May 20, 2010

Rand Paul

1. Cut your hair, brush it down, and go easier on the Brylcreem.

2. Find and fire the certified idiots in your circle of advisers. I speak particularly of the guy who told you it would be okay to have your victory bash in a members-only country club.

3. Shut up until...

4. ... you have a better grasp of the power of the symbolic. You don't look into the red light lens and start staggering around on a simple -- if "gotcha" -- question about how you might have voted on a the public accommodations section of the 60s civil rights laws.

I and some fellow libertarian types understood your agonizingly strained guns-in-bars analogy, but a million Kentucky voters wondered what the holy Hell you were talking about.

Here is a principled answer to questions about how you might have voted on racial rights during the LBJ/MLK reign:

"I don't think anyone can honestly say how he might have voted on anything 45 years ago. He would have been a different person then, affected by a different upbringing, a different culture, a different understanding of how a society should organize itself,

"But I will say that ending racial discrimination in voting rights was a decision we should still cherish and which was something like a century overdue when it was signed.

"The public accommodations laws of the same era raised different questions about how far government may intrude into strictly private affairs of business men and women. But for nearly a half-century they have been settled law of our Union, and if anyone thinks I am going to go to Washington and try to re-segregate the lunch counters, that person doesn't know Rand Paul."

The general idea, Dr. Paul, is to get elected. You don't need to shed your principles. You do need to brush the stray wookie hairs from your collar.



7 comments:

JohnW said...

Abolish the Department of Education? Okay, right there, I'm ready to move to a double-wide in Possum Trot just to be able to vote for him.

Jim said...

In the immortal words of Over Yonder, "Me too."

I'm just afraid he might blow it by listening to the same sorts of high-pay political nincompoops who pissed away his dad's 2008 money in a successful effort to reinforce Joe Sixpack's belief that libertarians are intellectual kin to your basic shithouse mouse.

JohnW said...

What makes me question his judgment is, what on Earth possessed him to think that going on MSNBC was a good idea?

Jim said...

Even a good guy can get seduced by the sweet magic of world-wide exposure on electrical teevee.

He now admits it was a fool's move, and his No. 1 chore is to get a boss handler who isn't afraid to wrestle him to the floor before letting him do dumb things.

Anonymous said...

Political "consultants" have always been an interesting breed for me. They can mess things up worse than the proverbial addition to the punchbowl, but when their guy/gal loses, it's always the candidate'f fault. JAGSC

Jim said...

I could tell you stories.

It is such a lunatic business, and the entry standards for "political consultants" are snake low.

My personal defense is that I never billed myself as anything other than a writer -- a "press guy." The consultant tag followed me home one day after I apparently had been observed exercising a small bit of ordinary common sense.

JohnW said...

"The consultant tag followed me home one day after I apparently had been observed exercising a small bit of ordinary common sense."
We'll overlook it this one time, but don't let it happen again.