After this I’m done. Dude ain’t gonna be president and I’m sick of pretending he’s relevant.
The only decent responses to Paul’s racist past in favor of the candidate that I’ve seen are ones that acknowledge it, consider the candidate greatly flawed because of it, yet insist that he would be nonetheless instrumental in implementing other desirable policies. Look here, here, and here for examples of that. My problem with these, however, is that they imagine Paul as a vehicle for political action rather than voter protest — and nothing about Paul suggests he could ever effectively act on the things these supporters appreciate about him.
To explain why requires imagining a President Paul, and the trouble with doing this is that the way Paul would operate in office is exactly why he can’t get elected. You’ll see what I mean as I continue.
I get the feeling like I might be the last of a bunch to send this around but it’s pretty darn good. Well worth a read. Strikes me as well that this same critique is relevant to much of Obama’s rhetoric four years ago. Pitched as one to change the system, he’s now stuck working within it. Systemic change is always hard, let alone when you’re proposing to do it on the scale that Paul is.
