Topic: GOP - Rand Paul's Presidential Highlight Reel w/ his Libertarian Twist - page 60. (Read 205816 times)

WASHINGTON – If Republicans Rand Paul and Ted Cruz were competing in the 2016 tech primary, the senator from Kentucky on Thursday showed why he’s ahead — even if he managed to also highlight his weaknesses as a potential presidential candidate during the same appearance.

Both Paul and Cruz appeared at Lincoln Labs’ #RebootCongress conference at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington (subtitle: “Get S#!t Done”), giving a speech and answering questions from organizer-selected moderators.

“I love tech,” Cruz declared as he paced the stage for nearly half an hour with microphone in hand, regaling the scattered crowd with stories of how his parents were programmers in the 1950s and 1960s — echoing the standard campaign trope of telling, say, an Iowa audience which distant relative was born in a town that somewhat resembles a hamlet in the agricultural state.

The Silicon Valley-oriented, mostly tieless, often denim-clad crowd stared back at him. “The principle I’m going to suggest to you is, don’t mess with the Internet!” Cruz said. Exactly two half-hearted claps came from the back of the room. “The two ‘don’t mess with us caucus,’” Cruz said, laughing nervously, “and the remainder are looking to be messed with.”

It was a study in contrasts with Paul, who sat onstage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and bantered easily back and forth about Bitcoin currency, net neutrality and how urban liberals could find common ground with rural conservatives. His fluency served as a reminder that he has something of a leg up with the tech crowd; the billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel has donated more than $2.5 million to a PAC backing his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, and Rand Paul has traveled to the Valley to raise money. Napster co-founder Sean Parker has donated to RandPAC.

Requesting help to avoid a "costly and time-consuming legal challenge," U.S. Sen. Rand Paul is asking members of the Republican Party of Kentucky's central committee to create a presidential caucus in 2016.

In a letter dated Feb. 9, Paul told GOP leaders that an earlier presidential preference vote would give Kentuckians "more leverage to be relevant."

"As you may have heard, you, as a member of the Kentucky Republican Central Committee, will be the one to decide if you want to help me get an equal chance at the nomination," Paul wrote.

The letter went out to hundreds of other Kentucky Republicans ahead of the party's 54-member executive committee meeting on March 7 in Bowling Green, where Paul will pitch the caucus idea to members for a vote.

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The conventional wisdom among Republican elites is that Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is a fringe candidate with limited popular appeal. That may prove correct in the long run, but it's unsupported by recent polls -- especially last week's Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm New Hampshire survey.

In fact, the poll, which surveyed 989 general election voters, suggests that Paul is succeeding in generating support beyond the Republican base. His untraditional Republican views -- including skepticism of government surveillance and military interventions, and his call to reform U.S. prison and drug laws -- appear to be resonating.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul sat at the head table of the American Spectator's 48th anniversary dinner. To his right, his wife Kelley, who Paul joked had been invited on "date night." To his left, David Koch, the libertarian funder whose net worth hovered around $42 billion, and whom Paul had just seen at a conference of donors that reportedly went better for literally every other Republican who showed up. Scattered around the room were more donors, influential journalists for conservative publications (John Derbyshire, Byron York, Andrew Ferguson, James Taranto, Richard Miniter), members of Congress (Colorado Representative Ken Buck, Idaho Representative Raul Labrador), and John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff on Cheers.

So Paul's speech, a streamlined version of several he'd given in Republican primary states, was delivered with one of the conservative movement's biggest donors looking right at him. (They'd also talked at a VIP reception before the start of the dinner.) Paul's been talking about criminal justice reform anyway, but the context gave his remarks about Ferguson a little extra heft. To the shock of people who are unfamiliar with libertarians, Koch and his foundations had announced a prison-reform push.

"Many of us believe that if you’ve convicted of a non-violent crime, maybe you deserve a second chance," said Paul. "I think there’s room, in the concept of justice, for discernment."

