-American vote that is open to much of the message, because much of what the Democrats has offered hasnt worked.
As Allen notes, Paul has made a concerted effort to reach out to African American voters, going far and beyond what most other leading Republicans have attempted. He spoke out on Ferguson before even Democrats like Hillary Clinton weighed in, visited the city last week, and has opened a GOP engagement office in a predominantly black Louisville neighborhood. The senator, who will speak at the National Urban League convention in Cincinnati in November, has certainly come a long way from his cringe-worthy appearance at Howard University last year, during which Paul condescended to the students at the historically black university by asking his audience whether they knew basic facts of African American history.
Outreach, while laudable, is one thing. Proposing an agenda that would actually address African Americans concerns is another matter entirely. And Pauls three-pronged strategy for appealing to black voters simply fails on the latter score. Lets say Paul or some other candidate espousing his message captures the GOP nod in 2016. Support for criminal justice reform is indeed commendable, and represents a shift away from the tough-on-crime message the GOP has pushed for the past half century. (Most of the party has yet to abandon it.) But what about school choice code for the education reformers agenda of privatization and dismantling the public education system as we know it? The education reform agenda has wreaked havoc upon African American communities in cities like Chicago, where anestimated 150 neighborhood schools have been shuttered since 2001, with African Americans representing 88 percent of affected students.
And economic empowerment? A 2012 NAACP poll of black voters in battleground states found that 60 percent considered jobs their most important concern, and 95 percent of respondents saw a role for the federal government in creating jobs. But dont count on a libertarian acolyte like Paul to propose a serious federal jobs program. Even as market forces have left many African Americans impoverished and shut out of social and economic networks, Paul adheres to the magical fantasy that if only the overweening government would get out of the way, the free market would work its economic miracles.
Pauls past criticism of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is perhaps the prime example of this market fundamentalism. In criticizing the laws nondiscrimination requirements for businesses, Paul contended that the free market would check against discriminatory business owners consumers would refuse to patronize bigots. Paul may have walked back his criticism once it became politically untenable, but African American voters will have a hard time overlooking his earlier view that discrimination is an inalienable right. Having confronted both overt racism (like the kind expressed in Ron Pauls newsletters) and structural racism,theyre unlikely to take kindly to a candidate so blinded by free market dogma that he thinks the market can solve even the most entrenched of American social problems.
Lets not forget, either, that even a better messenger than Paul would probably do no better convincing African Americans to return to the party of Lincoln. Just as the Republican Partys down-ballot candidates helped drag down Mitt Romney in 2012, so too will the GOPs racially tone-deaf (at best) candidates damage the tickets performance in 2016. This is a party, after all, populated by a breathtaking numberof people who believe that blah people are greedily feeding at the government trough, that our first African American president is an illegitimate foreigner, and that racism against whites is a bigger problem than racism against blacks a party that to this day continues to run race-baiting, Willie Horton-style attack ads.Thats an image which will take a lot more than a few policy concessions, some clever sloganeering, and a handful of outreach offices to overcome.
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Good luck with that: Rand Paul imagines GOP could win a third of African American voters in 2016
Rand Paul represents a new breed of Libertarian who might rejuvenate the GOP by John Connolly | Sep 25 2014 | 09/25/14 12:55am
Rand Paul is perhaps the most intriguing potential 2016 presidential candidate. Rand is not his father committed libertarian Ron Paul, who developed a passionate but ultimately small movement of devoted followers and he seems to have largely escaped the lazy media narrative that he is just like his dad. Like his father, Paul brings unorthodox Republican policy positions onto the national stage. Unlike his father, he may have the mainstream appeal to pull off a Republican presidential primary victory, at the very least. According to a July poll, he leads all other potential Republican candidates in New Hampshire, and is tied for the lead in Iowa.
Rand Paul has the potential to change the Republican Party. Even if he does not win the Republican presidential primary, the ideas he brings to the table might inspire policy shifts among Republican voters and politicians. It is too early to tell whether Pauls flirtation with alternative positions will pay off, so he might be tempted to temper his platform in order to appeal to the traditional Republican primary voter. But doing so would be a grave mistake for the future of the party, as it is crucial that Republicans have substantive dialogue over hot-button issues such as mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and Americas role in the international community. (Whether or not Pauls policy suggestions are actually good ones is up for debate. I find many of them to be dubious.)
Paul brings the most diverse platform to the 2016 Republican field. Like practically all of his Republican colleagues in the Senate, he is a budget hawk, supporting deep cuts in government spending. He is also a committed social conservative, supporting a definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, and opposing abortion in all cases, including rape or incest. This is par for the course among potential Republican candidates.
But his penchant for tackling issues not traditionally addressed by Republicans distinguishes him from his prospective primary peers. For instance, Paul has compared the War on Drugs to Jim Crow legislation in its effect on African-American men, pointing out that mandatory minimum sentencing laws do not lead to the arrests of drug kingpins, but rather, to the incarceration and often, the disenfranchisement of thousands of low-level drug dealers. Whats more, Paul has partnered with Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Chris Murphy to tackle this issue, a stroke of bipartisanship that few of his Republican colleagues have matched.
Paul most notably differs from his Republican colleagues on issues of the military and national defense. He has called for sweeping defense cuts, opposed the PATRIOT Act, and has proposed that the United States eliminate foreign aid. He has not gone as far as his father, who once declared the United States should eliminate all military bases on foreign soil, but he has stood up for libertarian conservatives who do not view the Iraq War as a quintessentially conservative approach to foreign policy. In an April editorial for National Review, Paul suggests neo-conservatism must be tempered with a dash of libertarianism, in recognition of governments inability to remake the world in its precise preferred image. William Buckley himself, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, decried the decision to invade Iraq. As Jeffrey Hart wrote in a 2008 column, Buckley thought the conservative movement had committed intellectual suicide by supporting the war with almost no dissent. If real foreign policy discourse among conservatives is dead, then perhaps Rand Paul can help revive it.
If nothing else, Rand Paul brings a breath of fresh air to a Republican Party that desperately needs it. My hope is that Paul will continue to speak out on issues not ordinarily broached by Republicans, in addition to advocating for a more limited view of foreign policy than the brand practiced under both the Bush and Obama Administrations. I say it is my hope because evidence has suggested, in recent days, that Paul may be reshaping his foreign policy stance to be more consistent with the Republican platform of the last ten years. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, Paul has backed airstrikes against Islamic militants in Syria and Iraq, bringing him more in line with the GOP mainstream.
A shift to the center might make him more appealing to the average Republican voter, but Paul should be careful not to lose his distinctiveness in the process. What makes Paul intriguing is his willingness to buck party lines, to reach out to minorities through his condemnation of mandatory minimums, and to hold a foreign policy position several rungs to the left of Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats. He has the power to start a worthwhile dialogue within the Republican Party. It is my hope that he does not throw this away.
John Connolly is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. His columns run bi-weekly on Thursdays.
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CONNOLLY: Come Rand soon
Rand Paul: White House Made #39;Mistakes #39; on Ebola
Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) - Today in New Hampshire, Mark Halperin interviewed Sen. Rand Paul and asked him about the White House #39;s handling of the latest Ebola news. Sen. Paul said the White House.
By: Bloomberg News
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Rand Paul: White House Made 'Mistakes' on Ebola - Video
Does Rand Paul Support Legalizing All Drugs?
In this clip from 2000, Rand Paul, now a U.S. senator, says he "would agree" with a proposal to legalize marijuana and other drugs and put the money that would saved into funding Social Security.
By: Marijuana Majority
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Does Rand Paul Support Legalizing All Drugs? - Video