By John Ballard
Political types on all sides sneer and laugh at Rand Paul at their peril. Tom Watson pulls together a few reflections his own and others in a provocative Sunday romp worth a look.
...He doesn't rock like the Sex Pistols, of even PiL, but it's all a performance piece nonetheless with an emphasis on the outrageous. Paul is challenging our assumptions of what can be said, of what can be asserted, in politely combative political company.
With Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity playing the Malcolm McLaren role, Rand Paul has been polished up and put on special in Kentucky, rollicking past the tired Mitch McConnell machine like a well-funded Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pamphlets in New Orleans crossed with a hopped-up William Shatner hawking cheap travel deals with goofy Kung Fu moves on YouTube. It all looks too much like the Charlie X episode of Star Trek's first season for my comfort. Too much too soon, do ya recall?
It's all performance art, but without John Lydon's wink. Rand Paul's absurd statements about civil rights and private business are revealing of the entire movement he now seems to lead. By refusing to endorse the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on Rachel Maddow's show, Rand left the GOP's slip showing at the big victory dance. It's no secret at all that Republican strategy has leveraged race and class resentment among southern whites for decades; but intellectual underpinnings that deny the advances of the civil rights movement and the strong Federal role in changing the racial formula at lunch counters and institutions of higher learning...well, that's some pretty dirty linen right there....
Other links...
I'm getting a little weary of people insisting journalists must pay homage to the Tea Party as a great infusion of political energy, and not call them racist, and examine their ideas with respect. As I've stated before, it is pretty clear from polling that the Tea Party is just another name for the traditional Republican base -- older, whiter, heavier on males and angrier than the rest of the country. Aside from their costumes and protests, I don't think they're that revolutionary or newsworthy. But OK, I'm willing to respect them. Respect means asking them what they'd do if they were in government, reporting on what they say, and letting the world know.
That's happening this week, and it's not going well for the Tea Party. Rachel Maddow is being trashed for asking Paul supposedly unfair questions, which is ridiculous; Maddow was tough but fair. But now the Kentucky Senate nominee is having problems with more than just Maddow. Friday afternoon, Paul pulled out of a scheduled appearance on "Meet the Press." "They just want to keep beating this same dead horse," said campaign manager David Adams. "We're finished talking about that."
Rand Paul, and other Tea Party candidates, are going to continue to have to answer questions about their political views. Maybe the end of that process will be that they win over the country to their approach to government, and Democrats are tossed out on their ears in November. I think the end result is more likely to be that most of the rest of the country is either mystified, or horrified, by their magical thinking about the free market. (They are now in danger of costing Republicans a couple of Senate seats, in Nevada and Kentucky, that should have been easy pickups in November.)Joan Walsh. (I hope she's correct.)
Here is Jonathan Weisman in the Wall Street Journal.
This reads like a Glenn Beck Epistle.
In tea-party circles, Mr. Paul's views are not unusual. They fit into a "Constitutionalist" view under which the federal government has no right to dictate the behavior of private enterprises. On the stump, especially among tea-party supporters, Mr. Paul says "big government" didn't start with President Obama, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s or the advance of central governance sparked by World War II and the economic boom that followed.
He traces it to 1937, when the Supreme Court, under heated pressure from President Franklin Roosevelt, upheld a state minimum-wage law on a 5-4 vote, ushering in the legal justification for government intervention in private markets.
Until the case, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, the Supreme Court had sharply limited government action that impinged on the private sector, infuriating Mr. Roosevelt so much that he threatened to expand the court and stack it with his own appointees.
"It didn't start last year. I think it started back in 1936 or 1937, and I point really to a couple of key constitutional cases� that all had to do with the commerce clause," Mr. Paul said in an interview before Tuesday's election, in which he defeated a Republican establishment candidate, hand-picked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, Ky.).
Mr. Paul has said that, if elected, one of his first demands will be that Congress print the constitutional justification on any law is passes.
Last week, Mr. Paul encouraged a tea-party gathering in Louisville to look at the origins of "unconstitutional government." He told the crowd there of Wickard v. Filburn, a favorite reference on the stump, in which the Supreme Court rejected the claims of farmer Roscoe Filburn that wheat he grew for his own use was beyond the reach of federal regulation. The 1942 ruling upheld federal laws limiting wheat production, saying Mr. Filburn's crop affected interstate commerce. Even if he fed his wheat to his own livestock, the court reasoned, he was implicitly affecting wheat prices. If he had bought the wheat on the market, he would subtly have raised the national price of the crop.
