The Rand & Rachel Show

No matter what your politics, I think it’s safe to say that there is bipartisan agreement that Rand Paul just had possibly the worst post-election week in US political history – after winning the Republican primary for Kentucky’s US Senate seat by a “Randslide,” as some clever pundits have called it.  Paul’s performance this week was the equivalent of running a world-record-breaking foot race, in the Olympics, and proceeding to fall and break one’s leg in four places doing a “victory lap.”  Paul’s problem now is, of course, that he’s entered in a “must-run” race a few months from now, “broken leg” and all.

Paul may be the first 2010 mid-term political rookie to crash and burn on takeoff, but you can be sure he won’t be the last because the raison d’etre of the Tea Party movement is to replace pragmatic and, admittedly, sometimes hypocritical, greedy and self-promoting Washington “insiders” with fresh new “outsider” candidates who, once elected, will invade “Big Government” like flesh-eating bacteria.  Once “Big Government” has been reduced to harmless shreds, the outsider Tea Party candidates, no longer needed because government is nearly non-existent, will be free to leave their government posts and return to being ophthalmologists or whatever non-political pursuits they left to go to Washington — and we’ll all live happily ever after.  That’s the “what” of it; as far as the “how” of it the Tea Party isn’t yet quite crystal clear on that.  And if the vague, directionless product of their recent “Constitutional Convention” is any indicator, a viable Tea Party platform is a long way off.  It is that very lack of agreement (and structure) that throw the door open for Tea Party candidates, like Rand Paul, to “make it up as they go along.”

That isn’t to say that all Tea Party-ers, or their candidates, are simple-minded crackpots; Washington needs a shake-up and some “new blood.”  There is more than sufficient evidence, lately, to suggest that our Congress has evolved into a dysfunctional organism completely in thrall to special interests and corporate power-brokers.  Something must be done, because, clearly, we are slipping and it’s starting to hurt.  But our only chance of making substantive changes that keep the US in play, in a rapidly changing world order, is, in my opinion, to stick with the “starters.” 

No matter how horrible a season a major league baseball team is having, you’re never going to see management decide to sideline the pros (with their multi-million dollar contracts) and call up the farm team players to replace them all – just to teach ‘em a lesson.  That’s because a sports team, like a government, is a never-completed “work-in-progress.”  It’s too dynamic a system, there are too many variables and way too much prior investment in building a winning team for a responsible team manager to ever throw up his hands and yell “clear the decks, we’re going to start from scratch.”  I’m not saying that you’ll never hear such a statement in the MLB world, I’m just saying that if you do, don’t believe it for a second.  Either that manager will, in the end, effect some tweaks far-removed from the over-emotional, over-ambitious call for wholesale change – or get fired.

And yet that is exactly what the Tea Party’s clearest message, so far, communicates – a desire to turn government inside-out and start over – without a plan.  I keep a finger on the pulse of the Tea Party by regularly reading what’s going on with ResistNet which is the “grassroots activist” portal of Steve Elliott’s Grassfire organization.  For almost a year now, Grassfire has promoted the wholesale change-out of Congress under the catchy phrase “Flip this House.”  There has also been quite the movement to get “just plain folks” to insert themselves into local politics by becoming precinct committeepersons – no experience required.  These are positions at the bottom of the political party food chain that are so inglorious that they very often go vacant; the only prerequisite for assignment is a pulse. 

J.T. Ready - Maricopa County's Republican Precinct Committeeman

As a measure of tea party success in the local precinct drive, Mr. Jason “J.T.” Ready is currently the Maricopa County (AZ) Republican precinct committeeman.  Ready is 34 years old, active in mainstream conservative politics, and a high-profile, outspoken Neo-Nazi white supremacist who advocates installing land mines along our border with Mexico.  Ready’s position on immigration reform, which he first shared with readers of NewSaxon’s online chat room, is this:

“The truth is that negroids screw monkeys and rape babies in afreaka [sic]. Then stupid white man who licks kosher jew rear lets negroids in. … Stop Negroid immigration and integration now!!! Nature will take care of the rest.”

While on the one hand, we have politicos mulling over the prudence of allowing Richard Blumenthal to run for the Senate after he exaggerated his military service record during the Vietnam War, on the other, we have J.T. Ready’s 2006 campaign for Mesa City Council finally unraveling when he offers to be the Master of Ceremonies of Mesa’s Veteran’s Day parade despite his having been drummed out of the US Marine Corps after his Court Martial.  Apples and oranges, I know . . .  Ready is not running for the US Senate – not yet, anyway.  Despite his embarrassing showing in Mesa, Ready has vowed that he will continue to run for public office — he already has a campaign slogan:

“The Purity of the Aryan Race is the most precious resource Nature has to offer All of Humankind.”

As a blogger on DailyKos said recently:

“In most states being seen publicly with a Nazi would ruin your political career. In most states you would be shunned by your political party. But not in Arizona, and not in the Republican party.”

I’m not so sure that we can still confine the craziest of Tea Party networking to Arizona, lately the Tea Party has the “biggest tent” around.  On the other hand, the Republican Party is showing signs of wear and tear from trying to herd Tea Party “cats.”

