The Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) annually convenes a hyper-charged conclave of right leaning (and in my view, right-thinking) activists. This gathering culminates with the announcement of CPAC’s straw poll winner. It is no surprise that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, an idealist candidate proposing sweeping changes, ignites CPAC since approximately half the attendees are college students. The question is, after eight years out of the White House, is Paul the nominee who can bring Republicans back to the presidency in 2016? Sadly, despite my great personal admiration for Paul, he has zero chance of winning the nomination, much less the presidency.
While Paul’s ideas are fundamentally correct and aligned with America’s Constitution and Founding principles, he is not a viable candidate. Rather, he is the perfect straw man. Paul’s stark positions make him an easily lampoon-able, cartoon-able, SNL skit that almost writes itself.
Specific and principled, Paul’s positions are effortlessly misconstrued as extreme and dangerous. Paul is to the left what faux-Native American, Harvard-professing, “you-didn’t-build-that”-originating Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is to the right — stereotypically laughable.
Paul favors completely abolishing the IRS, the Departments of Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Commerce and hundreds of associated agencies. A full list of these “must-go” agencies appeared on March 2, 2010, on dailypaul.com, a pro-Paul website. As far as the military, Paul wants minimal budget cuts but is adverse to “boots on the ground” in all but the direst circumstances; centrists in both parties therefore consider his foreign policy position isolationist.
While the intellectual merit of Paul’s views, both domestic and international, certainly deserves fair consideration, such fairness is not the purpose of the overwhelmingly liberal media. Just as Paul’s propositions are red meat to a CPAC crowd clad in “Big Government Sucks” t-shirts, they are alarming anathema to the left (press included).
Paul’s media interactions have fueled his extreme image. He famously “shushed” an MSNBC reporter and admonished her to “be more objective going into interviews.” Here is a brief sampling of Paul’s other press coverage over the years:
A May 2010 Gawker article entitled “Rand Paul is Even Crazier Than his Racist and Pro-BP Gaffes Suggest,” depicts Paul as “the political-contender version of the mouth-breathing conspiracy theorist with missing teeth and a torn plastic bag full of photocopies.” The reference to BP is when Paul said Obama’s comments about BP after the gulf spill were “un-American.” Paul is further described in “his tinfoil hat,” talking about the “NAFTA superhighway — [and his] bizarre and utterly unfounded conspiracy theory about a devilish highway connecting Mexico City and Toronto.” This highway, in Paul’s words, is “aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States with a multinational North American Union.”
A 2010 Wall Street Journal article said Paul nearly self-destructed during his comments “about the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on MSNBC; [Paul looks] extreme and, to some point, racist.”
“Paul is a hard-money fanatic who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve’s role in using money policy to stabilize the economy. That’s the joke,” observed Jonathan Chait in 2013.
In Jan. 2015, Paul told the Lexington Herald Leader that “Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everybody over 40 has a back pain.”
With just these few examples, Paul is branded as pro-oil, conspiracy obsessed, anti-Civil Rights, radical on monetary policy, and against disabled people. The supporting information is available in the first 15 minutes of any Google search.
The press will eagerly incorporate all this with Paul’s flip-flop on vaccines, his anti-bureaucracy extremism, and his recent signature on the Iran letter (another potential pie-in-the face if Obama ends up with UN approval).
The cherry on top is Senator Paul’s political pedigree; he runs the presidential media gauntlet saddled with his father’s almost ‘wing-nut’ reputation on his back. Texas Republican and former Congressman Ron Paul ran for the GOP nomination twice, (also once as the Libertarian nominee), and proposed even more radical solutions than Paul the younger does now. Nonetheless, “like father, like son” is a much easier concept for a TV-entranced, public school-indoctrinated, intellectually lazy public to embrace than honestly considering Rand Paul’s proposals. The sad fact is that the proletariat prefers bread and circuses. And it hurts Rand Paul. Republicans must look elsewhere if they want to return to the White House in 2016.
