Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, widely seen as someone who’ll mount a strong campaign for the 2016 GOP Presidential nomination, has once again argued that the Republican Party needs to be a bigger tent — and that it needs debate to evolve:
Sen. Rand Paul delivered a fervent plea Wednesday to expand the Republican Party and make the GOP more compassionate toward those “who aren’t treated fairly by the criminal justice system,” noting African-Americans and Hispanics in particular.
Speaking to a group of conservatives, the Kentucky Republican and potential 2016 presidential candidate also acknowledged a rift within the party over budgetary issues and civil liberties.
“People say, ‘Oh Republicans shouldn’t fight.’ I disagree. There’s a struggle, and there should be a struggle to make the party better,” he said, while headlining the Coalitions for America’s Weyrich Awards Dinner in Washington.
Most noteworthy:
The libertarian-leaning senator has been aggressively preaching the need for a broader GOP – ideologically and racially. The senator, whose outreach efforts have not gone unnoticed by the political class, invoked Ronald Reagan as a major figure who made the party “bigger and better.”
“He appealed to all kinds of people,” Paul said.
“We don’t dilute or give up our message; we need to extend our message to people who haven’t been listening to us. To me, that’s a message that may have a libertarian twist,” he said, emphasizing a focus on “liberty and the Bill of Rights.”
Some Democrats will insist that’s not an accurate characterization of Reagan but, in fact, reading a wide variety of history books (forget about weblogs on this question of the right and left since they usually have their ideological axes to grind) it is clear that a)Reagan attracted news voters to the GOP not by just saying what he didn’t like about the Democrats but by having an attitude that voters who didn’t always vote Republican or agree with him on some things were welcome and RESPECTEDD b)Reagan was an upbeat conservative versus the typical angry, perpetually outraged Fox News talk radio political Tea Party conservative.
As many have noted to the point of it being a cliche: yes, it’s unlikely Ronald Reagan could win a GOP nomination today.
IN fact, if he was governor, he’d probably be challenged by a Tea Partier.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.