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Tag: 2016 gop presidential nomination
Can America Stand Rand? Cranking Up His ‘Libertarian’ Campaign

Can America Stand Rand? Cranking Up His ‘Libertarian’ Campaign

Platitudes typically litter the announcement speech of every aspiring president, and Rand Paul’s address in Louisville today was no exception. “We have come to take our country back,” he thundered—or tried to thunder—“from the special interests that use Washington at their personal piggy bank.”

Exactly what those special interests might be, he neglected to say — although they probably don’t include the oil or coal lobbies he tends to favor. He went on to rant against “both parties” and “the political system,” not to mention “big government,” deficit spending, and the federal debt. Naturally he prefers “small government” because “the love of liberty pulses in my veins.”

Yet Paul delivered these encrusted clichés with impressive energy, to an enthusiastic crowd featuring enough youthful and minority faces sprinkled among the Tea Party types to lend a touch of credibility to claims that he is a “different kind of Republican.” Speaking about urban poverty and education, the Kentucky Republican even name-checked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — a gesture that too many elected officials in his party, especially from the South, still find difficult. (His father Ron Paul, watching from the audience, may have stifled a chuckle, recalling how his racist newsletters regularly excoriated the late civil rights leader as a “pro-communist philanderer” and worse, while blasting Ronald Reagan for signing the bill that made King’s birthday a national holiday.)

Appealing to younger and minority voters, Paul wisely emphasized his ideas about cutting back the machinery of surveillance and incarceration. Likewise, he kept the required paeans to economic “freedom” sufficiently vague to avoid alienating potential supporters, like students who might not appreciate his hostility to federal loans and grants, and families whose survival depends on food stamps and unemployment benefits that he would slash.

The upside of a Paul campaign may be that his dissenting perspective on issues such as Iran, Cuba, and the surveillance state brings a small degree of sanity to the Republican primary debate. Although he parroted much nonsense about the Obama administration’s foreign policy, he dared to say that the goal of diplomacy “should be and always is peace, not war.”

Equally beneficial would be a frank discussion of the libertarian delusions that underlie his economic platform – and the real effects that such policies would have on American communities, families, and workers.Paul still hates the auto bailout, although killing it would have cost another million jobs. While he rails against deficit spending and Obama’s economic stimulus, the clear consensus is that unemployment would have soared without those measures. No doubt he agreed with his father’s repeated warnings that government spending would lead to “hyperinflation” and depression, but we have seen precisely the opposite: a revived economy, recovering employment, and inflation that remains too low to worry any sane person.

Among Paul’s easiest targets today was the IRS, which he promises to diminish or even abolish with his favorite “new idea,” a flat tax. That was a fresh proposal, perhaps, back when right-wing academics Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka unveiled it in a 1983 book titled Low Tax, Simple Tax, Flat Tax. There is no reason to believe that Rand Paul’s flat tax would differ significantly from theirs in design or impact; namely, to worsen inequality, raising the burden on the poor and middle class while benefiting the very rich.

Mocking the federal proclivity to spend more than the IRS collects, Paul chortled today, “Isn’t $3 trillion enough?” But while he promises to “balance” the budget, his 17 percent flat tax wouldn’t collect even that amount — which means enormous cuts in every budget sector, from education and infrastructure to defense.

Authors Hall and Rabushka described their flat tax as “a tremendous boon to the economic elite” and noted, candidly, “it is an obvious mathematical law that lower taxes on the successful will have to be made up by higher taxes on average people.” We shall see whether Paul is as honest as the authors of his tax plan.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Rand Paul And The GOP’s New Civil Rights Movement

Rand Paul And The GOP’s New Civil Rights Movement

By David Weigel, Bloomberg News (TNS)

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is waking up to something fairly rare: friendly fire against his outreach to black voters on criminal justice reform. In a walk-up to Paul’s expected Tuesday announcement of a presidential bid, the Washington Post quotes Center for Neighborhood Enterprise President Bob Woodson, a frequent freelance tutor in poverty issues to Republicans.

“I find him superficial,” says Woodson. “His talk about the militarization of police felt like pandering.”

