2012 Elections
Ron Paul sets up Rand for 2016
The cult libertarian hero keeps his campaign alive, barely, as he prepares to hand the reins to his son
Ron Paul and Rand Paul (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak) So Ron Paul says he is going to stop actively campaigning, but his supporters will continue to rack up delegates by storming state conventions. What will he do with these delegates? That is still unclear. (Barter them for gold?) What is the point of this strategy, exactly? Also unclear, but the Daily Beast’s Ben Jacobs today says it’s part of a “sneaky maneuver” to help his son Rand out. Ron will continue to consolidate power but will not appear to be actively sabotaging the party’s nominee. Dave Weigel says the maneuver is less sneaky and barely a maneuver: He doesn’t want it to be a huge embarrassment when he loses Kentucky, the state his son represents in the Senate.
Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, Paul declined to endorse Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who endorsed Paul in 2008. Johnson was, formerly, the Republican presidential candidate all those young “liberal” college stoner Ron Paul supporters should have gone with if they’d wanted to support a candidate who believed strongly in liberty but who wasn’t a racist Alex Jonesian conspiracy-mongering goldbug loon. But Johnson had “extensive executive experience” instead of a blimp and a sweet logo, so he did not win over many Paul fanatics.
Ron Paul’s strategy seems to be a gradual takeover of the Republican Party itself, instead of attempting to build a Libertarian alternative to the GOP. I think he’ll find that he can get the party to happily sign on, at least rhetorically, to his fiscal message, as they continue to ignore his popular and populist isolationism and his eminently agreeable but politically untenable positions on criminal justice and civil liberties, forever. The party, in other words, will continue to co-opt whatever they find electorally useful about the Paul phenomenon, as the Tea Party movement stole his iconography and messaging wholesale while attaching it to the same religious-right/nativist sentiment that has driven the party’s activist base for decades.
But Paul thinks the future lies with his son Rand, who shares many of his father’s enthusiasms and beliefs while also appearing to be more acceptable to the mainstream. Various Paul allies and a few other Republicans strongly suggest that Rand is gearing up for a 2016 run; which would mean, of course, that they expect Romney to lose, but that they need to not appear to be rooting for Romney to lose.
The problem is that what makes Rand Paul more acceptable to the mainstream of the Republican Party is what makes him more repellent than his father. Take, for example, Rand Paul’s funny joke this last weekend about Barack Obama and gay marriage.
The president recently weighed in on marriage. And, you know, he said his views were evolving on marriage. Call me cynical but I wasn’t sure that his views on marriage could get any gayer. Now it did kind of bother me, though, that he used the justification for it in a biblical reference. He said the biblical Golden Rule caused him to be for gay marriage …
And I’m like: What version of the Bible is he reading? It’s not the King James version. It’s not the New American Standard. It’s not the New Revised version. I don’t know what version he is getting it from.
Haha Barack Obama is so gay, he should read a Bible for once. Libertarianism!
Nick Gillespie, of the libertarian Reason Magazine, does not get this joke. The crowd, at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, did seem to get it, or at least they appreciated it. But Rand sounds very different when he speaks to Iowa conservatives than he does when interviewed by Gillespie and Matt Welch. (His address received a nice notice from Robert Costa of the National Review, who did not mention his funny joke.)
While Rand Paul may be, as Gillespie says, the most libertarian senator, he is also not an actual libertarian, as demonstrated by his support for anti-constitutional anti-immigrant legislation and his very vocal antiabortion position. He is also a dumb lout, and I tend to think that having the Senate’s most libertarian member be a dumb lout is not actually that good for the Libertarian movement. When he makes explicitly libertarian arguments, he makes them dumbly. When he goes all anti-gay talk-radio bigot culture warrior, which he does increasingly frequently, he does so dumbly. (If he wants to be a mainstream politician and presidential contender, it was certainly dumb to appear — more than once — on the radio program of Truther/Birther/New World Orderer/every-other-conspiracy promoter Alex Jones, but for some reason he almost entirely escaped mainstream press scrutiny for these appearances.) While I don’t feel much affection for Ron Paul, he seems both significantly smarter and leagues more principled than his son the senator.
