But he doesn’t think anything’s wrong with its content. It’s strictly an image problem, he says, one that can be fixed by reaching out to that black guy, uh, er, lying dead in the street in front of a cop car.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rand-paul-the-gop-brand-sucks/
I’m curious what he’ll say to minimum wage workers who don’t earn enough to pay rent, or to rape victims who want an abortion because they’re not into raising rapists’ children, or to gays who want the same legal rights (including marriage) that every one has. Hmmm.
Paul also is a proponent of replacing the progressive income tax with a flat tax (he won’t say, but I suspect he’s on board for the so-called Fair Tax, a national sales tax that would make the federal tax system as regressive as Washington’s state tax system, wherein low-income households pay six times as much of their income to the taxman as high-income households). And a balanced budget which, coupled with the austerity policies he also favors, is one of the most efficient economic mechanisms ever invented for turning recessions into depressions. Hmmm.
I think there’s more going on here than image. Personally, I think the GOP has a policy problem, beyond their freak problem (i.e., being the party of racists, misogynists, xenophobes, and other nasty personality types). In a word, their worldview and ideas about how to run society (white police state, interning liberals in concentration camps, etc.) badly suck. Not to mention that their head-in-sand, science-denial, coal-rolling approach to really big problems will eventually drown us all, unless we want to live on rafts (think “Waterworld”).
Rand Paul happens to be the frontrunner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, by huge margins, in current polls. I suspect that won’t last, the shine will wear off when voters learn more about what he believes, but I can tell you that right now the GOP base is fawning over him. I guess I’m not shocked that people who think a standard-issue “rightwing nut” (i.e., all the other 2016 GOP aspirants) is neither rightwing enough nor nutty enough like this guy.
Image problem? Yeah, they have an image problem. They can improve their image by drowning themselves in a bathtub.