David Corn covers Paul’s fixation on Bill Clinton’s indiscretions:
On Meet the Press at the end of January, Paul accused Clinton of engaging in “predatory behavior” and taking “advantage of a girl that was 20 years old.” (Lewinsky was 22 years old, when she and Clinton hooked up.) And Paul griped, “the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this.” (Paul must have slept through much of the 1990s, for the media granted nonstop coverage to the affair and the subsequent investigation and impeachment.)
These were not random remarks; it seemed Paul was waging a one-man campaign to revive an old scandal. Afterward, he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “In my small town…we would in some ways socially shun somebody that had an inappropriate affair with someone’s daughter or with a babysitter or something like that.” Days later, Paul, during a C-SPAN interview, said that any Democrat who raised campaign money with Bill Clinton ought to return the donations because of Clinton’s dalliance with Lewinsky. In another interview, he called Clinton—who is scheduled to campaign later this month for Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky Democrat challenging GOP Senator Mitch McConnell—a repeat “sexual predator” and suggested that Hillary Clinton should return any campaign money gathered with Bill’s help.
Beinart’s take on what Rand is thinking:
Paul isn’t speaking to most Americans—he’s speaking to the Christian right.
Paul is presumably well aware that while economic conservatives loved his father, social conservatives did not. In the Iowa caucuses, for instance, Ron Paul won 28 percent among voters who said the deficit was their primary issue but only seven percent among those who said it was abortion.
For months now, Rand Paul has been trying to make inroads where his father did not. Last June, at a conference organized by former Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed, he put a new twist on his skepticism about foreign aid, arguing that America is funding Islamic regimes that oppress Christians. “There is a war on Christianity,” he insisted, “and your government, or more correctly, you, the taxpayer, are funding it.” Last October, he told students at the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University that “America is in a full-blown spiritual crisis.” And last week, he told the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage American Principles Project that “‘Libertarian’ … doesn’t mean ‘libertine’ … I don’t see libertarianism as, you can do whatever you want. There is a role for government, there’s a role for family, there’s a role for marriage, there’s a role for the protection of life.”
Paul’s effort to revive Lewinsky-gate is best seen as part of this effort.
The Dish 