The Rand Paul Prism

What is so fascinating about the New York Times’ latest dispatch on Senator Rand Paul is that only on the surface is it about the neoconservatives trying to figure out what to make of the junior senator from Kentucky. The more important glimpse it provides is of how flummoxed the liberal Democrats are by the eye doctor turned constitutional seer. Dr. Paul is skeptical of — to cite Exhibit A — military interventionism. Wasn’t this one of the reasons the Democrats elected President Obama in the first place?The Times describes Dr. Paul speaking to a private gathering of Republicans. He is asked by Senator Gramm, former senator of Texas, what he would do were Iran soon be set to build a bomb. “Would you support attacking?” Mr. Gramm asked. The senator dodges the question, and “an awkward silence” falls over the room. The Times says the exchange shows “how difficult it will be for Mr. Paul to straddle the treacherous fault line splitting the hawks of the Republican Party from others who favor a less aggressive foreign policy.”Say, what does the Times itself want its president to do in that situation? We know what President Obama actually did in almost that situation. He went yakety yaka in a European dacha (with apologies to the famous New York Daily News headline of years ago*). He also started relaxing the embargo. We’re with the hawks in this dispute, but what interests us is not us. The hawks will take their measure of Dr. Paul in due time. It’s the Democrats. How are they going to assess Dr. Paul on foreign policy?Is he better or worse than, say, Hillary Clinton? Secretary Clinton had a larger carbon footprint than any secretary of state in history. But with all that traveling, she and her colleagues in the administration have left our foreign policy in a shambles. When the call came at 3 a.m., so to speak, she blamed the Mideast riots on a film that, however coarse, was protesting Muslim attacks on Coptic Christians? Where has she been on that cause? Where has the President been? The best she could say about Benghazi was “what difference does it make?”It’s way too soon for the GOP to be making its decisions in respect of the 2016 nominee. Senators Paul, Cruz, and Rubio are three brilliant figures who are doing what they should be doing, marking issues in the contest of ideas. We have yet to hear from the full bench of governors, who, we hope and trust, bring their executive experience into the fray. Between Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, Chris Christie, Mike Pence, Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, and Susanna Martinez, to name but a few, it’s a deep bench. Plus Paul Ryan.To us the outstanding feature of Senator Paul at the moment is the breadth and liveliness of his outreach. This includes his trip to Israel, his remarks on voter registration, and his instinct for the Constitution. For every wayward theme he (or his father) pursued in the past, we are going to pose this question: Where were the rest of the politicians in the campaign for sound money? If they’d been alert to that issue, we would have been spared the long travail of one of the most destructive recession in American history.__________* This is a reference to a headline on a story about Henry Kissinger and Leonid Brezhnev meeting for talks in a villa near Moscow. The headline was: “Henry and Brez Yakety Yaka in Red Dacha.”

The Rand Paul Prism

The Rand Paul Prism

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