Tomorrow belongs to …Rand?
by digby
Rand Paul wrote an op-ed about how he is leading the “The Party of Tomorrow”. Seriously. I wrote about it at Salon today.
An excerpt:
Paul sets himself apart from the other guys by being a lone GOP critic of our criminal justice and surveillance policies, although the former is being taken up by the Koch brothers’ network as well. This appeals to young people, for obvious reasons. They are still idealistic enough to believe that the constitution means something. Of course, there are many Democrats who believe the same things, but it doesn’t seem quite as sexy as when it comes from a Republican.
And, needless to say, Paul made the usual libertarian argument against the war on drugs, another area in which he has far more in common with Democrats than his fellow Republicans. Indeed, if it weren’t for his stance on taxes, he could be one, right?
Well, no. Despite the fact that he refers to himself as “socially tolerant,” he has a few blind spots in that area that his target millennials are unlikely to find to attractive.
First of all, there’s the strange attitude toward race. He has recently worked to cover it up and has made an effort at reaching out to communities of color but the truth is that he’s something of a clod, at best, when it comes to that issue. Like the time he went to Howard University and talked to the students there as if they were in sixth grade history class, even going so far as to make a vacuous argument usually only seen at places like Fox and Friends or Bill O’Reilly’s twitter feed:
Paul devoted almost none of his speech Wednesday at the historically black college in Washington, D.C., to explaining the GOP’s thorny relationship with black voters over the last fifty years, and most of it arguing that “the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.” His history lecture focused almost entirely on the period before 1964, when the GOP began to champion the states rights arguments of southern whites. Echoing a popular conservative talking point, Paul repeatedly reminded the audience that Democrats passed Jim Crow laws in the south and that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, as were the first black legislators and the founders of the NAACP.“Would everyone know here they were all Republicans?” he said at one point, referring to the NAACP’s founders.“Yes!” came the booming response from nearly the entire audience, who appeared offended Paul would even raise the question.
The fact one of his closest advisors until recently was a neo-confederate who called himself the Southern Avenger also doesn’t speak well of his social tolerance when it comes to civil rights for racial minorities.
And then there’s gay rights. He told reporters back in 2013:
“I don’t think I’ve ever used the word gay rights, because I don’t really believe in rights based on your behavior.”
Since then he’s gone even further in his condemnation of gay marriage, saying, “It offends myself and many other people.” He went so far as to address a gathering of conservative preachers and declared it a “moral crisis”:
“Don’t always look to Washington to solve anything. In fact, the moral crisis we have in our country, there is a role for us trying to figure out things like marriage, there’s also a moral crisis that allows people to think that there would be some sort of other marriage.”“We need a revival in the country. We need another Great Awakening with tent revivals of thousands of people saying, ‘reform or see what’s going to happen if we don’t reform.’”
Somehow I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that young people are on board with. More than 70 percent of them support gay marriage. There’s no data on their enthusiasm for tent revival meeting with thousands of people saying “reform or else” though, so maybe he’s on to something there.
And last, but hardly least, his stance on women’s rights is something out of the mesozoic era. He is a hardcore anti-abortion zealot of the kind you see screaming in the faces of women as they try to walk into a Planned Parenthood clinic. For a man who fetishizes liberty for every type of ownership known to mankind, he makes one very big exception when it comes to women owning their own bodies.
Rand has said a lot of things about abortion over the years, much of it incoherent and abstract. He says one day that the states should decide and at other times waxed philosophical about when life begins. But you don’t need to know anything more than this to know just how extreme he really is on this issue: He has sponsored the “Life at Conception Act” (also known as “fetal personhood”) which defines a fertilized egg as a person and would implement equal protections under the 14th Amendment for the “right to life of each born and pre-born human person.” The implications of this for women’s autonomy and agency are overwhelming.
There’s lots more at the link. If there’s a bigger flim-flam artist in the GOP, I can’t think of one. And that’s really saying something.