Turns out tea party darling Rand Paul will likely morph into just another garden-variety neo-con GOP candidate, if his Republican Party handlers get their way, and it appears that they will.
Paul’s Republican handlers forced him to cancel a “Meet the Press” appearance — only the third public figure in 62 years to reneg on his agreeement to be interviewed. Conservative commentator Michael Medved, who noted, “the other no-shows were Louis Farrakhan and Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia,” outlined the strategy Paul’s Handlers will pursue:

It’s not too late to reboot his campaign but any effort to do so will require a new dose of rhetorical discipline and ferocious focus…He will also need to distance himself as quickly as possible from the fringe-candidate nuttiness surrounding his father’s two presidential campaigns (in 2008 and as a Libertarian standard-bearer in 1988). If he fails to do so he’ll suffer humiliating defeat but at least encourage Republicans across the country to disregard another Paulestinian presidential run in 2012 as a dangerous dead-end for conservatives who yearn for meaningful victories.

As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell added, chillingly “He’s said quite enough for the time being in terms of national press coverage.” The Wall St. Journal Washington Wire reports that Jesse Benton, who coordinated media damage control for Paul’s father, has been brought in to help salvage his son’s campaign, and a staff shake-up is anticipated.
Paul has been nominated by his party for less than a week, and already he has ticked off African Americans, people with disabilities and miners with waffling explanations of his views. Not an impressive start.
As SoonerBlue2‘s blog, “Is Rand Paul folding like a cheap lawn chair?,” puts it”:

Rand Paul will be carted off and muzzled by the Republicans very soon .. rushed over to Fox News for damage control .. as they try to figure out how to spin a Republican nominee for the US Senate who opposes parts of the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Fair Housing Act.

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reports that the reedy-voiced Paul’s next big media appearance will be a Memorial Day radio interview with Louisville’s WHAS, which has the most powerful signal in the state. WHAS is owned by, you guessed it, Clear Channels, which features Rush Limbaugh and other reactionary yakkers. Expect softball.
Kentucky Attorney-General Jack Conway’s campaign ought to be flogging Paul’s MTP no-show for all that it is worth. “In Rand Paul, we have a candidate for the United States Senate who is scared to appear on America’s number one political affairs program and explain his views. What a wimp.”
Or, alternatively, “Does Kentucky, the state that produced fierce fighters like Henry Clay and Muhammed Ali, need to be represented by a U.S. Senator who is cowered by the big bad media? I think not.”
Or, more affirmatively, “Kentucky needs a Senator who is not afraid to be fully-engaged in the great issues of the day. Only one candidate has the courage and brains to meet this challenge, and his name is Jack Conway.”
The ‘wimp’ and ‘scardy-cat’ memes may best be promulgated by Conway’s Democratic supporters, rather than the candidate himself. But it would be a political sin to let Paul’s chicken-out from Meet the Press and other open forums go unchallenged.
Maybe Colorado Dems can lend some of those chicken suits to Kentucky Democrats who want to protest against the muzzling of Rand Paul.

It’s been pretty obvious for a while that there’s a major split between Hispanics and non-Hispanics on the immigration policy furor sparked by Arizona’s new law authorizing state and local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws.
A new MSNBC/NBC/Telemundo poll helps outline the political choices this situation poses for both parties.
To put it simply, white Americans tend to support the Arizona law while Hispanics tend to oppose it, by roughly even two-to-one margins. But the internals of the poll tell a more interesting story. The short-term advantage to Republicans of loudly backing the Arizona law is reinforced by the fact that many Democratic-leaning voters–notably suburban women and women over 50–say they’d look favorably on candidates raising Arizona. And the long-term problem for Republicans is reinforced by the finding that hostility to the Arizona law–and to the GOP–is especially strong among younger Hispanics.
Complicating the picture further is the fact that a sizeable majority of all Americans (60-29) continue to support some sort of comprehensive immigration reform with provisions that include stronger border security and sanctions against both employers of undocumented workers and the workers themselves–short, however, of deportation. (This is what TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has been pointing out). And big majorities want Congress to do something about the problem.
This last finding may tempt Democrats to move ahead with comprehensive reform in Congress, heightening Hispanic hostility to alternative approaches while convincing non-Hispanic voters that it’s possible to increase enforcement without deportation schemes or potential harrassment of citizens and legal immigrants. But as Jon Chait notes today, certain GOP obstruction of comprehensive immigration reform legislation might simply increase the frustration of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic voters about the status quo, while shifting attention away from Republican extremism on the subject. And as TDS Co-Editor William Galston recently argued, highlighting this issue is a perilous strategy for Democrats, given the likely composition of the 2010 electorate.
There are big risks and big tradeoffs for both parties in making immigration a big issue in 2010. I doubt Republicans in most parts of the country are going to be able to keep themselves from expressing solidarity with Arizona and trying to make this a wedge issue. Democrats need to be more consciously strategic than that, which probably means a principled position that avoids the extremes of “amnesty” as well as deportation or ethnic profiling by law enforcement agencies–but that also makes Republicans play offense on immigration, and lets them become truly offensive.

