Some of us were wondering, over the weekend, exactly what audience Rand Paul had in mind. Adele M. Stan, in The American Prospect, has her own theory:
… If a Rand Paul presidential nomination by the Republican Party seems preposterous, says historian and former Republican Party official Tanya Melich, think back to 1964. At that time, Melich was a recent college graduate and former member of the Young Republicans, a group rooted on college campuses and ultimately taken over by supporters of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who improbably grabbed the Republican nomination out from under the feet of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, largely through the grassroots organizing of young conservatives. At the time, Melich said, she was covering the movement for ABC News, and “it became very clear that these Young Republican Goldwater people were really sharp,” she said in a telephone interview from her New York City home. “They knew how to organize.”
For the past two presidential election cycles, and ever since, the Paul organization has focused on campus organizing, building lists of young people excited by both father and son’s talk of liberty, and promise of freedom from foreign entanglements.
For liberals, Goldwater often fills the role of punch line, given his landslide loss to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Sure, Goldwater was routed, but his campaign brought together the minds and builders of a movement that became known as the New Right, a movement that went on to create the religious right, elect Ronald Reagan president, and set the nation on a rightward course for decades. It all began with a longshot candidacy, a quirky candidate, and a horde of highly motivated young people. Surely Rand Paul has read that script.
Win or lose, Rand Paul’s aim is to re-create the GOP in his own image, infused with the vigor of his young followers and committed to a radical dismantling of the federal government as well as an even more radical devolution to the states’ rights philosophy of the old Confederacy—not to mention disengagement from the world. This movement, if successful, could alter the party for years to come. And the old, neoconservative Republican Party establishment may never see it coming…
Though the Facebook generation appears united in its concerns about the economy, its members’ view of the government’s role in the economic well-being of the people varies within the cohort. Libertarians, such as the authors of the Reason study, are quick to jump on an overall figure for the generation that claims nearly half favor a fiscally conservative (and hence, smaller) government…
But if you drill down to look at which part of the millennial cohort expresses a belief in smaller government, it’s mostly white people, and the percentage varies according to how the question is asked. A March report by Pew Research found that overall, some 38 percent of millennials, not half, favored smaller government and fewer services. But when looked at through the prism of race, 52 percent of white millennials did, while 71 percent of non-white millennials favored bigger government and more services—numbers that likely speak to just which segment of the millennial generation Paul is aiming for….
Paul is also said to be courting the Koch brothers. In his Senate run, employees of Koch Industries ranked among his top 20 sources of donations. The Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit organization that spent nearly $35 million on so-called issue ads during the 2012 presidential campaign, was a sponsor of LPAC, the September conference hosted by the Pauls’ Young Americans for Liberty, as was the Charles Koch Institute. That same month, Paul addressed Generation Opportunity…
At the top of the list of Rand Paul contributors in 2010 was the Club for Growth, a bundling operation that has had an outsized influence on the realignment of Congress to the right, a group whose members would likely shower him with dollars in a presidential run…
Amir Khalid
It’s not even an original title. “2020 Vision” (“Wawasan 2020”, in Malay) was the name of a long-term national development plan launched by the government here in the 1980s.
Deecarda a
I can’t speak for millennials but I know Rand can count on the Aqua Buddah vote.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Baby Doc has been known to plagiarize.
Morzer
A quivering mass of permanently aggrieved white jelly?
Chris
I suppose it’s some comfort that… NEARLY half the people who share my generation and skin color aren’t idiots.
Ugh.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Morzer
I think I’ve seen that as a side dish in Korean restaurants.
Chris
@Morzer:
I know, he’s got his work cut out for him – it’s so far from the way they are now.
Morzer
Off-topic, but I can’t resist noting that the NFL is doing its best to provoke John Cole into going all Krakatoa on them. The Cowboys have cut Michael Sam from their practice squad.
suzanne
I just do not understand how the “government should be run like a business!” camp and the “government should be so small you could drown it in a bathtub!” camp can overlap to such a degree. Nobody who owns a business wants it to stay small, with limited offerings. The whole point of having a business is to grow it. I don’t care if the government is large, as long as it is efficient.
Morzer
@Chris:
Meet the new GOP brand, same as the old brand.
Morzer
@suzanne:
The overlap is in the one consistent feature of conservative economics over the last 40 years: pilfering as much taxpayer money and as many publicly paid-for assets for their fat cat sugar-daddies as possible. Government must do less so they can steal more. Embezzlement is their business model.
James E Powell
@suzanne:
Because only deluded voters believe that anyone means those things. None of the ruling class want to run government like a business, if “like a business” means a business that provides products/services that people want. They want to run government like the aristocracy ran Europe in 16th century.
