It must be Bash Rand Paul Day because Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal and Jennifer Rubin and Richard Cohen in the Washington Post all have pieces lambasting Sen. Paul for a variety of sins and apostasies. Our resident Rand Paul supporter, Arthur Gilroy, would say that the Bipartisan Establishment is trying to disappear him, which is in some sense true. Moreover, at least when reading Richard Cohen’s critique, Rand becomes more sympathetic with every passing paragraph.
The supposedly left-leaning Cohen gets offended when anyone attacks the integrity of any villager, whether it be Caspar Weinberger, Scooter Libby, or Dick Cheney. Stephens and Rubin are expressing a mixture of concern that Rand Paul would lose very, very badly to any Democrat and alarm that his formerly “radical” and “outside the mainstream” ideas are becoming more acceptable within the Grand Old Party.
An analogous situation would be the Democrats who didn’t like where Howard Dean was positioning the party and the Republicans who were offended by what they considered his overheated and perhaps conspiratorial rhetoric about the Bush administration’s motive for invading Iraq. Those groups teamed up within the village to do their best to derail Dean’s momentum, and succeeded in denying him a needed win in the Iowa caucuses. That night, Dean imploded, but only with a massive assist from the corporate media which played his tin-eared speech on a loop for more than week.
So, yes, powerful status quo forces are going to try to marginalize and disappear Rand Paul, each for their own reasons. But you should expect progressives to join in the chorus, for a different reason. Rand Paul is encroaching on our turf in certain areas (meaning that we, in effect, agree him in some areas), but we do not see him as someone we can work with constructively. Perhaps we could work with him on some issues if he were to remain a U.S. Senator, but as a presidential candidate, it is his differences not his similarities that are the top concern.
Progressives have no reason to want a libertarian president with ties to the worst in the neo-confederate movement.