Sarah Palin, political kingmaker (or queenmaker, as the case may be) has been on quite a roll lately. She was one of the very first national Republicans to endorse Rand Paul before he went on to trounce Trey Grayson and become the new face of the Tea Party Triumphant. And more recently, candidates for highly competitive June 8 primaries in CA (Carly Fiorina) and SC (Nikki Haley) have surged in the polls shortly after a Palin endorsement.
But Palin’s rep as someone with the political Midas Touch took a hit yesterday in, of all places, her native state of Idaho. In the Republican primary to face vulnerable Democratic congressman Walt Minnick, the candidate that Palin (like other national Republicans) endorsed and personally campaigned for, Vaughan Ward, lost yesterday to state rep. Raul Labrador.
Vaughan had a very large financial advantage in the race, but succumbed in no small part because of high-profile stumbles, including a speech in which he (or his speechwriter) lifted whole lines from Barack Obama’s famous 2004 convention keynote address (!), and a debate where he insisted that Puerto Rico is a foreign country (which didn’t get past Labrador, who was born there).
You can rightly say none of that was Palin’s fault, but she did do her personal appearance with Ward after, not before, his most famous gaffes. Labrador had some Tea Party backing (though Minnick, who has voted against most of the top Obama administration initiatives, has actually been endorsed by Tea Party Express, which apparently wanted to boost its nonpartisan bona fides), and was also supported by the local conservative hero, former congressman Bill Sali. In any event, St. Joan of the Tundra couldn’t pull her guy across the finish line.
In other news of Palin-backed candidates, the bizarre saga in SC involving allegations by a political blogger (and longtime conservative activist) that he had an “inappropriate physical relationship” with Nikki Haley continues to hang fire. The site which originally published the allegations is now trickling out purported text message records involving conversations between the blogger and Haley’s campaign manager that indicate the two were collaborating very recently on efforts to supress rumors of an affair, but don’t really corroborate the affair itself. And the Palmetto State zeitgeist seems to be turning in Haley’s favor, in the absence, so far at least, of real evidence to back the allegations.

Kentucky voters seeking a better understanding of the roots of the political, social and economic beliefs of GOP senate nominee Rand Paul should have a gander at some of the more revealing, but largely overlooked articles about his father’s views.
For openers, sample “Who Wrote Ron Paul’s Newsletters?” by Julian Sanchez and David Weigel, posted at Reason.com, the website of libertarian Reason Magazine. The article is mostly an expose of the influence of two libertarian activist-‘intellectuals,’ Llewellyn Rockwell and Murray Rothbard, on Rand Paul’s father, Ron Paul. The authors, who apparently identify with the anti-racist wing of the Libertarian movement, give no quarter to Paul’s mentors:

Ron Paul doesn’t seem to know much about his own newsletters. The libertarian-leaning presidential candidate says he was unaware, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of the bigoted rhetoric about African Americans and gays that was appearing under his name. He told CNN last week that he still has “no idea” who might have written inflammatory comments such as “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks”–statements he now repudiates. Yet in interviews with reason, a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists–including some still close to Paul–all named the same man as Paul’s chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.
Financial records from 1985 and 2001 show that Rockwell, Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. The company was dissolved in 2001. During the period when the most incendiary items appeared–roughly 1989 to 1994–Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist “paleoconservatives,” producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic. To this day Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul–accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman’s recent writings and audio recordings.

The authors go on to cite several credible sources affirming the close ties between Rockwell, Rothbard and Ron Paul, and note other issues of the newsletters that printed vicious slurs against Martin Luther King, Jr.They say Paul once claimed that his most lucrative source of donations was the mailing list for “The Spotlight,” a virulent anti-Semitic tabloid run by Holocaust denier Willis Carto. Elsewhere Rockwell has railed against “state-enforced integration,” and the authors say:

…Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an “Outreach to the Rednecks,” which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an “unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.”…Anyone with doubts about the composition of the “parasitic Underclass” could look to the regular “PC Watch” feature of the Report, in which Rockwell compiled tale after tale of thuggish black men terrifying petite white and Asian women.

Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between the racial views of Ron Paul and his mentors on the one hand, and Rand Paul’s views on the other. But, as Joe Conason notes in his Salon.com post, “The roots of Rand Paul’s civil rights resentment”:

To understand Rand Paul’s agonized contortions over America’s civil rights consensus, let’s review the tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him. Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as “paleolibertarian,” led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the “paleoconservatives” behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism.

In his article in The New Republic, “Angry White Man:The Bigoted Past of Ron Paul,” James Kirchick sheds light on a sort of split in the Libertarian movement, which puts Paul and his followers and mentors in the ‘paleo-libertarian’ camp:

The people surrounding the von Mises Institute–including Paul–may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history–the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent Washington libertarian told me, “There are too many libertarians in this country … who, because they are attracted to the great books of Mises, … find their way to the Mises Institute and then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of libertarian thought.”

Kirchick’s article goes on to cite even more repulsive examples of racial slurs and bigotry towards other groups in Ron Paul’s newsletters. Of course the elder Paul has done as much as he can to distance himself from the views he was so proudly associated with a decade ago. Rand Paul stretches even further to disavow such overtly racist views, but seems unable to completely let go of the racial attitudes he was raised around, and so he stumbles around the Civil Rights Act.
History provides numerous examples of political leaders who were more progressive than their parents, and Rand Paul has been given that opportunity. Regrettably, there are also plenty of politicians, like W and Rand Paul, who make sympathetic noises about change and equal opportunity, but when it comes to policy, can’t quite make the break.
Rand Paul has been muzzled by his GOP handlers, as far as “Meet the Press’ and other in-depth interview programs are concerned. They hope to deprogram some of his paleo-libertarianism, steer him toward the center, or at least the neo-con right and block one of the Democrats’ best pick-up opportunities. There won’t be any free rides, however, from his Democratic opponent, Kentucky Attorney-General Jack Conway, who is equally-determined to hold Paul accountable for his noxious views on race and economic privilege.

This item is by Alan Abramowitz, who is Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University and a member of the TDS advisory board.
As Ed Kilgore recently discussed at FiveThirtyEight.com, it has become almost an article of faith in Republican circles that the best way for the GOP to regain the ground it has lost in the last two elections is to nominate candidates who take consistently conservative positions on the issues facing the country. According to the “move right and win” theory, by standing forthrightly for traditional family values, smaller government, and less regulation of business, Republican candidates can energize their party’s base and win back conservative voters who became disillusioned with the free-spending ways of the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans.
But while the move right and win theory is extremely popular among Republican activists, it directly challenges the widely accepted view of American voting behavior among election scholars. According to the median voter theory first proposed by Anthony Downs in his seminal work, An Economic Theory of Democracy, general election candidates in the U.S. who take strongly conservative or strongly liberal positions tend to alienate moderate voters and therefore perform more poorly at the polls than candidates who hew more closely to the center of the ideological spectrum.
Fortunately, there is some readily available evidence that allows us to test these two competing theories. We can compare the performance of moderate and conservative Republican incumbents in recent U.S. Senate elections. If the move right and win theory is correct, we should find that conservative incumbents did better than expected based on the normal vote for their party while moderate incumbents did worse than expected; if the median voter theory is correct, however, we should find that moderate incumbents did better than expected based on the normal vote for their party while conservative incumbents did worse than expected.
In order to determine whether Republican incumbents did better or worse than expected based on the normal vote for their party, I measured their vote share compared with that of the current or most recent Republican presidential candidate in their state. I measured the conservatism of Republican senators based on their voting records in previous two years using a modified version of the familiar DW-NOMINATE scale with a range from 0 (moderate) to 8 (very conservative).
Figure 1 displays the relationship between the conservatism of Republican senators and their electoral performance. A positive electoral performance score means that a senator ran ahead of the Republican presidential candidate while a negative score means that a senator ran behind the Republican presidential candidate.