If the “electable” face of libertarianism is a fratty anti-gay, anti-choice nitwit like Rand Paul, I will stick with socialism, thank you. And I wonder if the Paul family’s plan is to promote “liberty” or to promote the Paul family.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
Romney’s human shield
The campaigns end this fall, but their flacks will never go away. Meet Eric Fehrnstrom, enforcer on the GOP side
(Credit: AP/LM Otero) The only honest line in “Inside the Circus,” the recent Politico e-book in which millions of nauseating Republican operatives lacerate each other anonymously during primary season, should be mounted on the computers of all “political news readers”: “It is sometimes unclear whether political campaigns are run for the benefit of the voters and office seekers or for the professional consultants who earn their living from politics.” Every other line in the book mostly goes like, and then the RNC flack whispered that the campaign flack didn’t know what he was doing, but that one sentence about the “professional consultants” would be enough to make Jane Austen envious.
Continue Reading CloseJim Newell has covered politics for Wonkette and Gawker and is a contributor to the Guardian. More Jim Newell.
Romney’s Bill Clinton gambit
He's praising the former president to paint Obama as a liberal – and to court his devotees. Why it won't work
(Credit: Reuters/Jim Young) Desperate Mitt Romney is not only taking credit for the auto bailout he opposed, and pretending to be a “job creator” rather than a Bain Capital job destroyer. Now he’s regularly praising former President Bill Clinton as a centrist whose legacy has been betrayed by the “liberal” President Obama. Actual liberals laugh, but can Romney’s gambit work?
Of course not, but Mitt’s not giving up.
In Lansing, Mich., last week, Romney derided Obama as an “old school liberal” compared to Clinton, whom he called a “new Democrat.” Where Clinton “said the era of big government was over, President Obama brought it back with a vengeance,” Romney told a crowd of college students. A campaign official told CNN that Obama “really turned his back” on Clinton’s policies, including welfare reform and middle-class tax cuts.
Continue Reading CloseJoan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.
This election’s true winner
It won't be Obama or Romney; it'll be the U.S. military -- and it's going to cost us a lot of money
(Credit: nex99 via Shutterstock) Now that Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the media is already handicapping the presidential election big time, and the neck-and-neck opinion polls are pouring in. But whether President Obama gets his second term or Romney enters the Oval Office, there’s a third candidate no one’s paying much attention to, and that candidate is guaranteed to be the one clear winner of election 2012: the U.S. military and our ever-surging national security state.
Continue Reading CloseBarbers for Romney
Can your job predict your candidate? What small-donor data reveals
(Credit: AP/David Lienemann) Recently, Mitt Romney used a conversation he had with a firefighter as part of his campaign pitch. “I spoke with a fireman yesterday, and he has a one-bedroom apartment, and his wife is pregnant, and he can’t afford a second bedroom,” he told an audience in Virginia. “I asked the firefighters I was meeting with, about 15 of them, how many had had to take another job to make ends meet, and almost every one of them had.”
Just because Romney is a fan of firemen doesn’t mean that firemen are fans of Romney, however: pick a random donor from the Obama and Romney campaigns, and the Obama donor is 10 times as likely to be a firefighter. How do we know this? From campaign finance disclosure data. As it turns out, campaigns must make “best efforts” to obtain the occupation and employer of anyone who contributes more than $200.
Continue Reading CloseDan Kozikowski writes about the intersection of data and everyday life at dfkoz.tumblr.com. More Dan Kozikowski.
Romney’s “vampire capitalism”
Obama's focus on Bain Capital could hurt Romney with working-class white voters and all the economy's victims
Mitt Romney (Credit: Reuters) Former Obama auto “czar” Steve Rattner stepped on his old boss’s message a little Monday morning, telling the folks on “Morning Joe” that President Obama’s just-released ad blasting Mitt Romney’s Bain career was “unfair.” As Rattner explained: “Bain Capital’s responsibility was never to create 100,000 jobs, or some other number, it was to make profits for its investors.” Rattner is a big Democratic Party donor who worked at Lehman Brothers before starting his own private equity firm, Quadrangle (where he was accused of participating in a New York state pension fund kickback scheme and paid millions of dollars in settlements without admitting wrongdoing).
Continue Reading CloseJoan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.
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