In any case, Paul is polling ahead of all other Republicans among the general electorate in three states. Maybe he’s doing better with independents?
As much as I agree with your post I don’t see why this is such a surprise. The President is not all that popular and even though most Dems have crazy love for Hillary the general public is pretty much worn out by war, Congressional gridlock and far more right of center than all us liberals are willing to admit.
I suspect what appeals most about Randy is that he is the only R getting much play in the media who happens to be both fiscally conservative and opposed to getting involved in military adventures overseas. He has been more blunt about the folly that is the Iraq War than any Republican other than his dad.
The only type of fatigue I am aware of that outweighs Clinton or Bush fatigue at this point is War fatigue. I have no doubt the more he talks about other topics the less appealing he will become.
Polls are meaningless this far before the election. Besides, Paul has the advantage of having, as a first-term senator, only a modicum of name-recognition (and favorable name-recognition among those who know him, since they’re likely to be libertarians). Clinton is a known quantity who’s been highly visible for a while and went through a protracted primary. She’s unlikely to revolutionize government, offer any radical policy change, or present any huge surprises. Given the current state of the country, a lot of people who holding out for someone who’s more exciting and has more to offer than just being a competent administrator, which I think is where Clinton has positioned herself. Once we get closer to the election and the “generic GOP” or “generic Democratic” candidates are replaced by actual people, voters will realize that no one better is going to come along and boost the numbers of the most likely candidates.
I could see Paul as a possible vice president pick (though not the most likely; he’s named after Ayn Rand, for heaven’s sake), but I don’t think a one-term senator is the most probable pick for the presidential nominee. (Sure, Obama was in 2008, but he was incredibly charismatic, running against the party of a president with approval numbers consistently in the mid-30s for a year, and running when the financial markets were imploding. It’s the same way Carter got elected in 1976 despite being a virtually unknown one-term governor.)
Anyone, my prediction would be for Christie to win the nomination. Despite his previous scandals, he’s still a fairly popular, well-known quantity in a field without too many contenders. I don’t think he’ll be recruited as heavily as he was in 2012, but he’s still probably the most likely choice. As far as one can predict two years before the election, anyway.
Anyway, my etc. It’s probably time for me to go to bed.
Oh, Rand Paul is so not ready. Really, the best outcome for Rand is to finish second in the primaries. If he was to win, then only bad things can happen. Either he’ll lose the Presidential race and the GOP leadership will say, “See, that’s what you get when you nominate a libertarian”, or even worse, he could win and be a poor President and the public doesn’t elect another libertarian.
What he should do is run for governor of Kentucky. If he does that well, then he can credibly run for President.
I think we all know that neither Paul nor anyone with his politics will ever be POTUS in our lifetimes. Ralph Nader has a better shot.
History is, by definition, over. Those southern white racists who used to vote reliably Democratic have all become Republicans. Yes, southern Democrats used to be shamelessly racists. So the party changed. If Republicans think all they need to do is point out to where the parties stood on race 50 years ago, they’re going to keep losing the black vote by overwhelming margins.
Why would he say that when he knows from personal experience that this cure doesn’t work?
Isn’t it time to find the wormhole and go back to your alternate universe?
In what way?
Why ever would you think African-Americans have any reason to distrust Republicans and their motives? If it makes no sense, as you claim, why is it the case anyway?
If Democrats keep saying the same things, as you observe, isn’t that because they’re the *right *things to say?
The GOP is a coalition of paleocons, neocons, theocons, bizcons and libertarians. The only ones who could plausibly claim to have “history” on their side in the past or the future sense are the bizcons.
This is so amazingly, globally, horrifying wrongheaded that words can hardly express it. We joke about you living in an alternate reality, but that’s no longer sufficient. You know what you’re saying about our mutual world and you do so deliberately.
Apologize. Fully and deeply.
The real problem is the GOP is a coalition of straight white Christian men. Everyone else has been voting Democratic.
When your base only has one pillar and that pillar is shrinking in size as a percentage of the population, history is the only thing on your side. The future belongs to the other side.
Here’s a history lesson the Republicans should heed. They don’t have an incumbent President for the 2016 election. The last time they got a majority of votes without an incumbent was 1980.
The Republicans have to stop appealing to their conservative base. They’ve already got that wrapped up. They need to start appealing to the moderate middle. But inexplicably, every time the Republicans lose an election by being too conservative they respond by vowing to become more conservative next time.
I’d attribute it more to better organization and name recognition at this point. His father’s polling showed pretty much the same thing thru 2010-2011: Amoung other things, he was running within 1-2 points of Obama in polls as late as 8/11. Exapno has it right; these polls are just noise at this point.
I don’t really see anything fundamentally different about Rand Paul that would significantly sway the broad electorate. He’s always going to get that 10% libertarian vote, and his policy statements–such as they are intelligible–are boilerplate GOP. His recent dust-up with Rick Perry–as he himself admits–wasn’t about any real policy differences in the Middle East; outside of Texas Perry is a laughingstock even in ther GOP, so for Paul this was more like swatting away a fly than trying to move the party in a new direction.
That’s pretty much my assessment of what Paul should do in order to get the nomination. He’s a nonstarter this election, and I think he’s unlikely to ever get the nomination at all, but a second-place showing in the primaries and then a governorship is not a bad position to be in.
I, too, was confused by this comment. Why does this make no sense from a libertarian standpoint?
Why do you keep referring to him as a libertarian? He isn’t remotely close.
Libertarianism is completely incompatible with restrictions on abortion or the war on drugs, not to mention Republican views on immigration, voter ID, religion, or basically anything else.
Also, there’s the part where he explicitly says he isn’t one.
http://content.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1972721,00.html
Nitpick: this is not true.
[QUOTE=wikipedia]
Despite his father’s libertarian views and strong support for individual rights, the novelist Ayn Rand was not the inspiration for his first name. Growing up, he went by “Randy”, but his wife shortened it to “Rand.”
[/QUOTE]
No, that’s not a nitpick, that’s a totally reasonable correction.
This definition of “libertarian” is one you will likely find in a dictionary, but I’d argue it doesn’t match the observed libertarians who have political power. There are genuine libertarians out there. But political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably favor business interests over individuals or government (the only instrument comparable to a business that ensures individual freedom) when the two clash. If libertarians generally valued freedom in the abstract, you’d think that at least some of them would favor the reverse (“liberal” libertarians?).
As for Rand Paul’s rejection of the label…well…political labels are usually wielded as rhetorical weapons, and Paul is trying to pre-emptively disarm his future opponents. He’s smart enough to know the term has a (perhaps unfair) association with cranks, a net negative in a presidential run.
I’ll agree that Rand Paul isn’t a “true” libertarian; frankly he’s not much different than the rest of the GOP field. Witness his recent newfound love for Israel, a country he said the US should stop sending aid to in 2011. That’s not a criticism necessarily, but it does appear he’s moving to conform more with the party establishment’s orthodoxy than the Tea Partiers who got him elected.
Federalism. Paul should encourage states to restore felon voting rights, but trying to pass a bill making them do it is of questionable constitutionality, and libertarians in the US really shouldn’t even be considering bills unless certain of their legality.
And that’s another problem with Paul. He absorbed his father’s ideology, but I don’t think he fully understands it. He’s still got a lot of learning to do. I do like his instincts though and think he could be the libertarian Reagan if he develops.