Similarly, “small government” means a government that gives money and publicly owned property to the ruling class, maintains the corporate empire, and protects their status. A Jeffersonian “small government” would not, for example, have over 700 military bases around the world.
BillinGlendaleCA
@suzanne: The belief is that the profit motive makes business perfectly efficient. Since government doesn’t have a profit motive, it works for the satisfaction of petty bureaucrats. The second belief is that government is doing too much, foreign policy, monetary policy, etc. Finally any government is better closer to the people(state better than federal, local better than state). Working for a large corporation for a few weeks would prove the fallacy of all these beliefs.
piratedan
@suzanne: hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug…. how can the same people who want the government out of their personal bidness (i.e. my god-given right to own a bazooka) instead want to insert the invisible sky-buddy (a thoroughly white baby jeebus, who is decidedly old testament tyvm) in it’s place as the only folks who can truly interpret what Gawwwwd wants for us are the parson on Sunday or the Pope in Vatican City (h/t to the USSC). Nevermind all that charity and tolerance and forgiveness shit that you find in the new Testament. It’s just the rich fuckers in charge playing the factions off of each other, each of them thinking that their sugar daddies loves them the bestest.
Chris
@suzanne:
“Run it like a business” is bumper sticker pithiness, nothing more. They’ve never actually stopped and thought about what that would entail, any more than they’ve stopped and wondered if maybe there’s a reason why government and business are two different things in the first place.
Suzanne
Sigh.
Assholes. The lot of them.
Console
America has a legacy of it’s most substantial freedoms coming from big government, be it forced constitutional amendments after a civil war, judicial fiat, or explicit congressional action (voting rights act etc.). Lots of white people and privileged people in general have decided to collectively ignore that history (because slavery was like a thousand years ago and they are through with you making them feel guilty), which results in believing America was at its freest when there was no federal income tax and stupid things like that. Then it gets even more perverse when you get to things like gutting the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts when you realize that libertarians are aligning with conservatives to give states more authoritarian power… all because of theoretical stances on federalism and small government.
Splitting Image
@James E Powell:
A lot of businessmen don’t want businesses to be run that way either. The modern business model isn’t providing products that people want; it’s forcing them to buy what businesses are prepared to give them. The entire point of “supply-side” economics is to remove the demand side of the economy (i.e. consumers) from the equation, and it’s more profitable to sell someone a product that doesn’t work than to sell her one that does.
Mike J
I don’t understand the doubt. When Republicans say they want to run government like a business, they absolutely, 100% mean it.
Mandalay
@James E Powell:
Just so, and for a great example of that look at Michigan where a Republican governor signed a bill yesterday to prevent Tesla selling directly to their customers in Michigan…
Democrats should be screaming about this whenever any Republican claims that they support free markets, forcing them to repudiate what Snyder did, or agree with it. Either way is a political win for Democrats.
Console
@suzanne:
The “run government like a business” camp might be even worse because they also overlap with the worst technocratic impulses of more elitist leftists. They can get a lot done when they get in power. Usually resulting in lots of radical change that screws over workers, punches unions, and enriches federal contractors, and doesn’t do a damn thing to make government more efficient or cheaper. They are the education reformers, the Halliburton no-bid contractors, the ones that think they can privatize everything. And if they are clever, they get people on the left to support them because they can sound rational about all the looting.
Mike J
@Mandalay: If Democratic governors in half of the other states didn’t have the same laws, I’m sure they would criticize them.
People who own car dealerships are often the richest person in a town. You don’t get elected governor without knowing who the richest guy in every town of your state is, and what will make them happy.
Mandalay
@Splitting Image:
Yep. A great example being TV cable companies that force you to pick from their package deals offering you either next to nothing, or a gazillion channels or fifty gazillion channels. Ordering just the three channels you want to watch is not an option.
Or try ordering a PC without Windows so you can reinstall your identical existing copy of Windows from your PC that just died. It can be done, but it’s not offered as an option, and they are real assholes about letting you do it.
Try buying a sofa or a printer in a store without having the salesperson begging you to buy a warranty plan as well. And then go through the same crap with the cashier when you pay.
Try buying house insurance. You will be probably be offered a policy with the contents being insured for far more than your shit is worth, because that bumps the premium.
The game is rigged to make you buy shit you don’t need, and don’t want.