Like virtually everyone else in national politics, Paul has stopped talking about police militarization. (Police unions popped that particular trial balloon.) But as he readies for a tour of his home state and early primary states, Paul is in the rare position of forcing criminal justice reform into a Republican presidential race. Since at least 2013, his office has collaborated with black leaders in Kentucky on voter restoration and economic development. His pre-campaign operation dodged all questions last week about the Iran deal and the red-state religious freedom laws, but his tour is going to take him to the University of Iowa, the sort of place where he typically leans in on criminal justice reform.

If Paul so chooses, he can cement the GOP’s role in the reform push — a role that still benefits from the Nixon-to-China, fish-out-of-water coverage conservatives get for leading on reform. Just last week, a story in the New Republic that informed liberals of Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal’s role in reform and a Huffington Post story about Koch Industries’ lobbying for voter rights got thousands of social media shares. Both shared the “you’re-not-gonna-believe-this” frame. Conservative reformers appreciate the attention; they’re also concerned that the legislation can only pass if they, and not President Barack Obama and civil rights leaders, are the faces of changes.

“If you build a big enough bipartisan majority in the Senate, it’s going to pass,” Newt Gingrich told reporters last month, at a daylong reform conference in Washington. “There’s no question that with Speaker (John) Boehner, Majority Leader (Kevin) McCarthy, Chairman (Bob) Goodlatte, former Chairman (Jim) Sensenbrenner, you have huge support in the House. But the trick is to put together a big bipartisan majority in the Senate — to have the president as a reinforcer, and a cheerleader, but have the president really have the patience to allow the legislative process to get a bill he can sign.”

Gingrich’s analysis could have come right from the work of Frances Lee, a University of Maryland political scientist who has researched how presidents can harden partisan opposition to a policy simply by coming out in favor of it. “Whatever people think about raw policy issues, they’re aware that presidential successes will help the president’s party and hurt the opposing party,” Lee told Ezra Klein in 2012. “It’s not to say they’re entirely cynical, but the fact that success is useful to the president’s party is going to have an effect on how members respond.”

You could say the same of the people most associated with civil rights causes, such as Al Sharpton, whose advocacy can make issues toxic for conservatives. At the Washington conference, former New York City police commissioner Bernie Kerik, who did a stint in prison and is now basically a full-time reform advocate, talked about how conservatives could shift the movement away from attention-getting protests.

“All these civil rights leaders that came out, encouraging these protests based on Ferguson, or Eric Garner in New York — those were two events out of hundreds of thousands of interactions a year with the police,” Kerik said. “Two events. You know what? What about this stuff, where there’s over-incarceration, where you have an 800 percent increase in the federal prison population over the last 30 years. This country would be far better served by those civil rights leaders fighting for this cause and addressing this than doing what they’re doing.”

Paul’s run is likely to elevate his reform push; he spent the early part of this year re-introducing bills he can talk about on the trail. The only risk for reformers is that the conservatives who turn on Paul for other reasons might look for vulnerabilities in how he advocated after Ferguson. In speeches, Paul often introduces the reform topic with some awkward words about how the facts of the Michael Brown case were controversial.

“From day one, the first time I was on CNN, hours after the event, I said: Don’t be premature,” said Kerik. “Wait for conclusions. Wait for evidence, wait for the grand jury. And people were all over the map, condemning the grand jury, condemning the officer, trying to confuse what happened without knowing what happened. We do that too often.”

(c)2015 Bloomberg News, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

The Real Ted Cruz: Country Music, Harvard Law, And Tea Party ‘Populism’

The Real Ted Cruz: Country Music, Harvard Law, And Tea Party ‘Populism’

Nobody who knows Ted Cruz — the Texas freshman senator who became the first official contestant for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination this week – doubts that he is very, very smart. That includes Cruz himself, whose emphatic confidence in his own superior intelligence has not always endeared him to colleagues and acquaintances (whose opinions of his personality are often profanely negative).

Yet while Cruz cleverly seeks to highlight the Tea Party persona that appeals to many Republican primary voters, he exposes the fraudulence of his ultra-right brand of “populism.”

