Requiem for Rand Paul
by digby
I wrote about the last stand for Rand for Salon:
Rand Paul dropped out of the presidential race yesterday after coming up very short in Iowa and being told by the Kentucky GOP and Mitch McConnell that he’d better attend to his Senate race if he planned to stay in politics:
GOP leaders in Washington, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), had grown increasingly concerned about how little Paul was raising for his Senate race while running for president. Paul raised just $156,000 for the reelection race at home in the third quarter, a paltry sum that would not be enough for a competitive House race.
They went to a lot of trouble in Kentucky to change the process so that Paul could run for president while also running for the Senate and now that he’s clearly going nowhere fast they would like to see him start to ding his supporters for money to keep himself in the job he already has. Undoubtedly, McConnell would like him to raise a few bucks for his fellow senators too. It’s bad enough that Cruz and Rubio are sucking the donors dry — and at least they have a chance to win the presidency.
There were many requiems for the Paul campaign yesterday and for good reason. There was a time when he was seen as the inevitable future of the Republican Party, a “different kind of Republican”who could appeal to “the youth” and bring a whole new constituency for what was assumed to be, for reasons never spelled out, an embrace of social liberalism and a return to isolationism among Republican voters. Where they got the idea that this philosophy transforming the GOP of 2015 remains a mystery.
Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress wrote one of the best “Rand, we hardly knew ye” pieces yesterday, in which he examined his strategy and explained something that many people may not have fully understood before. Despite his history of opposition to some of the most important civil rights laws in our history, including the Civil Rights Act itself, Paul was actually trying to recruit racial minorities to his side by offering a deal that nobody really understood on the left and nobody cared about on the right.
Millhiser describes it this way:
If you shrink the government, Paul promises, you will shrink the criminal justice system too. And Paul has offered more than simply rhetoric in support of his idea that less government is the solution #BlackLivesMatter is looking for. He’s also sponsored criminal justice reform legislation, including a bill that would restore voting rights to many people convicted of non-violent offenses.Paul’s call for less overbearing police forces, however, comes at a high price — and not just to people of color who risk being excluded from hotels and lunch counters. In his speech praising the Buchanan decision, Paul also likened this case to another Supreme Court precedent that he would like to restore: the Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York.Lochner is anti-precedent, a decision that is literally taught in law schools as an example of how judges should not behave. Relying on a fabricated “right to contract,” Lochner gave employers broad immunity from laws intended to protect workers from exploitation. The Lochner decision itself struck down a law limiting New York bakery workers to a 60 hour work week. Subsequent decisions applying this fabricated right invalidated minimum wage laws and laws protecting workers’ right to organize.According to Paul, this is the way things should be.
Unsurprisingly, this bargain did not catch on with African-Americans or anyone else. It’s great that he would end the War on Drugs and support criminal justice reform. One hopes he continues to do so in the Senate if he wins reelection. But his desire to return to the antediluvian Lochner era, which allows businesses to exploit their workers at will and discriminate against anyone they choose is not an acceptable trade, particularly since no such trade is necessary. A decent society would simply end the War on Drugs and enact criminal justice reform while maintaining its commitment to workers; rights. This is not a zero sum game.
I wrote about Paul’s inevitable demise back in August when it was clear that he had bought into the Village hype about his presidential prospects and had thus decided to run as a hardcore Republican with a few eccentric quirks, rather than a principled libertarian. He was flogging the Planned Parenthood hoax videos as if they were proof of women’s inherent evil, and his alleged isolationism was nowhere to be found. He was being a regular old Republican “running to the right,” and it sunk him. Nobody’s quite sure where all his young male followers went but they sure didn’t show up for him.