Rand Paul needs to figure out how he’s going to present his ideas

Here is a mark of the damage Rand Paul unnecessarily caused himself by getting caught up in a long discussion with Rachel Maddow about the 1964 Civil Rights Act (and again I ask: why, immediately after winning the Republican Senate nomination, did he, in his first exposure in the national media, go on the show of a political enemy?). John at Powerline writes:

Rand Paul reportedly has canceled his scheduled appearance on Meet the Press Sunday morning. According to The Hill, this is only the third such cancellation in the show’s history; the others were Louis Farrakhan in 1996 and Saudi Prince Bandar in 2003.

Presumably Paul’s advisers realized that their candidate is not ready for the MTP stage; maybe they concluded (as I would) that he just needs to disappear for a while after his gratuitous comments about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, followed by his ringing defense of British Petroleum.

I hate to say it, but I’m afraid Rand Paul could turn out to be as big an embarrassment to the Republican Party as his father.

That last comment is unfair. A single gaffe does not make the son as bad as his obnoxious anti-American father. He just needs, as I said yesterday, to get his act together. Rand P. was born on January 7, 1963. One month earlier Bob Dylan recorded a famous song, the last line of which is: “I’ll know my song well before I start singing.” That’s counsel Rand P. needs to heed. Which he seems to be doing by withdrawing from Meet the Press.

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A. Zarkov writes:

If Rand Paul wants to tangle with a hostile interviewer, he needs to do what lawyers do in court: learn how to sell your theory of the case, otherwise he needs to stay away from hostile forums. Now, being on the right, he has virtually nothing but hostile forums. Therefore he should stick to Fox News and talk radio until he learns how to sell himself. However this guy is an obvious lightweight and appears not to know any better. The Democrats will beat him over the head with the 1964 Civil Rights Act issue without let up. It’s possible he will never recover.

With one exception, Obama stayed clear of anyone who would ask him tough questions and still does. He did subject himself to Bill O’Reilly, once, and did pretty well until O’Reilly got to immigration, and he told Obama that the illegals are lowering wages and taking jobs from Americans. Obama replied, “No, no, no,” and at that point, he had him. I was waiting with anticipation for O’Reilly to strike the fatal blow, but he dropped the issue! I nearly threw something through my television screen. There is something strange going on, no one in the media really wants to put Obama down, not even his opposition.

I wish I had an opportunity to question Obama, I go for the throat.

LA replied:

I will repeat something I’ve said many times, which Jared Taylor first said to me in conversation in the early ’90s: “They will allow you to glance off the truth, but they won’t let you wrestle it to the ground.” O’Reilly, having glanced off the truth, was instinctively and automatically following the liberal dictate never to wrestle the truth to the ground, never to discredit liberalism definitively.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 22, 2010 05:08 PM | Send