Rand Paul vs Hillary Clinton 2016
by Jesse J. Lewis, Sr.
According to CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference)
For the second year in a row, libertarian Rand Paul was chosen as their leader. Paul laid out his vision one day after winning the CPAC’s 2016 presidential straw poll and several days after a Washington Post columnist suggested he has emerged as the top choice among the GOP’s conservative wing.
On Sunday, Paul acknowledged that he has tapped into young Americans, including those ‘fed up” with the National Security Agency tapping into their cellphone records.
“The fourth Amendment is just as important as the Second Amendment,” said Paul, who had been critical of the scope of the NSA’s domestic spying since those efforts were exposed last year. “That ‘s what distinguishes me from other Republicans.
Paul defended his foreign policy views, including his position that the United States should seek “respectful”relations with Russian President Vladmir Putin, who has sent troops into the Crimean region of Ukraine amid the country’s political turmoil.
Paul said he would warn Putin that he’s crewing ‘chaos” and potentially the next Syria-type crisis. He also said he embraces the Reagan maxim of “Don’t mistake our reluctance for war for a lack of resolve.”
Said Paul: “People still need to know this. Were I in charge, I think they would.”
He also said he has discussed with his family a presidential run and has “done everything that would make it work, but I still haven’t made up my mind.”
Paul finished with 31 percent of the CPAC vote, ahead of Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, considered Paul’s top competition for the Republican Party’s conservative mantle.
William J. Bennett, U. S. secretary of education from 1985 to 1988 and director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H.W. Bush, wrote in a CNN.com piece that the GOP must embrace multiculturalism if it expects to compete with Democrats in future elections. “With the nation’s changing demographics, Republicans can no longer rely on the south and Midwest to carry them to victory in 2012,” he stated, “Instead, they must broaden their base into traditionally purple and blue states. It’s an uphill battle: President Obama leads by a sizable margin with women and by wide margins with Latino and Black voters. But it’s not insurmountable.”
Patricia Carroll, a CNN camerawoman, made headlines after she says whites at the Republican National Convention threw peanuts at her. “This is what we feed animals,” she says they quipped during the assault. Carroll suggested that the lack of minorities at the convention might have contributed to her attack. She told Journal-isms, “This is Florida, and I’m from the Deep South. You come to places like this, you can count the Black people on your hand. They see me doing things they don’t think I should do … There are not that many Black women there … People were living in euphoria for a while. People think we’ve gone further then we have.”
Artur Davis, a former Alabama congressman, who changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, told the Post that the GOP can’t expect to reach Blacks by emphasizing its opposition to Big Government. “It’s not just enough to go into the Black community and say, ‘We want to keep government from taking over your life,'” he said. “That doesn’t resonate in a whole lot of the Black community, who have come to see government as a salvation and as an economic leveler. It’s going to take being willing to define conservatism as not just a defense of economic liberty but a broader way of constructing a society that can promote social mobility.”
Hillary Clinton has not said whether or not she’s running for president in 2016. The polls indicate that she has 65 percent of the vote. I’m sure the number will change, but I can never remember a candidate’s polling being this high and she has not yet said she’s running.
If the Republican Party is going to win any national election they must must have support from the minority community – Asian, Hispanic, Blacks, etc. It is obvious they do not have a clue of how this can be done. C-PAC devoted part of their program to reach out to minorities in a hall that seats 2500 people and there were only 16 people present.
e-mail: jjlewis@birminghamtimes.com