Rand Paul endorsed Senate colleague David Vitter for Louisiana governor, potentially giving him a boost with Tea Party supporters.
In a fundraising e-mail sent Tuesday, Paul called Vitter a “stalwart supporter of limited government, states’ rights and the taxpayer’s best interest.” Paul, a GOP senator heading toward a likely presidential bid, is a favorite among Tea Party activists and won his 2010 race in Kentucky with their support.
“David Vitter will bring confidence, knowledge and experience to the governor’s seat,” Paul said, noting they have worked together on issues such as balancing the budget, immigration and auditing the Federal Reserve — all favorites issues among Tea Party advocates.
Vitter is the leading Republican in this year’s race to succeed Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who cannot run again because of term limits. Several Republicans have already declared their interest in running for governor, including Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle.

The legislation has bipartisan support and passed the house last year with over 300 votes from both republicans and democrats on board.

The legislation is clearly called for in the constitution, so I can’t even imagine why they need to legislate it..

The Federal Reserve claims they are exempt from oversight and they have been.

But they should not be exempt…

No other agency is exempt from congressional oversight. And the agency that regulates our currency certainly should not be exempt either.

I support Senator Paul’s legislation to audit the Fed. It makes sense. Dollars and cents, that is. Yours and mine.

We have a constitutional right to know. I am calling on the Federal Reserve to open the books and let the American people know to whom and where we are loaning our money.

But ask a few questions about forever war and invasive surveillance, and elite Republicans line up around the block for a chance to destroy you. Problem is, Paul hasn’t gone down easily. He’s statistically tied with Scott Walker to win the Iowa caucus, according to a recent Des Moines Register poll, and he’s grabbed boldfaced headlines for his efforts to reach out to black and Millennial voters, something GOP bigwigs encourage but can’t ever seem to pull off.

Hence the fear.
I’ve mentioned the 2016 race to multiple people I know who work in Republican politics here in Washington, only to have them reflexively start fretting about Paul. You would think he was Republicans’ primary antagonist in 2016, rather than Hillary Clinton.

If the party can’t stop Paul, they seem determined to isolate him. With Scott Walker’s refusal last week to rule out ground troops in Syria, and with nearly every other GOP presidential hopeful—Perry, Christie, Rubio, Graham, Bolton, King, Santorum—having taken a swing at Paul, it’s quite likely that the Kentucky senator will be the only candidate on that debate stage who favors a more modest foreign policy.
And yet still the fear remains—and for good reason. “The one candidate that could potentially bring in new Republicans to the field would be someone like Rand Paul,” a former Obama staffer said last year.

The question is whether this authenticity about his views is something that stands out in a good way in a field of many more carefully packaged candidates, or if this tale of “keeping it real” ends with a Chappelle Show voiceover informing you that Paul now manages the medical facility at an Appalachian commune, where he is paid in bitcoin and chickens.

There’s a lot of attention given to the art of explicating the motivations of Rand Paul, and the disparate coalition he’s attempting to bring together in his fledgling 2016 campaign...

...As a fan of Senator Paul, my view is that any frame of him as a cynical politician attempting to both disguise his father’s demons without insulting the base of support that he needs misses what’s really going on in any of these moments of “impetuous” comments. On nearly every topic where Paul makes a “gaffe”, it’s actually an example of a circumstance best identified by a running Chappelle Show gag, titled “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong.” It shows a critical moment for a character when he could’ve shrugged something off or declined to make an issue out of a small insult, but decided instead to “keep it real”, to disastrous effect.

This has been something Paul struggles with because he’s not a naturally crafty politician, engaged in the art of manipulation – he’s a true believer. He’s a libertarian gangster who has gone legit, but the old world still lives inside him, in his heart – so the pull of “keeping it real” never really lets him go. He’s not some canny operator trying to pull off a political exorcism on the way to the White House. He’s a true believer who can’t help going back to the truth about how he views the world, like a social conservative who knows they would be better off cloaking their views in spiritual pablum, but they just can’t help going back to “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

For each of these interviews – on civil rights, on vaccines, on any number of topics – sometimes there’s an actual moment where you can see the internal struggle, and finally, his face relaxes as he gives in, and is who he is. “In response to the interviewer’s question, Paul could have given a bland non-news making platitude, or… he could keep it real.” “What Rand didn’t know was that the interviewer would say slightly crazy things on purpose to get politicians to say much much crazier things… So when the anchor asked Paul about whether we have the god-given right to own tanks… to contract for a commercial exchange of sex for cocaine… to sell bourbon-laced raw milk… he could’ve just gone along with it. But instead he decided to keep it real.”