Cruz announced his candidacy at Liberty University, a religious-right institution founded by the late Jerry Falwell. No doubt he chose the misnamed Liberty to underscore his commitment to the political attitudes – “anti-elitist” and often opposed to scientific and intellectual inquiry – that the late reverend represented. To Falwell, secular education and the Enlightenment tradition of free thought always seemed suspiciously irreligious; at Liberty, creationism is a required course, the Young Democrats are outlawed, and both students and faculty are rigorously censored.

What could someone like Ted Cruz, a vocal advocate of First Amendment rights, honestly think about a place like Liberty? Falwell’s school languishes far below the standards of educational achievement – including an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School — that have always filled Cruz with pride. Sometimes with excessive pride, like when he reportedly told Harvard Law classmates that he intended to form a study group including only those who had attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton as undergrads.

Josh Marshall, a journalist who attended college with Cruz, noted in Talking Points Memothat this bit of academic snobbery marked the future senator as a “pompous a**hole” at Harvard Law, “an amazing accomplishment since the competition there for that description is intense [his emphasis].”

In a further attempt to portray himself as a right-wing populist, Cruz now claims to be a country music fan – having changed preferences after 9/11, when he abandoned “classic rock” for country, which he suggested is more patriotic:

“My music tastes changed on 9/11. I actually intellectually find this very curious, but on 9/11, I didn’t like how rock music responded. And country music — collectively — the way they responded, it resonated with me. And I have to say just at a gut level, I had an emotional reaction that says, ‘These are my people. And ever since 2001, I listen to country music,” he told CBS News – without naming a single country artist or band.

Now every presidential candidate carefully cultivates a public personality by promoting and even adopting tastes that might resonate with desired constituencies. But there are few politicians whose image conflicts so sharply with his actual personality and real base of support.

Analyzing the Texan’s financial base as he entered the presidential arena, Bloomberg News revealed “surprising weakness when it comes to small donors.” Only 16 percent of Cruz donors gave less than $200, compared with 43 percent of the donors to his fellow Tea Party favorite Rand Paul. The funding that propelled him into the Senate came from groups like the billionaire-backed Club for Growth and the Washington-based Tea Party organizations underwritten by the Koch brothers with their oil billions. Having attended the same elite schools, the people writing those big checks must feel quite comfortable with Cruz.

Need anyone be reminded of the policies favored by such interests? They oppose raising the minimum wage, or even the existence of a minimum wage. They would gut Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment benefits, along with every other government program that supports the middle class. They would reduce their own taxes even more, while raising taxes on working families – all retrogressive ideas that even the average Republican rejects.

If that’s populism, Ted Cruz is truly a man of the people.

Photo: U.S. senator Ted Cruz of Texas speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, MD. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Sen. Rand Paul Wins Conservative CPAC Straw Poll

Sen. Rand Paul Wins Conservative CPAC Straw Poll

By Lisa Mascaro, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Sen. Rand Paul was the top choice of conservatives in a straw poll for potential Republican presidential contenders at an annual conservative conference near Washington.

The Kentucky Republican has been a repeat favorite among the GOP’s right flank, and won the Conservative Political Action Conference poll for the third consecutive year.

Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker tallied a close second, while the remaining dozen or so contenders trailed, according to results in The Washington Times, which sponsored the contest.

Paul earned 25.7 percent of the vote, followed by Walker with 21.4 percent.

Most of the Republicans who took to the stage at the annual multi-day conference over the river from the capital have not yet officially declared their intentions to run for president in 2016.

But the conservative gathering provides a proving ground for the budding campaigns. The record-breaking crowd topped 11,000, organizers said.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, took 11.5 percent, narrowly besting retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 11.4 percent.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush acknowledged during his talk that he would be happy if skeptics who view him as more moderate than they prefer would consider him their “second choice.” He won 8.3 percent.

Another Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio, took 3.7 percent.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie neared the middle of the tally, with 2.8 percent — behind Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina, but ahead of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

© 2015 Tribune Co., Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Image: Rand Paul speaks at the 42nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Feb. 27, 2015 in National Harbor, Md. Conservative activists attended the annual political conference to discuss their agenda. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)