The Problem With Rand

Clearly Rand Paul was told to sit down and take a breath which resulted in his dubious (and politically damaging) distinction of being only the third person in media history to bail on a scheduled Meet the Press appearance (definitely a bush league, albeit necessary step).  One of the reasons that Rand Paul was able to dig his whole so deep, so fast, is the very reason that the Tea Party (and Libertarians) loved him; he was a Washington outsider with an attractive, albeit inconsistent, ideology that he insistently wore on his sleeve.  And, like other recently successful politicians, Paul is well-educated and articulate enough making him a darling of the notably incoherent Tea Party just dying to have a smooth talker of their own.

Unfortunately, the Tea Party has put their money on a “horse with no name” an “outsider” just like they were looking for; the problem is that the horse has no conviction nor track record.  I know it’s a stretch to accuse such a rigid ideologue as Paul of having no conviction but witness his flipping and flopping like a flounder on the deck the minute his convictions were challenged.  And if you look even closer you’ll see that Paul struggled, not at all as well as some others have, to discover practical applications for his brand of idealism.

Naturally, since ‘liberal leftist media she-devil’ Rachel Maddow was the one feeding Paul enough rope to hang himself, plenty of Paul supporters immediately cried foul.  Sarah Palin, politics’ most infamous “Celebrity Apprentice,” produced this characteristically incoherent precis of the “Rand Incident” on Fox News:

“One thing that we can learn in this lesson, that I have learned and Rand Paul has learned now, is don’t assume that you can assume in a hypothetical discussion about constitutional impacts with a reporter or media personality who has an agenda, who may be prejudiced before they even get in the interview in regards to what your answer may be or the opportunity that they seize to getch ya. They’re looking for that ‘gotcha moment.’ That’s what it evidently appears to be what they did with Rand Paul.”

Reliable translators of Palin communiqués summarize her statement as being something like: “Hah! That lefty, Rachel Maddow doesn’t have much of a “fair and balanced” thingy going on.”

Anyone with a little more political savvy would have recognized that Maddow was actually providing Rand Paul with a (nationally televised) space in which to moderate, or at least explicate, his previous politically incendiary comments on the Civil Rights Act, made to NPR and the Louisville Courier Journal which left acres of room for explanation.  Maddow is an avowed policy wonk whose primary interest is in the intersect between ideology and pragmatism and who is sometimes maddeningly fair (IMO) in all manner of policy discussions. 

Rather than looking for a “gotcha moment,” as Palin suggested, I sincerely believe that Maddow was offering Paul a “getcha outta jail free” moment that he was too much of a rookie to accept.  After the newly victorious Paul decided to follow up by airing his politically suicidal views just prior to the Maddow interview, Maddow really had no choice but to address the “elephant in the room.”  Had she ignored it, she would have been accused of (and deservedly so) serving up a “softball interview” in deference to Paul’s having had announced his candidacy on Maddow’s program months earlier.  Let’s face it, no one interested in making great political TV would purposely try to produce a 20 minute long groaner, painful to watch, like the Maddow-Paul interview.  In the end, Huffington Post reported that Rand Paul, himself, stated that Rachel Maddow was “fair” to him but that the follow-on media coverage, in general, was not.

Of course, Paul the Elder dismisses the whole thing with a flip “they’re just jealous of his success,” which, as a parent, I am forced to let slide.

The Problem with Rand’s Politics

I don’t believe that Rand Paul is a bad man but I also don’t believe that Libertarianism, especially as packaged for the US market, is the cure for what ails us.  Just like I don’t believe that being majorly pissed off at the government (that we have permitted to evolve into its current ugly state) is a great starting point for positive political discourse and action.  Anger is a valid emotion and no will deny that the Tea Party is angry, or even that they have a right to be; but until the anger is spent and a more thoughtful, more constructive activism is nurtured by Tea Party leaders, we can expect little more from the movement than ugly public demonstrations and “Down with Everything” platforms that waste political energy and capital to no end.

We Americans are like well-intentioned weekend gardeners who can’t believe that weeds took over our vegetable patch while we played at the beach every weekend.  And like those clueless gardener’s, if we get impatient with weeding, feeding and cleaning up our garden and decide, instead, to spray the whole damn mess with Round-Up – well, you get my drift . . .   Mostly, we seem to lack patience and commitment; we are most comfortable with snap decisions, instant gratification and intellectual restlessness so it’s no surprise that, where we used to be world-class problem solvers, we no longer seem to have the stamina to carry out complex solutions.  In politics “just saying no” has replaced negotiation, compromise and the search for “win-win;” let’s face it, it’s a lot less work to say “no.”   Grassroots political movements lose interest when they realize that it could take decades and lots of hard work to achieve their goals.  Our military sells us on “The Next Big Thing” strategy – counterinsurgency – with the caution that counterinsurgency takes time to work and that we have to be patient but that it will be worth it, resulting in fewer deaths and stronger allies.  Nevertheless, within months of the counterinsurgency rollout, we are told that “guess what” this is going to take too long and that the absurd “easy, convenient Government-In-A-Box” designed to expedite counterinsurgency success, is as silly as it sounded.

Almost as silly as the notion that we can hastily and erratically dismantle the government that we have built up and expect a good result . . .

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