Paper Trail Of Tears
by digby
Louisville Courier-Journal
"What struck me most about Rand Paul is that he is like a Supreme Court candidate with a long paper trail," said Professor Stephen Voss of University of Kentucky. "He will have to defend his long legacy of statements."
Kentucky Educational Television analyst John McGarvey, a Louisville lawyer, said Paul could struggle as voters come to know his record in more detail.
"How is the farmer going to feel about a guy who wants to wipe out agricultural subsidies?" McGarvey said. "How will a senior citizen who usually votes Republican feel about Paul's views on Social Security? Or a business Republican who knows he is going to need help from Washington?"
Michael Baranowski, who teaches political science at Northern Kentucky University, said Paul's pronouncements -- including his controversial comments to The Courier-Journal editorial board and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- make sense if considered in the context of his libertarian political philosophy.
But Baranowski said, "Candidates who expect voters to consider their view in context generally don't win elections."
Paul faces another challenge, UK professor Ernest Yanarella said.
"Ideologically, he prefers to live in a bygone era that is no more, due to mammoth changes in society, politics, culture and especially the economy," Yanarella wrote in an e-mail. "The problem is many Americans, perhaps a majority, like a balance between individualist principles and effective government, even Big Government when it provides Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."
Still, said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, independent-minded voters may be attracted to the fact that Paul is a "square peg that refused to fit into a round hole."
"Many of his past positions, on both right and left, would have been enough to defeat a candidate for high office in the past," Sabato said. "If you go issue by issue, and focus just on which people will disagree, you can add up the opponents into a very large majority of the population."
Sabato goes on to say that people don't perceive Paul as a politician so they may not care, but I doubt anyone with his long history of controversial political statements can get away with that. Most people tribally identify with parties and politicians based on perceived shared values. Paul doesn't fit in with anything they recognize on a visceral level --- he's a theoretical politician who can't connect in the way most politicians connect because it feels inconsistent. Identifying with the tea party may not get him very far once they find out what he really thinks. (They are extremely tribal, and some of the things he believes, such as letting Veterans fend for themselves is heresy.)
Add that to the fact that he doesn't appear to be all that quick or all that savvy and he's going to be on the defensive throughout the campaign.
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