Republican Jewish Coalition Undertaking Concerted Efforts to Undermine Rand Paul's Political Ambitions
But he needs to convince his own party first
Yahoo News - There’s an obnoxious game that politicians play around the
halfway point between presidential elections. They dangle the
possibility of making their own White House run with a wink and a nudge —
not to mention a steady diet of airplane pretzels — as they zip between
early primary states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Then
they brush aside political reporters who ask them if they’re considering
a presidential bid, quizzing them as to why they’re always so obsessed
with politics.
“What I’m doing
is very simply thanking and encouraging grassroots activists,” Texas
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said innocently in Manchester Saturday when
asked if he was testing the presidential waters during a weekend swing
through New Hampshire.
While there, he met with state party officials
and spoke at a conference of conservative activists.
Cruz
may very well choose not run for president in 2016, but let’s get real.
The guy’s not test-driving New Hampshire for a joy ride. Those Live
Free or Die tires are feeling the swift kick of a pair of black
Texas-made ostrich-skin boots.
Not
to pick on Cruz. His finely tuned answer is the descendent of a long
line of genially vague quotes from aspiring presidents who’ve said the
same sort of thing over the years. But Cruz's answer contrasts sharply
with the way Rand Paul, the junior Republican senator from Kentucky and
son of failed three-time presidential contender Ron Paul, is approaching
his own possible run.
“I’m seriously considering it,” Paul regularly
tells anyone who asks.
Aides who work for him are equally up front about
his goal in private. His travel schedule, which regularly includes
stops in Des Moines and Manchester, suggest that he’s working toward a
White House run.
In
New Hampshire right now, it is a period of calm before the storm. Party
activists here from both major political parties are focused intently
on winning the midterm elections this November, although they don’t mind
a little titillating presidential foreplay in the duller moments.
Potential presidential candidates aren’t yet intensively locking down
field reps, although they are window shopping with the intent to buy
when the time is right. Two aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie,
Matt Mowers and Colin Reed, recently started working in New Hampshire
politics — Mowers as the executive director of the state party and Reed
as an aide to Republican U.S. Senate candidate Scott Brown. In Iowa,
Paul recently picked up the state's Republican Party chairman,
A.J. Spiker, to work for his PAC. It was a coming home of sorts for Spiker, who co-chaired former congressman Ron Paul's presidential campaign in Iowa in 2012.
For
now, Sen. Paul’s focus is on expanding the appeal of his party, which
has had branding problems of late, particularly among single women,
minorities and young voters. He has taken a cue from his father, an
unimposing little man in his 70s with a baffling knack for attracting
university arenas full of students, by speaking at colleges across the
country. In the wake of revelations of the federal government’s domestic
spying program, he sees a unique opportunity for Republicans to reach
young people who don’t want the feds snooping on their iPhones.
“It’s
an area where we can connect with people who haven’t been connecting.
Obama won the youth vote 3 to 1, but he’s losing them now,” Paul told a
gathering of New Hampshire Republicans in Dover on Friday.
“Hillary
Clinton’s as bad or worse on all of these issues. It’s a way we can
transform and make the party bigger and win again. But we have to be as
proud of the Fourth Amendment as much as we are the Second Amendment.”
Other
Republicans seem to be taking notice. On Saturday in Manchester at the
New Hampshire Freedom Summit, a conference for conservative activists
hosted by Citizens United and Americans for Prosperity where Paul, Cruz,
former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and several other well-known
Republicans spoke, most speakers devoted sections of their remarks to
the National Security Agency’s spying program.
While
Paul strives to reach young voters, his travels have taken him to
historically black colleges, where he has spoken out against the ongoing
federal drug war and imprisoning of millions of young black men for
nonviolent crimes. It is through this message, Paul says, that
Republicans can find an opening with a constituency that has largely
voted as a bloc for Democrats since the civil rights era. Some of this
push is also reactive: Paul has previously come under fire for making
controversial comments about the Civil Rights Act,
and Democrats think he is extremely vulnerable on racial issues. But
that doesn't mean Paul's views are insincere or will have no impact on
GOP thinking longer-term.
“I
truly do care about the injustice and what it’s done to voting,” Paul
told me when we met Friday at a pizza place in downtown Manchester.