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who has been engaged in a courtship with Silicon Valley as he prepares a 2016 run for president, has reaped some large donations from tech donors, a new Maplight.org analysis of campaign finance data shows.

The donations went to Paul’s campaign committee, his joint fundraising committee and his leadership political action committee, RandPAC, according to campaign finance data posted between Friday and Monday, the Maplight.org analysis shows.

Among the donors are Bay Area billionaire Sean Parker, the co-founder of file-sharing music service Napster and the first president of Facebook. He contributed $7,600 to Sen. Paul’s joint fundraising committee on Nov. 3 — $5,000 of that donation was distributed to RandPAC, and $2,600 went to the Senator’s campaign committee, the limit allowed by both committees.

The senator’s joint fundraising committee is used to raise money for both his PAC and his campaign committee.

Michael Dearing of Woodside, who founded Harrison Metal and previously worked at eBay, contributed $5,000 to Paul’s joint fundraising committee. The Dec. 27 contribution was distributed to his leadership PAC, the data shows.

Facebook’s PAC also contributed $1,000 to Paul’s campaign committee on Oct 30.

Paul’s campaign committee also received $2,600 from Travis May, founder and CEO of TollFreeForwarding.com, based in Los Angeles.

MapLight.org analyzed contributions from California contributors to Paul's three committees, all of them reported in the latest round of available FEC campaign filings, covering contributions from Oct. 1, 2014, to Dec. 31, 2014.

The beginnings of what I was afraid of. Party politics before principles.

NY Times: Rand Paul Seeks Middle (Sorry, Dad)


More...http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/us/politics/paul-seeks-middle-sorry-dad.html?_r=1

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Over the past few months, Mr. Paul has been seeking to convince mainstream Republicans that he is a team player. In states like Iowa that will hold the crucial early nominating contests, he has been bringing into the fold veteran party strategists who are laying new groundwork where his father’s operation wreaked havoc when they seized control of state parties and created a bitter rift.

Before the November elections, party leaders approached Mr. Paul to ask if he would help work against libertarian candidates who were drawing support away from Republicans in Senate races where a few thousand votes could make the difference.

Mr. Paul agreed without much reluctance, top Republicans said. He filmed several ads for the United States Chamber of Commerce on behalf of Republican candidates in Iowa, New Hampshire and North Carolina. Republicans ended up taking two of those three seats away from Democrats.

Mr. Paul’s political action committee also spent $100,000 to help save the distressed campaign of Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, a target of Tea Party activists.

Harnessing the intense grass-roots energy that Ron Paul followers bring is something the Rand Paul campaign acknowledges it has to manage delicately. Jesse Benton, an adviser who has worked for both Pauls, said the expectations of the base could always be better managed.

“Their energy is so crucial, and you legitimately love and respect them so much for their dedication,” he said. “But because they care so much and they’re so passionate, they require a lot of attention and a lot of tending that does suck up campaign energy that could be used for other purposes.” (Some strategists said they sometimes have to warn overeager volunteers not to do anything too aggressive, such as covering an entire neighborhood in campaign signs and leaflets.)
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Nobody thought that former US Representative Ron Paul would show up in Iowa this week to stump with his son, Kentucky Senator and likely 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul; but when Rand took the stage to deliver the keynote at an “Audit the Fed” rally hosted by Liberty Iowa, there was a whole lot of Ron in the room.

Ron Paul shirts, Ron Paul hats, and Ron Paul stickers adorned many of the roughly 120 people that gathered in Des Moines to hear the younger Paul speak. Even the speech itself sounded a lot more like the fiery Texas Congressman of yore than the polished, diplomatic tenor that Rand has worked to fine-tune over the course of his fairly recent emergence on the national stage.

