The Tea Party’s new hero has decided to emulate the 2008 Vice-Presidential candidate and avoid being grilled by annoying reporters, ducking his Meet the Press interview tomorrow.

Pity, for unlike Sarah Palin, Rand Paul’s problem is not that he is clueless about issues but quite the opposite–he clearly has strong views on every subject. His recent mots about the 1964 Civil Rights Act infringing the rights of restaurants and the Obama White House picking on poor BP could be only the tip of an iceberg of Libertarian outcries over government suppression of freedom.

Americans, and particularly Paul’s Tea Party followers, would benefit from elucidation of views inherited from his father who named him in homage to Ayn Rand, who inspired not only the Texas Congressman and former Presidential candidate but the architect of the 21st century economic meltdown, Alan Greenspan.

For clues to what the younger Paul might now be sparing voters in Kentucky and elsewhere, it might be instructive to look at Rand’s novel and movie, “The Fountainhead,” in which the architect hero, Howard Roark, blows up a public housing project because the sponsors made changes to his plans.

“My ideas are my property,” he tells a jury at his trial. “My building was disfigured at the whim of others who took all the benefits of my work and gave me nothing in return.

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim. It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. I came here to be heard. In the name of every man of independence still left in the world. I wanted to state my terms. I do not care to work or live on any others. My terms are a man’s right to exist for his own sake.”

In Ayn Rand’s universe, instead of being sent to a loony bin, the hero is set free to impose his vision on the world to universal acclaim.

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