Ruckus
@Splitting Image:
They don’t want to remove consumers, they want consumers to have no power, no say in providing what they want to give them. “Look it’s the latest, greatest widget, get one now, before it’s too late!(and you all find out it’s a piece of crap)”
WTF. Profit is not based on a product working or not and it doesn’t increase by making/selling crappier ones. Profit is simply how much is left over after producing/purchasing and selling. You may have a point if you are trying to say cutting costs to the point that the service/product is crap temporarily increases profit by rearranging the cost/price equation but with out having your first point of consumers having no power, deciding only to sell crap is a failure over time. Of course if short time thinking is all one is capable of then sure, cutting costs(don’t forget, one still has sunk costs) =profit, better stated, slash/burn, move on to the next thing. Or in Mittens case buy low and burn to the ground, profit!
Mandalay
@Mike J:
But Democrats don’t constantly pay homage to the free market god like Republicans do – that’s the difference. If a union or the government is alleged to be harming business growth then Republicans yell about it, but when the National Automobile Dealers Association do it you don’t hear diddly squat.
Mandalay
@Ruckus:
But that is not forcing the consumer to buy – that is persuading the consumer to buy, by preying on their stupidity, weakness and insecurity. I have no problem with that. Any consumer dumb enough to fall for that spiel deserves everything they don’t get.
Mike J
@Mandalay: You can’t talk about the problem without talking about the people writing the checks for your reëlect ads.
A Humble Lurker
@Mandalay:
It is if it’s the only product on the market.
Chris
@Splitting Image:
On top of this, you’ve got the “become CEO of a company, gut it, make yourself a nice golden parachute, bail out, move on to the next CEOship, and start over” school of thought.
Old school, Gilded Age capitalists wanted to be aristocrats in $3,000 suits. The new breed wants to be pirates in $3,000 suits, not ruling over an estate as lord of the manor, but pillaging the estate, burning it down and moving on to find another.
Amir Khalid
@Chris:
Better to be a pirate than an aristocrat; a pirate doesn’t have to work to keep the estate going.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Also, pirate ships were run democratically. If the crew wasn’t happy with the captian(not enough booty and well booty). They’d vote him off the ship(if he was lucky to an island).
NotMax
Such as Hillary Rodham.
opiejeanne
@Mike J: Nice use of umlauts in reelect.
Amir Khalid
@opiejeanne:
Actually, that’s a diaeresis.
opiejeanne
@Amir Khalid: The double dots? I’ve never seen them used in English; I took German in HS and college, so I thought they were umlauts.
I looked up diaeresis, so I see the definition and it makes sense but it’s not common in English.
Amir Khalid
@opiejeanne:
Diaereses are more common in French, but not by much. In English, it’s an affectation normally unique to the New Yorker. The only legitimate use of the umlaut in English is, as everyone knows, over the N in Spinal Tap’s name.
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne, @Amir Khalid:
The diaeresis is one of the grace notes of fine typography, and as a former typographer and full-time pedant of course I applaud its use. Some gentle self-mockery from The New Yorker: “The Curse of the Diaeresis.”
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
I do think it would be helpful if words defining typographical gewgaws contained the mark being defined, e.g., ümlaut (umläut?), çedilla, câret, etc. Still trying to figure out where to put the tilde in tilde.
Frankensteinbeck
Guys, it’s only about big business for the big businessmen – and they’re less than 1% of the voting population. For Republican voters, ‘small government’ and ‘run government like a business’ are excuses. They can’t admit they’re racist assholes who want to fuck over the other guy, especially if he’s black. Why would they even accept that’s true themselves? Like all assholes, they look for some paper-thin excuse to feel self-righteous about it. The policies you hear conservatives cheer on radios, the policies that have made Tea Partiers in the House unpopular even with big business, are policies that hurt people (and I admit, blacks are only the #1 target).
Big business has been piggybacking a wave of hate since Reagan. The asshole base loves watching the rich fuck people over, and anyway if the liberals who messed up this country so bad a black man can become president want to regulate business, then by Jaysus conservatives will deregulate business.
Frankensteinbeck
…as for the OP, Rand Paul is liar of Romneyan proportions, who says whatever he thinks the audience wants to hear at that moment. He’s blatant about it and makes no attempt to even sound consistent. Is anyone surprised that Young Republicans fall for that?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Mandalay: I haven’t seen a convincing case either way about the state auto franchise laws. Here’s a linky from a lawyer about the Tesla situation:
In an “ideal” world, factories would sell to any reasonably qualified wholesaler who would then sell to any reasonably qualified retailer. “Reasonably qualified” is the hitch. Should the factory be able to require that retailers look a certain way or be sited in certain places or enable them to have a local monopoly (e.g. no two Ford dealers across the street from each other)? Should a factory be able to set minimum prices that everyone has to meet? Why is it legal for just about every store to be forced sell a new iPad for almost exactly the same price? Can’t auto factories control competition that way just as tightly as if they own the retail stores?
