So it’s come to this. Republicans are so desperate that they’re starting to believe that Rand Paul is a 2016 contender.
As Republicans chase after Hillary Clinton’s skyrocketing poll numbers with a collection of stragglers suffering from various ailments like indictments and federal investigations and continuous “ethical” challenges, they’re getting a bit desperate. Suddenly the guy who is on record palling around with a white supremacist and whose campaign worker stomped on a female Move On protester’s neck and head is looking viable.
So says Politico in an article entitled, “GOP leaders reconsider Rand Paul”. “Not that long ago, most Republican leaders saw Rand Paul as the head of an important faction who, like his father, ultimately had no shot at becoming the party’s presidential nominee. Now the question is no longer whether Paul can win the nomination, but whether he can win a general election.”
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Well, to be fair, winning the Republican primary isn’t a real thing. They started rigging the game in order to push Mitt Romney to the fore, ahead of the populist candidates. So Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) can only win the GOP primary if the Republican establishment wants him. And they just might because he can sell their message!
Paulites everywhere rejoice. Their time has come at last.
Who did Republicans ask in order to determine that Rand Paul was reaching new voters? In typical GOP epistemic closure disorder, they asked Republican National Committee members. 30 of them…
… Any and all of ’em. I can see Rand Paul’s lost Senate seat from my kitchen window…
Apparently hearing their own recycled beliefs repeated back to them from the exciting package of Rand Paul makes even establishment Republicans true believers. Yes, it’s true, their big problem isn’t their policies or their ideology or their reliance on hateful get out the vote tactics that alienate necessary voting coalitions.
They don’t need to change anything in order to grow that tent! Phew, because they totally failed to rebrand according to the 2012 post mortem. Republicans don’t need to rebrand! The problem Republicans have is that they don’t embrace their message!
Stop “diluting” the message and they will come, Rand promised.
Also, spread that stuff to Berkeley, Harlem, East Los Angeles. Yes, apparently Republicans have no clue that they need to avoid the alert, informed, and unFoxified pockets of the country in order to sell “give the rich all of your money for freedom!” message.
“To paraphrase Captain Kirk, we need to go boldly to where Republicans haven’t been going,” Rand said according to Politico. “We need to go from Harlem to Berkeley, to East Los Angeles and Laredo.”
OH! Captain Kirk! Well, why didn’t y’all say so? Now we get it. You’re hip, you’re cool, you’re fresh, you’re expanding!
If Republicans are going to crown Rand Paul because he doesn’t dilute their message, we will get to hear him explain again that liberty means giving the rich guys more of your money for the trickle down fantasy. Repeating a falsehood louder because you think the dummies aren’t getting it always endears one to the listener.
He will also no doubt be tasked with “explaining” “broke freedom” to the same Latinos that the Koch brothers are spending millions to “educate” on “personal responsibility” (something the Kochs know nada about) and how the “free market” principles embraced by Libertarians like Rand Paul are so helpful to the working class.
So helpful that the Koch brothers have to spend millions to fool the working class into buying it. So helpful.
And then, if God loves Democrats as she seems to do, Rand Paul will face Hillary Clinton in a debate and our largest national challenge will be to try not to laugh out loud.
If this huge, epic fail is for real and not just a way to fool the youth vote into thinking that the GOP takes them seriously, it will be because Republicans are doing what people in denial do. They will believe anything other than the truth. And the truth is that they have to change before they can legally and without great expenditure to fool the people win the White House again.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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