Posted on 02/28/2013 1:13:38 PM PST by Sir Napsalot
(snip) Paul is, in essence, a non-interventionist who’s been trying to rebrand himself as a realist to better influence a party that’s been dominated by hawkish voices since the early 2000s. And his strategy, crucially, has been neither the “go along to get along” approach that McCarthy criticizes nor some kind of frontal, guns-blazing assault on the “Fox-fed” ideas of “Tea Party neocons.” Instead, Paul has done what successful politicians tend to do: He’s picked his battles, done outreach to his critics, and consistently framed his arguments in language that conservative voters and activists understand. This has enabled him to break with the party’s hawkish tilt on a number of substantive questions, from the Libya and Syria debates to issues of executive power to the question of whether containment should be an option for dealing with Iran, without coming in for anything like the attacks that greeted Hagel’s nomination. He’s put his foot in his mouth here and there and taken fire from both his friends and foes along the way, and future world events (particularly events related to Iran) may upset his tightrope walk. But at the moment he seems like living, breathing proof that there’s room for actual foreign policy debate within the Republican coalition, and that not every non-hawk need be dismissed as a RINO and read out of the party.
What Paul seems to understand is that the Republican base doesn’t really have a detailed set of foreign policy positions: What it has, instead, is the cluster of sympathies and instincts (pro-Israel, pro-military, nationalist rather than globalist, fretful about radical Islam, skeptical of international institutions) that Walter Russell Mead has famously dubbed “Jacksonianism,” .....
(Excerpt) Read more at douthat.blogs.nytimes.com ...
But the fact that realists who fall into this category (like Colin Powell) or else have drifted into it (like Hagel, since 2004 or so) are now regarded with hostility by most Republicans emphatically does not mean that it’s impossible to sell a more restrained foreign policy vision to the Republican electorate.
You just have to actually, you know, sell it......"
Be sure to read the whole opinion piece, AND readers' response.
This is the party ‘realists’ trying to cover up Paul’s @ss.
The so-called model party realist is Colin Powell.
‘Nuf said.
Senator Paul does not realize that the confirmation vote is meant to confirm the Senate believes the candidate will represent the Nations best interest.
non-interventionist realist the Powell .....enough said
He ended his aspirations over a confirmation vote for a cabinet secretary? Gimme a break. Who is more pure for you? Amnesty Rubio? Or perhaps we can just repeat 2012 and run a bunch of single issue conservative candidates to split the vote and wind up getting someone like Jon Huntsman or Jeb Bush.
When Paul voted to confirm Hagel he confirmed his own anti-Semitism, in general conservatives do not support anti-Semitics.
Whatever the heck it was that replaced it got Republicans thrown out of the White House and the Senate for some years already -- and maybe some years to come.
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