Rand’s lonely dance
by digby
I like Ed Kilgore’s take on Rand Paul’s return salvo to Rick Perry’s lame attack op-ed:
[I]t showed his three-pronged strategy for dealing with the “isolationist” attacks he will continue to attract: (1) challenging GOP hawks for the mantle of St. Ronald Reagan; (2) pointing to polls showing the extreme unpopularity of warmongering, thus making foreign policy an “electability” issue; and (3) denying the whole premise that he’s that different from other Republicans, in part by talking tough on national security issues that don’t involve military interventions.
Paul’s gotten pretty good at turning what would seem to be “isolationist” positions into emblems of truculence, viz. his makeover of a long-time proposal to cut off assistance to the Palestinian Authority into a “Stand With Israel” posture. But for eons Republicans have ultimately measured their presidential candidates’ acceptability on foreign policy and national security in terms of their willingness either to kill foreigners or spend more money, if not both. No matter how much he dresses up his old man’s non-interventionism in camo patterns and how loudly he plays martial music, so long as Rand Paul opposes every opportunity to kill foreigners while calling for lower defense spending, the “isolationist” label will be a problem for him, as the ghosts of both the Cold War and the War On Terror haunt him. I suspect opponents more skillful than Rick Perry will at some point make that plain.
I know there’s a lot of optimism that Paul is going to turn the GOP into the Party of doves but honestly, I think there’s not a snowballs chance in Vegas of that happening. The hyper-patriot, martial, blood ‘n guts strain is so dominant in the Republican Party that this change would require a political earthquake far greater than a quixotic Rand Paul presidential run. It would be a good thing for the nation to have non-interventionist/pacifist types in congress to temper the overwhelming power of the American Deep State, but the Republican caucus is hardly the most auspicious place to start.
Just a little reminder about the Iraq war:
Granted, both parties are at least half full of people who would vote for any war no matter how stupid. But one of them is pretty much unanimous on the subject every time it comes up. And it isn’t the Democrats. My point being that if you are trying to build strength for the anti-war position, why start with the Party that only has a small handful of true anti-war members (at best) when the other party actually has quite a few who will often not only oppose war for partisan reasons but stand on principle? Rand Paul, while being someone that can certainly provide some bipartisan support within the Senate on discrete issues, is facing a major headwind if he’s supposed to become president and lead his party away from its philosophical and cultural attachment to authoritarianism and war. In fact, I’d guess it’s going to take another major realignment that switches red to blue and vice versa. Does anyone see that happening anytime soon?
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