The cover of the new issue of Time magazine is a doozy; it declares Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul the most interesting man in politics. Maybe that says something about Time, or about the state of American politics. What is perfectly clear is that the magazine really believes it, and it’ll go a long way to making it seem so.
The article by Michael Scherer (10/16/14) wants to tell you that Paul’s political views are complex and nuanced–“his positions now take several sentences to explain,” Scherer explains, which is perhaps why they’re hard to understand when the reporter devotes a sentence apiece to explaining a few of them:
He opposes gay marriage but also opposes a constitutional amendment to define marriage, saying that states and Congress should pursue an extensive strategy of decoupling all government benefits from marriage so a ban might pass court scrutiny.
But the way Scherer recalls a rather famous Paul interview in 2010 shows where he’s really coming from. During his campaign, Paul had made given some peculiar interviews about the Civil Rights Act, insisting that he opposed racism but maybe wasn’t so sure that private businesses should be required to serve black people if they didn’t feel like it.
As Scherer put it:
He is a candidate a bit unhinged from history, and his meaning is easily mistaken. Shortly after winning the Senate primary in Kentucky, he agreed to an appearance on MSNBC, only to find himself under fire from Rachel Maddow, a past supporter, for his opposition to the part of the 1965 Civil Rights Act that imposed antidiscrimination rules on private businesses.
Paul says his position has nothing to do with his fierce opposition to racism; instead it reflects his view of the limited role government should play in private business. But for Maddow and other liberals, it was a chance to tar him as another Southern politician dog-whistling to angry whites.
There’s a lot going on here. Though I’m not clear what he means when he says Paul is “unhinged from history,” Scherer tells us right from the start that Paul’s “meaning is easily mistaken.” He believes in limited government and thinks private businesses should have the freedom to more or less do as they please–but then “Maddow and other liberals” come along and “tar him” as just another Southern practitioner of crypto-racist politics. That’s a pretty heavy accusation.
But Rachel Maddow didn’t create Rand Paul’s civil rights problem; he did that himself. The Maddow interview came only after at least two other similar interviews on the subject. One of them was with the editorial board of the Louisville Courier-Journal (4/17/10), where Paul said this:
I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners–I abhor racism–I think it’s a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from your restaurant. But at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I think there should be absolutely no discrimination on anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what the Civil Rights Act was about, to my mind.
He reiterated that viewpoint in an NPR interview (5/19/10), where he at one point stressed that federal government intervention was the problem. Asked about the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Paul said “the more local the better and the more common sense the decisions are, rather than having a federal government make those decisions.”
The same day (5/19/10), he appeared on Maddow’s MSNBC show; she noted that the Louisville paper declared in an editorial that
much of what he stands for is repulsive to people in the mainstream. For instance, he holds an unacceptable view of civil rights, saying while the federal government can enforce integration of government jobs and facilities, private business people should be able to decide whether they want to serve black people or gays or any other minority group.
Rand Paul couldn’t seem to understand why Rachel Maddow kept asking him about his contention that businesses have a right to racially discriminate.
The Maddow interview is tense, primarily because Paul can’t seem to understand why Maddow treats his endorsement of the right of the private sector to racially discriminate as a significant issue. At one point, he says that what he’s really concerned with is free speech: “What about freedom of speech? Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking?” When asked about segregated lunch counters, he tried to wave the issue off; these were “important philosophical debates,” but were nonetheless “not very practical.”
But far from trying to “tar” Paul as anything, Maddow comes across as sincerely trying to understand how he can square his avowed support for civil rights with his opposition to the Civil Rights Act: “Isn’t being in favor of civil rights but against the Civil Rights Act a little like saying you’re against high cholesterol but you’re in favor of fried cheese?” (Rand’s response was that he wasn’t against the Civil Rights Act–just against the parts of it that prohibited private discrimination.)
Since then, Paul has tried very hard to shift his rhetoric on civil rights–so much so that it caught the attention of Washington Post factchecker Glenn Kessler (4/10/13), who noted that Paul had given a speech where he claimed that he “never wavered in my support for civil rights and the Civil Rights Act.” That would be tough to square with the record. And Kessler notes that just a few days after the Maddow interview, Paul went on CNN and declared more confidently that he would have indeed voted in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In the end, the Post‘s Kessler determined that Paul’s new position was an attempt at “rewriting history.” But to Time magazine, the reality is that Rand Paul is a complicated and interesting man whom people like Rachel Maddow are unfairly maligning. I don’t know if that’s “unhinged from history” or just unhinged.
Rand Paul’s claim that he opposes racial discrimination even while saying businesses have the right to engage in it should be evaluated in the light of his similar claim that his staffer who liked to dress up in a Confederate flag mask and claimed John Wilkes Booth had his heart “in the right place” did not have “any racist tendencies.”
http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/11/rand-pauls-racial-blind-spot/
So who’s more interesting? No Democrats (Biden? Cuomo? Obama? Crist? Brown? Geithner?) seem to have anything about them to attract even a momentary interest, and the rest of the Republicans are beneath mention. It is a public figure’s CONTRADICTIONS that make him interesting–as proven by your article’s total focus on Dr. Paul’s contradictions!
