Rand Paul Victory Poses Risks For Jewish Republicans as Tea Party Movement Surges. RJC, in unusual move, opposes Tea Party candidate.
James D. Besser, The Jewish Week
Rand Paul, the Tea Party insurgent who was the upset victor in last week’s Kentucky Republican Senate primary, could be the biggest headache yet for a Republican Party that hopes to capitalize on the populist surge without getting tainted by the angry movement’s extremists.
While some political observers say Paul’s strong pro-Israel views could be a magnet for Jewish campaign givers, even some ardent Jewish Republicans are worried about what they see as the political newcomer’s views on U.S. foreign policy and his positions on issues such as civil rights. All of which led the Republican Jewish Coalition to oppose his candidacy for the nomination and, in an unusual move, to spurn him now that he is the party’s standard- bearer.
“Rand Paul is outside the comfort level of a lot of people in the Jewish community, and in many ways outside of where the Republican Party is on many critical issues,” said Matt Brooks, the RJC executive director, adding that leaders of his group worked on behalf of Paul’s primary opponent, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson.
Brooks called Paul a “neo-isolationist” and pointed to positions like his strong opposition to federal legislation barring discrimination by private businesses, although after last week’s storm of controversy he insists he would not vote to repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
University of Florida political scientist Kenneth Wald said Paul is the leading edge of a Tea Party movement that is “a huge problem pointing right at the heart of the Republican Party” — and now the most prominent figure in a churning, amorphous movement that could badly undermine the party’s outreach to Jewish voters.
Jewish Democrats, battered by recent controversies over the Obama administration’s handling of the Israel issue, couldn’t be happier.
“This is manna from heaven for us,” said Ira Forman, CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC). “And it’s not just in Kentucky; like Sarah Palin, Rand Paul is going to be very good for Jewish Democrats.”
But a prominent GOP strategist said it all depends on how the GOP responds to the grass-roots surge that has energized the Tea Party movement.
“The two elements that I see that are consistent across the Tea Party movement are demands for lower taxes and smaller government,” said Lee Cowen, who was a fundraiser for former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney in the race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. “Those are things a growing number of Jewish voters agree with.”
The Tea Party activists and their political passion offer a major opportunity for the Republicans as they seek to regain control of Congress and set the stage for the 2012 presidential election, he said.
“It’s just a grass-roots movement that’s still relatively disorganized,” he said. “It’s up to the Republicans to take advantage of it. The key will be to find ways to make this work with the Republican core.”
And a leading political scientist predicted that Paul’s ascendance could help pull a Tea Party movement with isolationist leanings closer to the pro-Israel orbit.
Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg said Rand Paul is a “godsend — he’s the sort of the person the Jewish community should be working with.”
Ginsberg says that much of the Tea Party movement is isolationist, and it includes “some who are seen as meshuganah,” or crazy.
But Paul represents a major opportunity for pro-Israel campaign givers to influence that movement, he said.
Ginsberg’s calculus applies only to campaign givers. Jewish voters “are still Democrats; it would take a major earthquake to upset that,” he said.
But with Jews making up a miniscule proportion of the overall electorate but a huge proportion of major campaign givers, any shift of Jewish money to the incipient Tea Party and its advocates could be significant in 2010, he said.
Extrapolating from Paul’s stunning victory last week to the broader Tea Party movement and to a Republican party that hopes to exploit the voter frustration it has tapped is difficult, political experts warn, in part because calling this a “movement” at all ignores its leaderless, amorphous nature.
“It’s not a single movement,” said the University of Florida’s Wald. “The most interesting thing about the Tea Party movement is that it’s so different wherever it happens to be.”
The movement encompasses everything from “tax-cutting, anti-government conservationism to loony libertarianism,” he said. “That makes it very hard to get a real fix on it.”
Republicans hope to embrace it, but many GOP incumbents are also in the cross hairs, as the recent defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) by a Tea Party insurgent at a state party convention and Paul’s victory — a huge setback for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kent.), who supported his vanquished opponent —demonstrated.
Enter Rand Paul, the 47-year-old ophthalmologist and son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), whose libertarian-oriented run for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, while ultimately unsuccessful, aroused a big enough and angry enough constituency to represent the first shot of the Tea Party wars.
The senior Paul has long been regarded as one of the least friendly members of Congress when it comes to Israel.
Not so his son. While sharing Ron Paul’s dark view of big government and the Federal Reserve, Rand Paul has issued position papers that sound like he could be reading from AIPAC talking points, praising the “special relationship” between the two allies and a “shared history and common values.”