The results in Figure 1 show that there was a fairly strong negative relationship between conservatism and electoral performance. The more conservative the voting record, the worse the performance of the incumbent. Republican senators with moderate voting records like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and John Chafee generally ran well ahead of the Republican presidential candidate in their state while those with very conservative voting records like John Ashcroft, James Inhofe and Jim Bunning frequently ran behind the Republican presidential candidate.
The results in Figure 1 would appear to support the median voter theory and undermine the move right and win theory. Before reaching this conclusion, however, we need to control for a variety of other factors that influence the outcomes of Senate elections involving incumbents such as the strength of the challenger, the national political climate, and the presence of any major scandals or controversies involving the incumbent. Therefore Table 1 presents the results of a multiple regression analysis of Senate election outcomes including all of these predictors along with the conservatism of the incumbent’s voting record. Challenger strength is measured by the natural logarithm of challenger spending in thousands of collars, the national political climate is measured by dummy variables for each election year, and scandals or major controversies are measured by a dummy variable. Once again, the dependent variable is the performance of the incumbent compared with the Republican presidential candidate.


The results in Table 1 provide additional support for the median voter theory. After controlling for challenger strength, the presence of major scandals or controversies, and the national political climate, the conservatism of the incumbent’s voting record continues to have a strong negative influence on incumbent electoral performance. For every additional one point increase in conservatism, Republican incumbents lost an additional three percentage points in support relative to their party’s presidential candidate.
Conclusions:
Evidence from U.S. Senate elections since 2000 provides strong support for the median voter theory of U.S. elections. This evidence shows that conservatism had a significant negative effect on the electoral performance of Republican incumbents. Based on these results, efforts by the Tea Party movement and other conservative activist to purge moderate incumbents and pressure Republican candidates into taking more consistently conservative positions are likely to have a detrimental impact on the GOP’s performance in future elections.

It’s been quite an election cycle so far for the South Carolina Republican Party.
First you had the Mark Sanford psycodrama, resulting in a failed impeachment effort and lots of material for late-night comics and Democrats.
Then there was the speech by Lt. Gov. (and gubernatorial candidate) Andre Bauer comparing beneficiaries of the school lunch program to “stray animals.”
And throughout it all, you had Sen. Jim DeMint ranging around the country intervening in Republican primaries to promote a rightward lurch in the GOP, while his Senate colleague, Lindsay Graham, appears to have been intimidated into curtailing cooperation with Democrats on climate change and immigration legislation.
And now with the gubernatorial primary just two weeks away, the front-runner, arch-conservative state Rep. Nikki Haley, has been hit with allegations of an illicit affair by a former Sanford (and Haley) staffer who is now a self-styled “bad boy” political blogger.
The blogger in question, Will Folks, has a rather sketchy reputation, in part because he left the governor’s staff in 2005 after being convicted of domestic violence. Haley, who is married (as she was at the time of the alleged “inappropriate physical relationship”) is angrily denying the whole thing, while her friend Sarah Palin has joined other supporters in attacking the allegations as a dirty trick engineered by her political enemies.
Now the web site that published Folks’ statement on the affair is rather broadly hinting that it has years of emails and text messages between the two that it will make available if Haley has the guts to sue for libel.
All this is occurring just as a new PPP poll (conducted before this story broke) shows Haley opening up a big lead over the GOP gubernatorial field, though likely heading for a runoff.
Haley had started the race at the back of the pack, with the unwelcome reputation as Mark Sanford’s protege. But early backing from out-of-state conservatives (e.g., Erick Erickson of RedState) and then endorsements from Jenny Sanford and Palin had helped earn her the prized Most Conservative mantle in the race.
And now all this.
There’s no telling how the latest Palmetto State saga will turn out, but it could be good news for one of the two Democrats (Vincent Sheehan and Jim Rex) in the gubernatorial race. I mean, really, how much craziness from one political party in one state can voters accept?

In this week’s ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira affirms that, despite all of the controversy over Arizona’s new law empowering police to harass suspected immigrants, the American public continues to support comprehensive immigration reform. As Teixeira explains:

In a recent AP-Gfk poll…the public was asked whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that the Obama administration had not yet passed a comprehensive immigration bill. A plurality of 48 percent pronounced this a bad thing, while just 9 percent thought it a good thing (41 percent thought it was neither).

And not only does the public want action; They want fairness for illegal immigrants:

The public particularly wants to see a path to citizenship made available. Fifty-nine percent in the same poll favored “providing a legal way for illegal immigrants already in the United States to become U.S. citizens” compared to 39 percent who were opposed.

Despite the Arizona distraction, explains Teixeira, the public wants policy-makers to address immigration reform in a constructive way — as ” the real solution to the immigration problem. The public still wants the country to move in this direction and policymakers should, too.”