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Title: What Went Wrong With Rand Paul?
Source:
The Daily Beast
URL Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl ... went-wrong-with-rand-paul.html
Published: Dec 30, 2015
Author: The Daily Beast
Post Date: 2016-01-03 08:17:36 by Operation 40
Keywords: rand, paul, deceit
Views: 758
Comments: 10
A year ago, Trump was a joke and Paul was rising. But now that their fortunes have flipped, is it fair to say libertarianism is finally dead? So this is the year that libertarianism, a political philosophy advocating minimal government across the board and thus annoying as hell to both conservatives and liberals, finally up and died. Not really, but that’s the new official story, at least as told by media types who have been prophesying the end of libertarianism for as long as they’ve been writing. There’s a superficial plausibility to the charge, especially among those who confuse partisan politics with the real America. Among high-profile Democrats and Republicans, the constituency for more-open borders is zero and there’s nothing like Islamic terrorism in France and California to rev up the war machine and ignite bipartisan calls for encryption backdoors or a ban on secret communications altogether. After a few years of an unintended pause, our elected officials have even managed to put aside their differences and are once again cranking up spending...snipped ...There’s no doubt that Paul’s presidential campaign is on life support. What started out so promisingly as an unstoppable drive to the White House got a flat tire before it even left the parking lot. In February, Paul won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for the third year running, cruising past Scott Walker (remember him?) and positively crushing Donald Trump by over 20 points. As recently as June, Paul was topping polls of Republican contenders! And yet just a couple of weeks ago, Paul was reduced to special pleading to even get on the main stage of the latest Republican debate. He’s now scraping by with Pataki-like numbers, even as his fellow senators, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, duke it out for what might come if and when Trump hits the skids. What happened to Rand Paul? He has run a bad campaign, especially from an ideological perspective. Conservatives have never been especially fond of libertarian-leaning Republicans to begin with and Paul seemed eager to show time and again that he wasn’t, well, that libertarian. Sure, he had called the GOP “stale and moss-covered” and even reached out to ethnic minorities, but once he started aiming at the presidency, he’s rarely missed an opportunity to jump on every conservative outrage of the day: sanctuary cities, ebola quarantines, Planned Parenthood, the Iran deal, you name it. The guy who counseled—at the war-crazy Heritage Foundation, no less—that the U.S. should give peace a chance overseas was suddenly talking about bombing the Middle East and waging war against ISIS and banning refugees and ending visas for people from countries with “a jihadist movement,” a term of art that covers essentially all of Europe these days. After this summer’s shooting in Chattanooga, he called for the sort of profiling program he had once rejected as intrusive and ineffective. The result was that Paul went from being what Time called “the most interesting man in politics” to sounding like most of the other windbags running for the GOP nomination. He abandoned exactly what had brought him attention at exactly the wrong time. And by fixating on the 2016 presidential race, he may well be undercutting the long fight he needs to wage within the Republican Party to win hearts and minds to the cause of smaller government across the board. Whether going full libertarian would have produced different results in today’s GOP is anybody’s guess—based on the years they controlled Congress and the White House, there’s no reason to believe that Republicans are actually interested in a government that does less and spends less—but there’s no question it would have made Paul’s campaign more interesting...snipped Full Article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/30/what-went-wrong-with-rand-paul.html 
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#2. To: Operation 40 (#0)
in other words ,reality hit his ideology square between the eyes.
There are no replies to Comment # 2. End Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestThe guy who counseled—at the war-crazy Heritage Foundation, no less—that the U.S. should give peace a chance overseas was suddenly talking about bombing the Middle East and waging war against ISIS and banning refugees and ending visas for people from countries with “a jihadist movement,” a term of art that covers essentially all of Europe these days. After this summer’s shooting in Chattanooga, he called for the sort of profiling program he had once rejected as intrusive and ineffective.
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