In one statement, Paul said he “strongly object[s] to the arrogant approach of [the] Obama administration. … Only Israel can decide what is in her security interest, not America and certainly not the United Nations.”
Paul, a strong opponent of foreign aid in general, doesn’t say how he would vote on Israel’s $3 billion appropriation, but he said he opposes aid to Israel’s adversaries.
Such sentiments have earned strong criticism from the anti-Israel right, but praise from some prominent conservatives — including several leaders of the Christian right, a faction that generally worries that the Tea Party candidates focus too little on social issues such as abortion and gay rights.
Paul “opposes earmarking and supports Israel,” said James Dobson, founder of the “Focus on the Family” Evangelical empire in a statement. “He identifies with the Tea Party movement and believes in home schooling. Sounds like my kind of man.”
Some political observers, including Johns Hopkins political scientist Ben Ginsberg, predict an uptick in interest in Rand by pro-Israel campaign givers because of his strong support for Israel — and because of his sudden new status as the brightest star in the Tea Party cosmos.
But the head of a pro-Israel political action committee said he doubts Paul will attract significant amounts of Jewish money.
“In my little corner of the world, the focus is on helping incumbents who have been good on Israel — and occasionally trying to knock off somebody who has been bad,” said Morris Amitay, treasurer of the Washington PAC. “In this case, we’re talking about an open seat in Kentucky; I wouldn’t anticipate our PAC will get involved in that.”
Amitay sees the Tea Party movement as an open book as far as Israel is concerned. “It’s a conservative, populist movement that will have some influence because it’s activated a number of people to become politically involved,” he said. “Looking through my pro-Israel lens, I don’t see it as a negative; I assume most Tea Party people sympathize with Israel’s plight in a region filled with jihadists, even if they don’t support foreign aid. There are some isolationists, but they are a minority.”
But with the Tea Party a relatively leaderless political agglomeration that includes traditional conservatives, conspiracy theorists and members of old-line far-right groups like the John Birch Society, observers like the University of Florida’s Wald say it’s unlikely the movement will become centrist enough to attract even Jewish givers who focus exclusively on the single issue of Israel.
“It’s the kind of movement that attracted McCarthyites in the 1950s,” he said. “It is an open door for all kinds of extremists; all kinds of people will hop onto this movement. You see a lot of hostility to bankers that may be code text that will worry the Jews. It’s ironic, because this new kind of populism came along just as Jews were starting to penetrate the Republican Party organizationally.”
Wald said the GOP faces some difficult choices as it tries to absorb major elements of the Tea Party movement without getting tarnished by its reputation for extremism and, in some cases, nuttiness — choices that will affect the party’s prospects with Jewish voters and donors alike.
That’s clearly the kind of anxiety that has lead the Republican Jewish Coalition, the central body of Jewish Republicans, to say no to Paul, at least for now.
“We don’t write off anybody,” said RJC director Brooks. “But as it stands now, there are just too many questions about Paul. Is he more like [Sen.] Mitch McConnell, who has been terrific on Israel — or is he more like Ron Paul? His civil rights views are another indication of a tone deafness and a point of view that are troubling to a lot of people.”
There is the problem. Should you have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater? I say yes, particularly if there is a fire. Should you be held accountable afterward if you made it up and people were injured? Of course.
But that is after the fact. What they are doing now is making laws that restrict us before a wrong is committed to “protect” us. This will bind up the good with the bad and bring society into bondage under a politically correct arbitrary rule. The court must decide whose right trumps the other and it will all depend on the personal views and feelings of of the bench—like it is now.
This is what happens when a nation looses its soul and becomes a society of big ‘Gods’and little gods.
That is the key to censure. Government elitists have had a difficult time undermining the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The round about way to achieve the same result is censure by consolidation and control of powers: media, web housing, education, financial, etc. By wiping out smaller providers, they have a monopoly of a few private sector giants—loyal corporate proxies who serve to regulate content and create the appearance of a free market system. If you are lucky, for a while you may be able to write and to speak freely, but you will not be read or heard by anyone outside of your small circle. Eventually they will legislate that also.
The current financial overhaul is structured with regulations to wipe out smaller independent corporations and allow them to be gobbled up by the larger ones. Right now, today, in D.C. they are putting together a government-media-banking-complex that ends freedom in America as we know it and ties into international law and a global system.
Acting in an obscene fashion has been made a criminal offense. It too is a form of speech. As for what is obscene, the courts in Canada and I think in the US applied a local community standard. So what is obscene in the fly over country is not necessarily obscene on the coasts.
