In an opinion piece in TIME, Rand Paul just ensured he will not become the Republican nominee for President in 2016.
First off, the piece is titled, “We Must Demilitarize the Police”. That will serve him well with true Libertarians, but not with neocons, and not with the Republican establishment, which has always suckled at the teat of a law-and-order platform, and has since at least the 1950s.
The most damning paragraph in his piece is:
Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.
Republicans have been insisting we are a post-racial society – well, except for blaming all of the problems that “inner-city youth” has on a “culture” that encourages “absent fathers” and “lazy takers”. Anyone who doesn’t think those dogwhistles are intended to be racially coded is just not paying close enough attention.
Paul the Younger is undoubtedly trying to live down his recent (in)famous statements about the unfairness of forcing restaurants to serve people like Dr. Martin Luther King. Paul is smart enough to know that no one will be elected President with the dismal percentages of votes from blacks and Hispanics that Romney and McCain were able to pull – and no Republican will do better than that in the foreseeable future without doing something about the terrible image Republicans have among most groups who don’t consist of aging middle-class white Christian males. So Paul’s trying to reach out.
His problem though is that he is, at best, grasping at symptoms, not at the underlying causes. Yes indeed, police forces must be demilitarized. But the problem that led to the militarization is not, as Paul suggests, simply a matter of too much federal government, a too-big Department of Homeland Security, and an erosion of rights dealing with seizure of property by law enforcement. Some of these are legitimate issues, yes. But the racial aspects – which Paul mentions but does not further address – need to be not only provided with one sentence of lip service, but actually dealt with.
What Paul did here was merely try throwing a gnawed-clean bone to a constituency that wants real policy suggestions to address real racism. Undoing any good that might do, he also made further noises to reassure the anti-gubbermint crowd that he’s still on their side. The result is that he said nothing useful. His anti-federalist rhetoric was intended to subtly hide-while-confirming an opposition to social spending (read: food stamps for welfare queens), which stands in direct contradiction to his new-found concern-without-practical-consequence toward race issues.
His one recognition that perhaps blacks have a right to complain about too-big government isn’t going to win him any friends, either with the people for whom he still won’t give any real acknowledgement, or among the Tea Party which doesn’t want any honest acknowledgement of racial matters at all.
Just ask Eric Cantor what happens if the nutty right thinks you’re insufficiently pure. We can expect young Mr. Paul to win not a single Republican primary.