Rand Paul's Gospel

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One of the earliest lessons I learned inside the Beltway Bubble is that selling a political candidate is a lot like selling a house. Most home sellers follow a set of standard tricks to make their abode as broadly appealing as possible and hide all the warts. Most campaigns for statewide office and in competitive districts, where there is a broad mix of voters to be courted, engage in a similar subter-fudge on their views. Liberals, for example, will mask their real interest in making big cuts to the defense budget. Conservatives will mask their real belief that homosexuals are immoral.

That's what makes Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul so refreshing to his Tea Party supporters and so radical to the political establishment--he broke this unwritten code at the most high-risk time, right as he was introducing himself to the general electorate. Indeed, Paul was brave enough (or dumb enough, depending on your perspective) to stand by his absolutist libertarian creed and state that he was opposed to government bans against racial discrimination by private businesses. Which is to say, he said openly what many of his peers think deep down but won't confess in public, because they know it would set off the kind of backlash that Paul's tortured explanation generated last week.

Paul's self-preservation instincts did ultimately prevail: He wound up repudiating his own past statements on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and then stopped talking to the national media. But to his credit the contrarian ophthalmologist has chosen to shun his party's moderation mask on most other issues, even with all the heightened scrutiny he's been under since he set off the racial flap. He has not backed away from his equally extreme (and less inflammatory) small-government positions that have made him a hero to the don't-tread-on-me crowd, like his support for eliminating many federal departments and agencies and his opposition to almost all legal limits on campaign contributions and on gun ownership.

This Paul's gospel is good for small "d" democrats and especially good for big "D" Democrats, for largely the same reason. By showing the true face of the Tea Party movement, or at least the dominant wing of it, Paul has injected some much-needed clarity and honesty into what has heretofore been a stilted and one-sided debate about the role and size of government since our economy almost collapsed in the fall of 2008. At the same time, he's essentially given President Obama and his party a road map--you might call it the Rand McNutty--for defusing and defeating the right-wing populism that has been threatening the Democrats' control on Congress.

Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting the so-called constitutional conservatives that Paul speaks for are racist or are indifferent to discrimination (though I do think it's clear that Obama's heritage, his otherness, helps fuel the fear and loathing many on the right feel toward him). Instead, what we have learned from Paul is his school's hierarchy of values and political priorities. As George Will recently pointed out, the Paulists cherish their individual rights and their freedom from government intrusion to such a high degree that it trumps the civil rights of African-Americans to be treated equally at lunch counters and private clubs. This does not make them bigots, but it does make them political puritans.

The same is true on many other issues and institutions. The Paulists are so committed to minimal government that they don't think there should be a central bank or other federal body to regulate the money supply; they want to terminate the Federal Reserve, not reform it. They also want to get rid of the Department of Education: They don't think the federal government should be in the business of offering tuition aid or college loans to low-income and middle-class families, supporting and incentivizing state and local efforts to close the pernicious achievement gap in this country, or ensuring students with disabilities get an appropriate public education.

The Paulists think our campaign finance system should revert to the pre-Watergate rules, going far beyond the conservative Supreme Court ruling earlier this year in the Citizens United case, with corporations and other wealthy interests giving as much as they want (except for those holding federal contracts). They would repeal the Brady law requiring background checks for gun purchases to stop violent criminals from buying guns; they seem to oppose all background checks. Also, they would repeal the ban on automatic weapons and allow individuals to buy as many handguns as they wanted in a single purchase. (On his website, Paul says he "will fight all attempts at gun control in the U.S. Senate.") And they would scrap the Americans with Disabilities Act.

What all these positions have in common, besides an intellectual consistency that is rare in U.S. politics, is that they are startlingly out of step with the views of the overwhelming majority of Americans. We know this empirically from years of constant public polling results. But we also know it practically from the last bout of right-wing populism we went through with the Gingrich revolution.

