Senator Rand Paul, in an event in Greenville, North Carolina, drew a line in the GOP sand.
“I don’t see Common Core being—if you’re for Common Core and you’re for a national curriculum, I don’t see it being a winning message in a Republican primary,” Paul said in an interview with Brietbart News.
“If there’s a Republican candidate out there—let’s just say there’s a hypothetical one that’s for Common Core,” Paul said. “I’m saying that that hypothetical candidate that’s for Common Core probably doesn’t have much chance of winning in a Republican primary.”
Let me suggest another hypothetical candidate runs in the Republican primary who, oh, say, hired as one of his key aides a person holding explicitly racist views and who had written a column “John Wilkes Booth Was Right”; who declared he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act; who argued that the United States went to war against Iraq in 2003 because of former Vice President Richard Cheney’s ties to Halliburton; and who worked for the presidential campaign of his father, who believes the attacks on 9/11 were an inside job. My guess is your guess is that individual doesn’t, and maybe even shouldn’t, have much chance of winning the primary to represent the party of Lincoln. But we’ll see.
The debate about the merits of the Common Core is a legitimate one (a good debate about it can be found here). Primary voters can decide how much weight they place in where one stands on it; whether it’s an issue intelligent and principled Republicans can disagree on (and if wrong be forgiven for) or whether it’s a hill to die on.
As a general matter, it seems to me that the mindset that says that support for the Common Core is disqualifying is indicative of a deeper problem, which might be called the Purification Impulse. This refers to those who judge individuals not in the totality of their acts but hyper-focus on this or that perceived deviation from the party line. It’s the eagerness to expel heretics from the temple.
To understand what’s dangerous about this approach to politics, consider that as governor of California Ronald Reagan signed into law legislation liberalizing abortion laws and signed into law what Reagan biographer Lou Cannon called “the largest tax hike ever proposed by any governor in the history of the United States”–one four times as large as the previous record set by Governor Pat Brown. Do we really wish in retrospect that Reagan’s actions, some of which he later regretted, should have disqualified him from winning the Republican nomination? Based on the Common Core argument by Rand Paul, it seems as if he would have declared Reagan as insufficiently pure.
The target of Rand Paul’s comment was clearly Jeb Bush. Senator Paul, who is a committed libertarian (whose philosophical tradition is quite different than conservatism), has reason to fear Bush if he enters the presidential race. Now I have no idea if Bush will run, and if he does, no one has any idea how well he’ll do. But the effort to paint Governor Bush as a RINO is really quite silly, and demonstrably so. As between Rand Paul and Jeb Bush, Bush is the more conservative person with a much more impressive conservative record. Which probably explains why Rand Paul is targeting him in such a clumsy fashion.
