Posted on 04/28/2014 5:17:11 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Via Dan Riehl, people are going nuts over this in the Headlines thread but I don’t know why. He’s not endorsing her over some tea-party primary opponent. She has no primary opponent. He’s endorsing her over the Democrat in the race, Shenna Bellows (whose civil-libertarian cred from working at the ACLU evidently gave Paul no pause).
Even Jim DeMint, who once said he’d rather have 30 principled conservatives in the Senate than a 60-seat majority of RINOs, saw fit to endorse Scott Brown on the eve of his big special election upset in 2010. If Rand can hold an extra Senate seat for the GOP in 2014 by nudging Maine tea partiers to pull the lever for Collins, what’s the harm?
Q: You’re going to join U.S. Sen. Susan Collins for a state party fundraiser today. She’s defended National Security Agency spying programs you oppose, and she’s also running against a Democrat, Shenna Bellows, who comes pretty close to sharing your views on that and other privacy issues. Do you support her, despite disagreement on many of those issues?
A: I wholeheartedly endorse Senator Collins for re-election. I think she’s doing a great job for Maine and for the country. … I don’t really know, exactly, what her position is on the NSA; you’d have to ask her about that.
I just know my position, but I think we’re a big political party. There’s room for not-entire agreement on every issue.
So why are grassroots righties annoyed? Here’s a representative comment from Headlines:
Well, since Collins is running unopposed on the Republican side, it’s logical for Paul to support her over her democrat opponent. However, this is less about “GOP unity” than it is about Rand Paul being desperate to publicly secure his position within the GOP establishment ranks – Republicans would have supported Collins without Rand Paul’s endorsement, so, it’s all pretty meaningless as far as the Maine election goes.
Rand Paul wants to make that everyone knows that he has shifted from the conservative side, to the establishment side – and his ‘wholehearted’ support for Collins is just one more box checked.
Yeah, the “wholehearted” Collins endorsement is interesting mainly as a temperature check on how Paul’s effort to mainstream-ize himself before 2016 is going. Nearly every GOP candidate has a problem with either the establishment or with grassroots conservatives. (The only major contender I can think of who really doesn’t is Scott Walker.) Paul’s problem, needless to say, is with the establishment, who think he’s too dovish, too much like dad, and just too anti-status quo to be a safe pick, so he’s been at pains lately to try to solve it. At some point, between endorsing Mitch McConnell and shifting to a hawkish posture on Russia and running away from Cliven Bundy and making status-quo noises on abortion and ObamaCare, he risks pandering a bit too much to the donor class and thereby irritating his base of righties and libertarians. Backing Collins so effusively when he could have demurred with a simple “I always support Republicans over Democrats” might have been the last straw, definitive proof that he’s “over-correcting.” Bad enough that he’d back McConnell, tea-party enemy number one for the moment, over a grassroots favorite, but to cheer on someone who voted for the stimulus? C’mon.
The risk here isn’t that righties won’t forgive him. He’s already hard at work on a remedial pander, floating a bill to cut foreign aid to the Palestinians unless they recognize Israel’s right to exist. The risk is that he’s putting himself at a disadvantage against Cruz in the battle for tea-party hearts and minds while not reaping any concomitant benefits among the establishmentarians he’s trying to impress. Paul doesn’t expect to win their votes; all he wants is for them to see him as an acceptable nominee, sufficiently status-quo that they won’t unite to destroy him if he pulls an upset in Iowa or New Hampshire. He even met with Romney’s donor network recently, the creme de la creme of the GOP donor class, to make nice. How’s it going so far? You tell me:
The darkest secret in the big money world of the Republican coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be Clinton, a familiar face on Wall Street following her tenure as a New York senator with relatively moderate views on taxation and financial regulation.
“If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary we would love that and either outcome would be fine,” one top Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer said over lunch in midtown Manhattan last week. “We could live with either one. Jeb versus Joe Biden would also be fine. It’s Rand Paul or Ted Cruz versus someone like Elizabeth Warren that would be everybody’s worst nightmare.”…
Ted Cruz, whose wife works at Goldman Sachs, is viewed negatively by many in the industry for his support of last year’s government shutdown and scorched earth approach to political battle. Cruz fired up an activist gathering in New Hampshire earlier this month with the kind of provocative populist message that makes bankers very nervous. “The rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power, are getting fat and happy,” Cruz thundered. At the same event, Paul argued that the GOP “cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people and Wall Street.”
As a wise man recently said, the first duty of establishmentarians is to the establishment, meaning that stopping Paul (or Cruz) will almost certainly take precedence for rich Republicans in 2016 over stopping Hillary. I guess, in theory, with enough pandering Rand could convince them that he’s marginally better than her, but how much pandering could he realistically do before convincing his grassroots fans that he’s sold out and would be as disappointing to righties as president as Obama was to hardcore lefties? Maybe there’s no way out of this bind.
FURP!!
I meant I DON’T endorse suzie collins. Yeah, that’s what I meant.
The Left will stop at nothing to derail an anti-big government candidate. I hope the Right doesn’t help them.
The GOPe would have a problem with Reagan.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
Who needs Marxist/Communist Dimocraps when you have Marxist/Communist Republicans? The two parties might as well merge. The end of America keeps marching on.
Rand Paul is not that candidate
Paul is an idiot if he thinks he can ingratiate himself with the GOP Establishment. They’ll never trust him.
I’m not convinced he’s not. So far from what I’ve seen, he’s been the most vocal about stopping big government.
Actually it was the Paul’s who had a problem with Reagan.
Support and power over principle. I’ve never liked the “Paulista” foreign policy and now I’m looking at hypocrisy.
Collins is actively engaged in spreading marxism in the USA and is working hand in hand with card carrying communists to promote their agenda.
Paul could have just kept silent, but no, he has to endorse her?
More proof he isn't playing with a full deck.
“It’s nice to elect the right people, but that’s not the way you solve things. They way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things” Milton Friedman, 1975.
I agree, this is very discouraging.
Without an R behind their name we will never take the Senate or even hold the House. Nothing is perfect.
There’s only the one ugly chick left in the room.
What else was he gonna do?
It’s closing time and sometimes you just go with it.
And they did. The establishment hated him.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