"That's when we quit owning our own property. That's when we became renters on our own land," Mr. Paul told the crowd.
And finally, Frank Rich.
One caveat after another...
The �Randslide,� in the triumphalist lingo favored by Sean Hannity at Fox News, was the Tea Party�s first major election victory. As Charles Hurt, another conservative commentator, wrote in another Rupert Murdoch organ, The New York Post, this was no �qualified� win by a moderate with Tea Party support, like Scott Brown in Massachusetts. �What we saw Tuesday night in Kentucky,� Hurt enthused, �was a pure, unalloyed victory for the Tea Party� in which �the son of the quirky congressman from Texas trounced the establishment candidate who had been groomed and supported by leaders at the highest levels of the Republican Party.�
Ain�t that the truth. The opponent whom Paul humiliated, Trey Grayson, was the prot� of Mitch McConnell, Kentucky�s senior senator and the G.O.P. Senate leader. Grayson was also endorsed by Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and John Cornyn, the Texas senator who presides over the Republicans� Senate campaign committee (and its purse strings). But Paul had the supporters who matter, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, the tag team that nowadays runs the conservative movement for fun and profit.�
Paul is articulate and hard-line. When he says he is antigovernment, he means it. Unlike McConnell, he wants to end all earmarks, including agricultural subsidies for a state that thrives on them. (He does vow to preserve Medicare payments, however; they contribute to his income as an ophthalmologist.) He wants to shut down the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve. Though a social conservative who would outlaw all abortions, he believes the federal government should leave drug enforcement to the states.
It�s also in keeping with this ideology that Paul wants the federal government to stop shoveling taxpayers� money into wars. He was against the war in Iraq and finds the justification for our commitment in Afghanistan �murky.� He believes that America�s national security is �not threatened by Iran having one nuclear weapon.��
it�s Paul�s brand of populism, not his views on Jim Crow or Iran, that are most germane to the Tea Party�s birth and its future � both within the G.O.P. and as a force that will buffet Obama and the Democrats. Paul most abundantly embodies the movement�s animus when he plays on classic American-style class resentment. His campaign loved to deploy the full name of his opponent, Charles Merwin Grayson III, a Harvard-educated banker�s son. In his victory speech Tuesday night, Paul said the voters� message was to �get rid of the power people, the people who run the show, the people who think they�re above everybody else� � or, as he put it on an earlier occasion, the establishment who �from their high-rise penthouse� look down on and laugh at the �American rabble.�
That Paul gave his victory speech in a �members only� country club is no contradiction to white Tea Partiers. Their anger is directed at a loftier club that excludes them as well: the big-government and big-money elites partying together in that high-rise penthouse. At the Utah state G.O.P. convention this month, the mob shouted �TARP! TARP! TARP!� as it terminated the re-election bid of the conservative Senator Robert Bennett. It was Bennett�s capital crime to vote for a bailout of Wall Street�s high-flying bankers.�
But the enthusiasm gap remains real. Tea Partiers will turn up at the polls, and not just in Kentucky. Democrats are less energized in part because even now the president has not fully persuaded many liberal populists in his own party that he is on their side. The suspicion lingers that a Wall Street recovery, not job creation, was his highest economic priority upon arriving at a White House staffed with Goldman alumni. No matter how hard the administration tries to sell health care reform and financial reform as part of the nation�s economic recovery, these signal achievements remain thin gruel for those out of work.
The unemployment numbers, unlikely to change drastically by November, will have more to say than any of Tuesday�s results about what happens on Election Day this year. Yes, the Tea Party is radical, its membership is not enormous, and its race problem is real and troubling. But you can�t fight an impassioned opposition merely with legislative actions that may bear fruit in the semi-distant future. If the Democrats can�t muster their own compelling response to the populist rage out there, �Randslide� may reside in our political vocabulary long after �Arlen Specter� is leaving �Jeopardy� contestants stumped.
Otherwise good and decent people support the Tea Party. I know these people. I've lived with them all my life. I was born in Kentucky and grew up in Georgia. They don't mean to harm anyone but theirs is a very small universe populated by other like-minded folks. There may be enough well-behaved exceptions to allow them to say "Some of my best friends are [supply offending group here]" but their mindset is solid enough to reliably anchor a blowout preventer. They are not troubled by complicated discussions requiring new ideas because theirs is a completely comfortable world view, not threatened by alien ideas.
And the tragedy is simple: they vote.
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