Here’s a thought experiment: imagine a candidate saying that if we want to balance the federal budget, we need to cut warfare as well as welfare. Throw in some talk about the military-industrial complex. Then try to picture that candidate gaining the support of Sarah Palin, James Dobson, and Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund—en route to winning a closed Republican primary in a Southern state by a landslide margin. With this impressive victory, the candidate becomes the face of the grassroots conservative activists who make up the Tea Party movement.
No experiment is necessary, actually. This describes Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Kentucky. “[W]e have huge budgetary problems and the Republicans often say, ‘Oh it’s just that welfare queen, if she’d go back to work we’d balance the budget,’” Paul observed during the campaign. “Well, the truth of the matter is, if you look at the numbers, there’s not enough money just in welfare to cut to balance the budget. You have to look at the entire budget, and approximately 40 percent of that budget is military.”
In the not too distant past, Republicans might have written off a candidate who talked this way. Doesn’t he know we’re at war? Let him print those bumper stickers about schools being well funded and the military needing to hold bake sales as he runs in the Democratic primary. Hoping to stoke these sentiments, a who’s who of hawks ranging from Dick Cheney to Rudy Giuliani did their best to make Paul seem like the second coming of George McGovern.
Kentucky conservatives stuck by Paul as the neoconservatives gunning for him shot blanks. But since winning the primary, he has started facing friendly fire. Admirers of his father, Texas congressman and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, have criticized the son for being insufficiently antiwar. To reassure Republicans that he wasn’t the crypto-pacifist the neocons imagined him to be, the younger Paul was less forceful in making certain arguments and abandoned a few of his father’s positions altogether.