Even if Tesla were to win, I don’t think it would change things for buyers very much. GM and Ford aren’t going to want to own their dealerships (at any significant scale) – they want to push those costs and risks on to others. What would the current dealerships do to keep their money and power? I dunno. But they’d find something, I’m sure.
Even if Tesla loses, they’ll find a way to keep selling their cars without dealers if that’s what they decide they want to keep doing. They’ll find loopholes (e.g. maybe not having a permanent store location, basing the company in a post office box in the Cayman Islands, or something).
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Amir Khalid: rofl. Indeed, one is struck by it when one picks up a New Yorker article for the first time.
It would have been fun if Teddy and Franklin Roösevelt used it…
Ken Burns: “The Roo ooo se velt family …”
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Sherparick
I actually find this very weird, but for the Village, who apparently still loathe the Clintons, they have to find a shiny new object and apparently Ted Cruz is just to overtly Theocrat for them. That Rand Paul is a complete nut (Charlie Pierce’s 5-minute rule) seems to escape their attention as they shower him with libertarian love. He gave a silly speech about drones in 2013 and apparently allows otherwise sensible people to forgive or overlook the rest of his record (including that he has been channeling John McCain regarding the ISIS war and expanding U.S. involvement in it).
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Chris:
Yes, professing hate for government while personally taking advantage of every goverment service offered is a such a bold new vision for the GOP. That crazy Paul boy is in over his head.
chopper
goldwater hated the religious right wing takeover of the GOP. it was a monster he helped create. if paul really wants to follow in barry’s footsteps, he can go ahead and try, but i don’t think he’ll be happy with the results if it’s anything like goldwater’s experience.
Chris
@chopper:
I KNOW! I loved that part of the article – yep, Goldie may have hated them, but he did a lot to help give birth to them.
The Moar You Know
@Mandalay: hahahahaha
That would require “fighting” and “taking a stand” and “doing something”. Qualities notably absent from today’s Democratic party. Plus, bitterness aside, there’s quite a few blue states that have done the same anti-competitive bullshit. “Both sides do it” is really true when it comes from taking money from the car dealer’s mafia.
NonyNony
@Sherparick:
He’s a second generation politician. His daddy did the grunt work of making friends and building up alliances. If he’s a bit “eccentric” why should they care? Second generation pols are allowed to be eccentric in their views.
The Village media absolutely adores legacies. See their fawning treatment of George W Bush long past everyone else had figured out that he was a screwup.
donquijoterocket
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Monty Python did a sketch about it too.It’s called a blancmange.
C.V. Danes
@suzanne:
Government should be run like a business = government should be run as an autocratic institution where the leaders are chosen by the oligarchs (the board) and the people just do what they’re told. If they don’t like it, they can quit and move to Canada.
Government should be so small you could drown it in a bathtub = government should merely exist to serve the interests of private industry as represented by the oligarchs, mostly by enforcing laws that favor corporatism and redistributing wealth from the people to private industry.
These are not mutually exclusive :-)
C.V. Danes
@James E Powell This. Exactly.
C.V. Danes
@Mandalay: And anything Apple, too :-)
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
So Paul is saying the same thing that the “old, neoconservative Republican Party establishment” has been saying for decades, doing the same things they’ve been doing for decades, but he’s some kind of revolutionary that they’ll never see coming? Someone should get Adele M. Stan out of the 1980’s and introduce her to the past few decades.
artem1s
for FSM sake, why is anyone even talking about this guy as a viable candidate? He can’t run unless he gives up his Senate seat, ergo, he will not run. He will never, ever give up the gravy-est, gravy-train of grifting political fundraising: an un-term-limited seat in the US Senate. The potential is easily 10X Papa Doc Paul’s ongoing Preznit campaign grift. Nothing to see here but a family tradition. Since Citizen’s United, running for office (while not really running for office) is the best con going. And as long as KY law says he can’t run and keep his Senate seat, he has an insurance policy that guarantees he will never be held accountable for anything he says. And he will never actually, you know, have to shell out money to run a real campaign (ie hire and pay staffers). As it stands he has a cadre of slavering Ayn Rand wannabes who will keep his fundraising website going and any other PR necessary to stay in the news (for no pay) just like Daddy did. He is doing what Sarah Palin would like to do, but she is too lazy, mean, and stoopid to carry off the long con.
Kyle
Gutting the idiot neocon imperialism that got us into Iraq, and slashing the bloated Pentagon would be one of the few good things that might come out of this, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts this would be one of the first items dropped in the name of compromise.