Last week, the Senator from Kentucky suggested (NYT) that Republicans might want to dial down their rhetoric on voter ID laws in order to stop alienating black voters. However, after a predictable firestorm of criticism, his spokesman walked it back on Monday, stressing that Paul had never come out against voter ID as a matter of policy. Chait doesn’t see what all the fuss is about:
Paul’s original heterodoxy didn’t take him very far out on a limb. What he told the Times was, “Everybody’s gone completely crazy on this voter ID thing. I think it’s wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it’s offending people.” Paul was not arguing against vote suppression on moral grounds but practical grounds (“it’s offending people”). He wasn’t asking Republicans to stop engaging in vote suppression altogether. Taken literally, he wasn’t even asking them to stop being crazy about vote suppression. He was just asking them not to be too crazy.
But James Poulos calls Paul’s recent comments on race “the most important development of the nascent presidential campaign”:
Our ambitious activists of all stripes have just about sucked the last drop of pathos out of “raising awareness.” But for years, the GOP’s establishmentarian leaders have come to think of Hispanics and minority outreach as virtual synonyms. Despite the occasional Condi Rice, Herman Cain, or Michael Steele, the fact is that Republicans have all but written off black Americans. They are on the verge of giving up on them, of trying to forget they exist.
For the men and women who seem invisible to the GOP, what Rand Paul is doing may or may not be a canny effort to outflank his party’s complacent elite and its cantankerous base. (Paul’s counsel is to cool it on Voter ID, not oppose it.) What it is, no matter what else, is genuine awareness.
Yes, this is a relatively new look for Paul. Yes, it has taken a while for him to find his footing. But his approach is working.
Weigel thinks everyone is missing the big picture, which is that Paul wants to restore voting rights to felons:
The irony is that Paul’s felon-voting stance is plenty radical all by itself. Go back to the stories of felon-voting laws from after the 2000 election. The reaction to the 1970s/1980s crime waves have a long tail, turning plenty of minor-looking crimes (listening in to a police radio in Florida, for example) into felonies. This ended up being a net benefit to Republicans, and, being in the business of winning elections, few hurried to change the laws. As recently as 2012, Mitt Romney could run ads scorching Rick Santorum for daring to support felon voter restoration. Paul didn’t “evolve” on voter ID, but he really has developed a daring policy change after talking extensively to black voters and leaders.
Allahpundit muses on Paul’s strategy here:
Above all, righties want someone in office whom they can trust will defend their values. The more Paul takes positions like this one — let’s be for voter ID but not talk about it — the harder that is. But now I wonder if maybe I’m missing the point of what he’s trying to do. All along, I’ve thought his chief appeal was as a man of principle — libertarian on many issues, conservative on a few, but unafraid to buck either side to defend his beliefs. I thought that’s how he’d run in 2016, precisely because he’s interested in showing righties that he’ll defend their values relentlessly in office. Maybe, though, he’s starting to re-position himself the same way that Rubio’s re-positioning as an establishment candidate. Maybe Paul’s new brand is less about standing on principle than about (as strange as it is to say it for a member of the Paul family) electability, forging an unorthodox new right-wing platform that supposedly gives the GOP its best chance in the general.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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