So is walking around nude wherever you please to be considered speech. Your rights end where they impinge on my rights. The court must decide whose right trumps the other.
A person has free speech so long as they can say what they want subject to the rules of the house. But who is to say that they must have the right to express themselves in any way they want. To my mind the courts can certainly decide that the citizen has free speech even if he limited in the ways he can exercise it.
So I think there is much to discuss.
America enjoyed excellent freedom of political expression for two centuries when pornography was prohibited. After pornography became protected under the same freedom of expression statute as political speech, both of them became censored simultaneously.
The media and web hosting providers, who refuse publicity to child porn, also refuse publicity to “hate speech” and other controversial political expression. That is so simple: if pornography and political speech are both “expression” in the constitutional sense, if both of them enjoy the same First Amendment protection, then logically the same restrictions should apply for both. Indeed, it would be very non-liberal to censor one type of expression (porn) but not the other (political speech). Here we see a typical sophistic problem: expanding the term’s meaning undermines it. Once freedom of expression is construed to cover pornography, and while some restrictions on pornography are universally accepted, the same restrictions are applied to any expression.
Yamit. I think you have gor something there. It started with porn. But still as a society, shouldn’t we be able to control its environment.
You have much to be thankful for. knock on wood.
I am just thankful that the Internet has yet to be sullied by porn.
Knock on wood.
It would be very non-liberal to censor one type of expression (porn) but not the other (political speech). Here we see a typical sophistic problem: expanding the term’s meaning undermines it. Once freedom of expression is construed to cover pornography, and while some restrictions on pornography are universally accepted, the same restrictions are applied to any expression.
The liberals who fought for legitimizing pornography in the 1960s, sowed the seeds of the current restrictions on free political speech.
A typical libertarian argument is that a country which suppresses some expression will eventually suppress much wider expression, even including political speech. That is nonsense. Societies constantly balance opposing objectives. That’s what the system of checks and balances is for. The libertarian argument can be applied to the government: every government tends to assume the most powers, so shall we dismantle the governments? No, but we keep them in check, theoretically, with judicial review. Contrary to the argument, it is the very equating of freedoms that dilutes them.
Imagine a society which allows everything: it would soon be ruined by mad social experimentation. It is right for societies to erect entry barriers to new ideas and ostensibly new values: their adherents have to overcome the initial hostility, even if illegally, and convince the majority that their ideas are viable. In such a way, viable ideas proliferate eventually, while the wrong ideas are filtered out. One example is the anti-slavery movement, which was illegal originally but convinced most people in time. Such incremental, slow-paced evolution might be abominable to social reformers, but the only alternative would be allowing everything, down to Nazi groupings, KKK gatherings, and drug addiction. If it is legal to ban racism, a political theory, then how much more legal should it be to ban pornography?
Quite so.
People who live in glass mental hospitals shouldn’t throw stones.
Someone needs to explain to the dickhead ira forman, that Sarah Palin is a friend of the Jewish people, unlike the president he shills for. So contrary to forman’s claims, Sarah will be a nightmare for the demorats.
SOME of the tea party movement is isolationist and anti-Israel. From what I gather the bulk of the tea party movement believes we should be fighting islamization and sympathizes with Israel. Pam Geller was at the Tennesse tea party event over the weekend. They defied CAIR’s demand to drop her as speaker. The bulk of the tea party movement is anti-jihad and not isolationist.
Therein lies the rub.
The Libertarians and the other crazies are determined to hijack the Tea Party.
The GOP chasing any significant amount of votes from the American Diaspora is akin to politically PEE PEEING INTO THE WIND. Now, the American big Jewish political money will give the GOP some cash as insurance only. But significant votes and commitment from American Jews for GOP candidates?…..IT AIN’T GOING TO HAPPEN!
American Jews have largely given up on the God of their ancestors, and now worship at the secular humanist alters of quasi socialism, one worldism, liberalism, and ecology(or earth worship).( As a follow up,they have begun the mental process of abandoning their Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel.CAN YOU SPELL J STREET?)
The process of abandoning the 5,000 year old Hebrew Jehovah has already left American Judism with enough nervous ticks to last several millenia. Can you imagine, what voting GOP would do to their neurotic souls?( Oh wait,I forgot, liberal secular humanists don’t believe in souls.)
I bet,old abandoned JEHOVAH is PISSED! Historically that has not been a good thing.Strap in tightly boys and girls, it’s going to be a very rough ride indeed!