There may be a simple way to deal with the confusion that gets spread by such “interesting” people, (even if I don’t find such persons to be interesting at all.) We don’t pay attention to what anyone might say; rather, we base our conclusions upon what they do.
I assume he won’t be gifted with flowers and chocolates from Code Pink in gratitude for his “nuanced” views on this issue.
Oy gevalt …
Libertarians and Tea Partiers love to pose as if they have some sort of progressive social agenda, despite their devotion to capitalism, which is the great concentrator of wealth. The problem is, of course, you can’t really have social equality and peace without economic equality and peace.
Ron and Rand Pauls are disingenuous thieves trying to pull the wool over a large portion of the Left. The informed will not be so easily deceived, but unfortunately, too many are not informed and do not know or understand this basic social-economic equation.
I guess we must wait until this whole mess plays out before the Wandering Left realizes it has been had by RW mathematics. See an interesting article with Michael Hudson on the economic portion of this. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=12533. Racial discrimination is just a diversion from the real underlying economic issue.
Several sentences? My god, he’s in the same league with Noam Chomsky. I got an idea. Let’s let Chomsky take the resigned seat of Paul, and Paul become the distinguished professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT.
We ought to de-government all government, except that which bails out Wall Street snake eye dice throwers to the tune of $15 trillion and counting. [Expletive deleted] lying, filthy [expletive deleted] corporate media dissemblers. This is just complete gibberish oozing from the mouth of Paul: “He opposes gay marriage but also opposes a constitutional amendment to define marriage, saying that states and Congress should pursue an extensive strategy of decoupling all government benefits from marriage so a ban might pass court scrutiny.” What good are civil rights if they end upon entering corporate occupied territory? That in epitome, is the tyranny raging in this sorry-[expletive deleted] excuse for a country. Private property is pure hokum.
The perfect epitome of the depth-sunk state of US politics of purporting to address an issue by skirting it: “’What about freedom of speech? Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking?’ When asked about segregated lunch counters, he tried to wave the issue off; these were ‘important philosophical debates,’ but were nonetheless ‘not very practical.'”
With respect to No Differences’s comment that “ The problem is, of course, you can’t really have social equality and peace without economic equality and peace.” If it’s not too burdensome, please see my review of Valdas Anelauskas at http://www.amazon.com/Discovering-America-As-It-Is/product-reviews/0932863299/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending in which he spends 550 pages proving just this thesis.
I think Scherer is defending Libertarianism without declaring himself as a Libertarian. There’s nothing special about Paul that can’t be defined by the basic definition of Libertarian
Look – either Paul says what he means or he says what he thinks you want to hear. That’s how he rolls. In the Maddow/MSNBC appearance, do you think he was saying what anyone wanted to hear? What he stands for is the Lester Maddox business model, plain and simple. I think Rand (and Ron, for that matter) are a combination of Lyndon LaRouche and Jim Bakker resulting in Viral Teabola. As for what he might truly believe, I see Rand Paul as the second coming of George W. Bush with all the same policies while expecting a different result.
This morning page 4 of the New York Times Sunday Review has a photo with no caption and no relationship whatever to the article it illustrates, “The Rebirth of Tijuana.” Nor does the article mention it or suggest it in any way.
The photo is incomprehensible mix of totally unrecognizable objects, the partially blocked heads of two boys, a partially blocked female torso, and partially blocked paintings of a sideways Santa Claus, and what may be a crucifixion.
Okay, from there I went to this FAIR posting, which also has an unidentified photo, this one with a caption that has nothing whatever to do with it. In the foreground sits a young man with odd markings on his head (blood?) and behind him someone pouring liquid from a can on the head of a young woman seated at a table.
I think I’ll go back to bed.
Once again, the moral bankruptcy of American conservatism is revealed in a simple interview. This is about far more than some superficial discussion about “contradictions.” The “right” to discriminate against others based upon race or other factors, which many conservatives see as an “expression of freedom” is actually just another form of oppression. Perhaps in a future America in which whites do not outnumber everyone else, white conservatives like Paul Rand will finally have to acknowledge the downside of the “right to discriminate.”
Communism,Nazism,Obamaism are all the great force behind concentration of wealth. Free enterprise is the open market of opportunity regardless of the presenting obstacles. You choose freedom or equality but not both. Equality must be enforced by a power which rules as a sovereign over subjects. I prefer freedom and the opportunity for success or failure.
Roger – the B&W photo from the article is from one of many lunch counter sit-ins (Greensboro, I believe), where activists occupied the seats in establishments that refused to serve black customers. It is directly relevant to Rand Paul’s opposition to the portion of the Civil Rights Act that ended such race-based customer discrimination.
I suppose FAIR was not explicit because they assume that their readers have a minimum amount of education about American history.
@ Janson: Thanks for your information. Now it all makes sense to me, sort of. Perhaps your amount of education about American history could also identify the NYT photo for me.
Perhaps, you are unhinged. Maddow attacks alleged crypto-racism, yet does nothing to admit anything controlling racists protestor; some of whom were black people who didn’t like white people. This is another cry by the media, to make lazy and biased news.