While at times Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)93% has shied away from his libertarian heritage, he seemed to embrace it fully on Friday night – to the applause of an energetic crowd of Liberty activists from around Iowa. “Anybody here want to audit the fed?” Paul bellowed to the cheering audience as he took the stage. His opening line was a shot over the bow of the Federal Reserve, and an indicator that recent competition from the rest of the 2016 field may have pushed him back into consolidating the liberty vote, before expanding his appeal to other groups in the often-cliquish Iowa GOP.

Throughout his nearly 20-minute speech, he threw out plenty of libertarian red meat to his audience, hitting on executive overreach, prison sentencing reform, and foreign non-interventionism. After tearing into the lack of transparency and accountability demonstrated by the Federal Reserve, Paul discussed the more specific problem of backing currency with undisclosed federal “assets”, which according to him constitute taxpayer liabilities. “Once upon a time, your dollar was as good as gold. Then for many decades they said your dollar was backed by the full faith and credit of government. You know what it’s backed by now?” Paul quizzed. “Used car loans, bad home loans, distressed assets, and derivatives.”

Rand Paul said a curious thing when asked, in reference to the measles outbreak across 14 states, if government should require parents to vaccinate their children. The libertarian-oriented Republican senator from Kentucky could have been expected to say, as he did, that government should not. But his reasoning took the philosophy of less regulation and more personal freedom to a whole other level.

"States don't own the children," declared Paul, who is considering a run for president. "Parents own the children."

No, we don't own our children. From slavery to child sexual abuse, the notion of owning another human has led to nothing good. Legally, we're responsible for our kids and their care, feeding and safety until they're old enough to take care of themselves. But they are autonomous human beings, which is why, unlike property, there are laws and standards governing what we can and can't do to them culled not just from individual whims and wishes, but from knowledge of child development, mental and physical health and education.

On Saturday night, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul will give a video address to the International Students For Liberty Conference in downtown Washington, D.C. One night earlier, self-exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden—who has a little less mobility inside the United States than Paul—will address ISFL "via videoconference," according to organizers. Paul has consistently spoken out on behalf of Snowden, calling his actions "civil disobedience," and saying that if Snowden faced justice he should "share a jail cell" with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Not every potential 2016er could appear on the same virtual dais as Snowden. Paul will be right at home.

"There seems to be a generational divide in opinion on Snowden, with young people more broadly supportive of his conduct," says Alexander McCobin, the president of Students For Liberty. "I think it's largely a result of young people having a different worldview these days, one that emphasizes individual empowerment and skepticism of the efforts of long-established institutions reforming themselves." (Disclosure: McCobin interned at Reason magazine when I was a reporter there.)

Paul's appearance is as good a reason as any to explain the difference between the sort of libertarian youth groups that are giving him hope for a broader, larger GOP. Students for Liberty was founded in February 2008 by McCobin, from an idea germinated in the Charles-Koch funded Institute for Humane Studies summer program. Young Americans for Liberty was founded roughly six months later, when Texas Representative Ron Paul ended his campaign for president, and "Young Americans for Ron Paul" was re-branded. Both are 501(c)3 organizations; both are still run by the former students who founded them. (Jeff Frazee, a veteran of the 2008 and 2012 Ron Paul campaigns, is executive director of YAL.)

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Thanks for the compliment and making me look up this quote (I thought it was Rand or Solzhenitsyn); hope it helps:

The Federal Reserve's cronies launched a nasty smear campaign against me because they're terrified of the momentum Audit the Fed is gaining in Congress.

The attacks are personal -- and they're only going to intensify.

That's why RANDPAC is holding a "Stand with Rand® Audit the Fed" Money Bomb to raise $150,000 starting tonight and ending on Monday.

As a former quasi-Socialist type who always found you in particular to be about the most obnoxious Libertarian type (which is no mean feat here on trolltalk), all I can say is...ya, you win this one.

I will say, however, that the right-wing Conservatives are just as much people-farmers who tend to hire more abusive ranch-hands.