“Everyone’s talking about voter ID. Voter ID is one-one thousandths of
the problem compared to felony disenfranchisement. I think there’s
150,000 people in Kentucky who can’t vote because of a felony
conviction. Probably half or more are black.”
A
number of high-profile Republicans have begun to explore Paul’s ideas
about prison reform, albeit cautiously. In the Senate, Texas Republican
Sen. John Cornyn and Utah Sen. Mike Lee have teamed up with Illinois
Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin on a bill to reduce minimum sentencing
requirements. In the states, Republican governors around the country,
particularly outgoing Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Louisiana Gov. Bobby
Jindal, are re-examining their own state laws on how the government
handles drug cases.
Changing
or reforming these laws, of course, won’t transform the GOP into a less
white and less old party overnight, but it does give Republicans something to talk about with new constituencies.
And
Paul isn’t just interested in growing the party by wooing people of
color. He wants the party to move beyond calls for ideological purity,
even if it means giving party blessings to members who stray from the
official platform.
When asked
by a reporter on Friday in Dover about Republicans who support same-sex
marriage, Paul replied:
“I think the party’s a big party and can include
people with a variety of opinions. I think that in some ways we need to
agree to disagree on some of these issues, in the sense that the party
needs to be bigger, we need to understand that people have somewhat of
regional attitudes towards the issues. … I think there’s an arrogance to
having an absolute litmus test.”
Paul's call for openness
reflects a growing understanding that the party will need to present
itself differently if it hopes to win at the national level again.
Huckabee, a Southern Baptist conservative who opposes allowing same-sex
couples to marry and who
recently questioned President Barack Obama’s commitment to faith
because the president changed his views on the matter, also called for
more ideological room within the party when asked similar question in
Manchester on Saturday.
“There’s
room in the party for people to have different viewpoints, there always
has. I don’t know why we would suddenly have this moment where we would
start acting as if there’s only a few viewpoints that are valid,”
Huckabee said. “As far as in the general election, I think it’s nonsense
that people would vote against someone because of an issue that a
president would probably not have a lot of input on anyway.”
So
what does all of this have to do with Paul’s presidential ambitions?
Plenty. Paul is steadily working to carve an important niche among
Republicans as a voice in the ongoing effort to remake the party at the
national level. To win a general election, presidential candidates need
to appeal to broad swaths of voters — not just hardcore conservatives —
and Paul, who on many issues is a hardcore conservative, is crafting a plan that he thinks will do just that.
And
yet Paul’s most skeptical audience may well be inside the Republican
Party itself. Much of what he emphasizes is new territory for members of
a party who have long embraced the mantle of being “tough on crime.”
The party has also celebrated surveillance measures enacted under
President George W. Bush that some members now decry as overreach when
carried out under Obama.
Conservatives
who embrace the party’s traditionally robust foreign policy stance have
severe reservations about Paul's quest for executive power and views
that the U.S. should play a more limited role abroad. Republican donors
who gathered last month at the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas,
Nev., expressed concern over Paul’s rise,
telling Time magazine
that they may have to undertake concerted efforts to undermine his
political ambitions over such positions as cutting off all U.S. aid to
Israel and other countries. Republican mega donor and casino magnate
Sheldon Adelson, Time reported, is considering spending massive sums to
keep Paul from becoming the GOP nominee.
In
response, Paul insists that those concerned about his foreign policy
views just need more time to hear him out. Paul plans to discuss these
issues with Adelson himself in the future, he said.
“When he gets to know me, he’ll like me too,” Paul told me.
I asked Paul about the time Christie
called his foreign policy “dangerous”
and when former U.S. ambassador to the U.N John Bolton described
Republicans like Paul as “unfit to serve.” (Both men, particularly
Christie, harbor presidential ambitions of their own.)
“The
people who are saying that are the dangerous people,” Paul said. “The
people who wake up at night thinking of which new country they want to
bomb, which new country they want to be involved in, they don’t like
restraint. They don’t like reluctance to go to war. They really wouldn’t
like Ronald Reagan if they read anything he wrote or were introduced to
it.”
So it goes, and so it
will go with greater intensity the closer these aspiring politicians get
to presidential primary season. In these intervening years, party
members will snipe and engage in acts of friendly fire as they skirmish
over the soul of the Republican Party. All that will come to an end once
Democrats choose their own nominee, at which time Republicans will, for
a brief period of months in 2016, suddenly agree on everything until
the second week of November.
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