Just as a thought experiment, imagine that I offered you the opportunity to sit down with a handful of congress members and have an in depth conversation about world events and foreign policy. Who would you choose to invite to your chat?
My assumption here is that you would not take this as a chance to convince anyone to change their mind about anything, but rather you would be doing this because you sincerely wanted to learn.
As an example of a recently departed member of Congress, I would find it exciting to sit down with Dick Lugar and just talk about things. I could pick his brain for hours without getting bored.
But probably among the last people I’d be excited to talk to are Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.
On a superficial level, Rand Paul is interesting simply because he doesn’t parrot some party line. But his knowledge of and sophistication about world events and foreign affairs is at such a low level that almost any Ivy League undergraduate would make for more compelling conversation.
And Rubio is just a politician, through and through. His ideas are not his own. They are either learned from biased self-interested sources or they are for sale.
So, who would you want to talk to?
