TaftFan
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I came across the first article today and the second yesterday. They are both derived from the same, new McKay Coppins book.
dailycaller.com/2015/12/02/rand-pauls-religious-adviser-expresses-doubts-about-candidates-christian-beliefs-in-new-book/
(Saw this on Twitter)
dailycaller.com/2015/12/02/rand-pauls-religious-adviser-expresses-doubts-about-candidates-christian-beliefs-in-new-book/
The man tapped by Rand Paul to serve as senior adviser and religious liaison to his presidential campaign is quoted in a new book on the 2016 race expressing doubts about the candidate’s Christian beliefs.
Journalist McKay Coppins quotes Paul campaign adviser Doug Wead in his new book, “The Wilderness,” saying he is unsure what the candidate actually believes.
“My point is, I don’t know,” Wead says when asked by Coppins if he thinks Paul is a Christian believer. “I don’t think we can know. I don’t know if he knows.”
(The Pauls have long been Presbyterian but Rand recently joined a Methodist church in Kentucky, Coppins explains in the book).
The book goes into detail about how Paul — in Coppins’s words — needed a “crash course in conservative Christianity” in order to appeal to the evangelicals in the early caucus and primary states.
Coppins wrote that “the distinct dialect of right-wing born-agains was as foreign to [Paul] as Swahili.”
“To fix this,” the author continues, “Wead assembled a list of creedal buzzwords that would signal to evangelical voters that Rand was one of them — a sort of Rosetta Stone for Evangelicalese. Soon, with some tutoring, Rand was conversational.”
Coppins continued: “As evidence of Rand’s progress, Wead would later point me to a 2014 interview the senator had given in which he recounted his teenage conversion to Christianity. ‘When [Rand] said, “I accepted Christ as my savior,” an evangelical was hearing that he was born again,’ Wead explained. ‘But that’s not what he’s actually saying… In fact, he didn’t even say Jesus is divine. He didn’t say any of that! But that’s what is heard.’
When Paul named Wead a religious adviser in June, the candidate said in a statement: “He is an incredibly influential conservative and evangelical leader, and I look forward to working alongside Doug to solve our nation’s current moral crisis.”
Coppins also describes in his book how Paul, preparing for the campaign, met with Pastor Brian Jacobs in February 2014. The pastor asked Rand if he had met with other prominent Christians like Dr. Russell Moore, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Franklin Graham and Gary Bauer.
“Jacobs continued to rattle off the names of some of America’s most prominent Christian leaders until finally it dawned on him: the senator sitting before him had no idea who any of these people were,” the author wrote.
Jacobs was quoted by Coppins saying of the meeting: “I had to pick my jaw up off the table.”
According to Coppins, Paul explained to Jacobs: “I’ve lived in the Washington bubble for years, and I apologize that I don’t know who these people are. But that’s why I need your help.”
UPDATE: Reached by The Daily Caller, Paul’s campaign released a statement from Wead: “Rand Paul is a great man and a compassionate Christian. I have heard him talk about his faith publicly on multiple occasions, one of which was in an interview with Justin Machacek. In that interview, Sen. Paul makes it clear that he is a born again believer. Nothing I have ever heard him say privately contradicts the idea of his Christianity.”
(Saw this on Twitter)
buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/new-book-rand-pauls-chief-strategist-was-writer-behind-senat#.rqZ8OV55K
Doug Stafford, the chief strategist for Kentucky senator Rand Paul’s presidential campaign and a former senior staffer in his Senate office, was the culprit behind most of the plagiarized writings that went out under the Kentucky senator’s name.
That tidbit comes from The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party’s Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House a new book to be published Tuesday by BuzzFeed News reporter McKay Coppins. (Disclosure: I was interviewed for the book.)
Coppins’s book also provides a sometimes damning minute-by-minute account of how the senator and his office respond to a series of plagiarism accusations that came out over the course of a week in fall of 2013.
It started on Oct. 28, 2013, as Coppins notes, when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow revealed a speech Paul at the gave evangelical Liberty University cribbed heavily from the Wikipedia entry for the movie Gattaca. The next day, BuzzFeed News posted a story noting the Kentucky senator had again lifted almost word-for-word the plot summary of the Wikipedia article for the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver.
Paul had yet to understand the seriousness of the charges, Coppins reports.
“But while Rand’s advisers understood the seriousness of the charges, the senator himself was convinced he was the victim of a fevered witch hunt,” he writes. “He thought the evidence of his supposed lapse in ethics was outrageously thin and nitpicky. He’d been recapping movie plots in these speeches, not reciting Tolstoy and calling the words his own. He felt certain that if he could just explain this in a neutral setting, his attackers’ petty animus and partisanship would be laid bare.”
In an interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos, Paul said the problem was merely about footnoting— leaving aside the fact the speeches were not footnoted on his website. At the time, a spokesperson similarly said to BuzzFeed News that “only in Washington is something this trivial a source for liberal media angst.”
Politico then ran a story alleging Paul’s 2013 State of the Union response had taken language from a Associated Press article. And as Paul raged, Doug Stafford, a senior aide to Paul began to panic, Coppins reveals. Stafford had been with Paul since he launched his political career and wrote much of writing that went out under his name, including ghostwriting Paul’s second book Government Bullies.
“He wrote at home and on weekends, in between meetings and during dull conference calls, on trains and planes and all throughout the long daily commute from and to his far-flung Virginia suburb,” Coppins writes. “From speeches to essays to op-eds to books, Stafford was in charge of it all — and his corner cutting was now costing them.”
Stafford invited Trygve Olson, another Paul adviser, in for a meeting, according to Coppins. Olson questioned whether Paul’s bomb-throwing response on the Sunday shows would be a good idea. Olson warned it would be a horrible move for Paul if there was more plagiarism.
There was.
BuzzFeed News posted on the Saturday night before Paul’s appearance that three pages of Paul’s book Government Bullies were lifted nearly word for word from a 2003 Heritage Foundation study. Subsequent BuzzFeed News stories would show he plagiarized in his Washington Times column and in Senate testimony. The Times would end Paul’s columns over the allegations.
The press would eventually die down, and Paul, clearly annoyed if not humbled by the turn of events would pledge to do better.
“It annoys the hell out of me. I feel like if I could just go to detention after school for a couple days, then everything would be okay,” he told National Review. “But do I have to be in detention for the rest of my career?”
Still, as Coppins later reveals, the incident didn’t dash Paul’s faith in Stafford, who ghostwrote Paul’s next book Taking A Stand.
“Many in the senator’s orbit had privately urged him to find a different ghostwriter for his upcoming book after the egregious cribbing in his last title set off a media firestorm,” Coppins writes. “But Rand, defiant and loyal as ever, stuck with repentant plagiarist Doug Stafford as his chief scribe. Stafford labored over the manuscript as if it were his own masterpiece: researching, writing, rewriting, carefully — very carefully — compiling citations, submitting the drafts to Rand, and then starting all over again once the senator returned the pages with handwritten notes scribbled across the margins.”
Reach for comment, Stafford told BuzzFeed News that Coppins’s book was “fiction.”
“I love fiction, so I am looking forward to reading more Washington media machine stories from ‘sources,’” wrote Stafford in an email. “Also I lived on Capitol Hill from 2011-2014 with a four block commute. And I avoid conference calls like the plague.”
