Rand Paul: Political Amateur

One of the benefits of staying at a hotel while vacationing at the beach is that there are free copies of USA Today available to anyone who cares enough to pick them up. Since I'm not a regular subscriber, I figured that this would be a valuable opportunity to expose myself to a wider variety of news coverage and opinion writing than what is found on the pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times. And lo and behold, I was proven correct this morning when I opened the paper to discover an op-ed by Kentucky senatorial candidate and arch-conservative Rand Paul detailing his personal political philosophy. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Paul's piece featured a noticeably lower quality of argument than those that are found in the WaPo and the Times, I found it to be a perfect example of a point that I made on this blog a few weeks ago: In modern day America, there are a striking number of individuals who have achieved or are actively seeking incredibly powerful leadership positions in fields about which they understand very little of practical importance.

You see, Rand Paul is a man whose background is in medicine. Specifically, he's a career ophthalmologist. Now, he has decided to run for a seat in the United State Senate, which is arguably the most important legislative body in the history of the world. Yet as today's op-ed makes painfully obvious, Paul is pitifully ignorant about subjects such as political science and history that are intimately connected with the job of governing.

For example, Paul describes himself as being a member of "the vast coalition of Americans — including independents, moderates, Republicans, conservatives and "Tea Party" activists — [that] share many libertarian points of view." As any political scientist can tell you, though, that list hardly encompasses a "vast coalition" of anything but rightward-leaning American voters. Members of the Tea Party have been shown to be overwhelmingly Republican, and members of the Republican Party are almost uniformly conservative. Furthermore, the terms "independent" and "moderate" mean hardly anything when discussing politics- people may describe themselves with these labels, but they still vote in just as partisan a manner as those who are self-identified Democrats or Republicans. In essence, Paul's "coalition" is merely a singular segment of the American electorate that he has chosen to describe both in terms of its ideological dispositions and its party loyalty.

Paul also demonstrates a woeful understanding of history by asserting, "Our Founding Fathers were clearly libertarians, and constructed a Republic with strict limits on government power designed to protect the rights and freedom of the citizens above all else." In reality, there were quite a few Founding Fathers who clearly were not libertarians, notably Alexander Hamilton who is perhaps best known for successfully lobbying to create the First National Bank, an institution whose modern-day heir, the Federal Reserve, is pure anathema to libertarians.

One could forgive an ophthalmologist for not knowing these finer points since they wouldn't be of much use when performing surgery on people's eyes, but it seems likely that they would come in handy for a legislator who is trying to enact sensible public policy measures that take into account the nation's history and its contemporary political landscape.