Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky wants to stir up dialogue — a word that has been forgotten in our hyper-partisan, deadlocked political climate.
Last week, he went on record as saying that Republicans were wrong to go too crazy on voter ID restrictions and that they were offending people. In a May 11 editorial in The New York Times, Paul called for the public release of Justice Department memos legally justifying drone strikes, some of which were written by David J. Barron, President Obama’s new nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Paul is also a proponent of the Smarter Sentencing Act legislation backed by Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama Administration that would reduce mandatory minimum sentencing in certain nonviolent drug offenses and give judges more flexibility and discretion in sentencing.
Clearly, Paul is looking past capturing longtime backers of his father’s grassroots presidential campaigns. He wants to run, and he wants to win. He’s framed his outreach attempts in terms of winning and losing, stating that the party needs to boldly go where no Republicans have gone before in order to become the dominant party again.
Paul’s high-profile appearances in Memphis at a Republican National Committee event in the Sunday op-ed pages of the NYT and his speech at Howard University last April are the machinations of a politician shaping his brand — but the outreach effort itself is encouraging. While Sen. Ted Cruz continues to try to milk Benghazi and Sen. Marco Rubio denies climate change, Paul is taking much-publicized steps to widen the Republican Party’s scope and appeal. There was a lot of talk about how the GOP would respond after its 2012 general election defeat — talk of an identity crisis, a demographic problem and a need for more inclusiveness. That was followed by more intransigence, showboating — hello again, Cruz — and, of course, little substance. I supported Obama in 2012. During the Republican primaries, I looked at the selection of candidates with bemused indifference at best. While it’s too early to tell (but never too early to speculate), players like former Gov. Jeb Bush and Paul make the field easier to take seriously this time.
It says something about the sorry state American politics is in when a public official sounding open-minded and not-so-entrenched within their party line makes headlines — in the context of gearing up for a presidential run, no less. At the same time, Paul’s willingness to communicate across the aisle and beyond dogma is duly noted — as he’d hoped.
[Andrew Baldizon is a UF alumnus. A version of this guest column ran on page 7 on 5/22/2014 under the headline "New players offer hope for GOP in 2016"]