After the 1994 midterm elections, the emboldened antigovernment conservatives made a frontal assault on the Departments of Education and Commerce and a more subtle attack on Medicare, Medicaid and environmental funding, which led to the government shutdown confrontation with President Clinton. The Republicans got crushed in the court of public opinion and were forced to back down. Clinton went on to make the 1996 campaign a referendum on the GOP's antigovernment extremism, and won handily. The mask of moderation was soon back in place, and for eight years it bore a striking resemblance to George W. Bush, the compassionate conservative-in-chief.

Of course, the mood of the country, and the center of governmental gravity, has shifted dramatically since then. In the wake of the sweetheart bailouts, the AIG bonus scandal, the botched handling of the stimulus and health care bills, and the explosion of the federal deficit and debt, there's been a profound rise in public distrust in and disillusionment with government, across the political spectrum. For much of the last year, the Tea Party movement, despite its lack of coherence and leadership, has tapped into and harnessed that anger and anxiety with a simple, visceral and squarely negative appeal. Government is too big, too intrusive and too profligate. And down went the Democrats' support among the frustrated middle.

But now that Rand Paul has pulled the mask back off the core of the Tea Party movement, we're getting to see the full philosophical Monty: how much government the Tea Partiers actually want to cut, how little regulation they actually support, etc. This gives the Democrats, who have been on the defensive with the center almost nonstop since the stimulus bill passed, a priceless opening heading into the November midterms to reset the big-picture debate about what kind of government we need now, redefine their opposition and in the process reclaim the public trust. To do so, the Democrats won't have to reinvent the wheel--they'll just have to prove that the Republicans would be much more dangerous drivers.

That process has already begun with the White House's framing of the financial reform debate. Up until recently, the Republicans have been able to get away with their own form of Wall Street double-dealing, exploiting the antibailout anger in public while doing the bankers' bidding in private. But Obama and company have effectively outed their opponents in the last few weeks, and the Republicans have begun paying a heavy price for looking weak and weasely on Wall Street reform. Here we have a relatively fair fight, and smart government--or at least smarter government--is beating no government.

If the Democrats really want to build on these gains, they would make Rand Paul the new Newt, hold up his extreme antiregulation views as the GOP's party line and hammer the Republicans for aiding and abetting financial fraud and crony capitalism. That will not only keep the GOP and its Tea Party-favored candidates on the defensive, it will drive a wedge between the core Tea Partiers who think government's always the problem and their centrist sympathizers who know Wall Street is the bigger threat in this case. It will also manage to co-opt and marginalize the Tea Party in one swoop.

The other area of maximum opportunity for the Democrats, and maximum vulnerability for the Paulists, is on education. As the cover story in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine spelled out, Obama's greatest domestic success as president has been to free the Department of Education from the grip of its assorted constituency groups and transform it into a catalyst of innovation for our outdated and ineffective public school system. The Paulists would not just stop that progress dead in its tracks--they would also rob the country of any national leadership and profoundly undermine our ability to get out of the competitive hole we're sinking deeper into internationally.

If that weren't enough, the Paulists would shut off all college student aid--Pell Grants, direct loans, Title IX funding--and as a result deny millions of Americans an opportunity to get a college degree. That's not spin or hype, but an unavoidable consequence of eliminating the Department of Education. It's also a campaign ad that writes itself. Every Democrat running against a Paulist should be on the air with this devastating message--John Birch wants to cut every last dollar of college financial aid and kick your kid out of college--until his opponent disowns his Tea Party support.

That's not enough to get Democrats, who have a lot of warts to hide right now, home free this November. They would help themselves even more by responding to the frustrated middle's widely shared concerns about the expansion of government and taking some meaningful steps to crack down on spending--such as the ersatz line-item veto Obama unveiled this week. That would make the choice I am suggesting they frame that much more stark, and substantially more credible. Forget about selling a home--that's a recipe for keeping the House.

Dan Gerstein, a political communications consultant and commentator based in New York, is the founder and president of Gotham Ghostwriters. He formerly served as communications director to Senator Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and as a senior advisor on his vice presidential and presidential campaigns. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.

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