Rand Paul: It’s McCain and Lindsey Graham who are “lapdogs” for Obama’s foreign policy, not me
POSTED AT 6:01 PM ON APRIL 21, 2015 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Via RCP, a smart, well prepared retort to superhawks like Graham, who’s already started beating on Paul during his quasi-2016 media tour. Rand seems to relish taking tropes that are common to interventionist critiques and turning them against his interventionist critics. Back in December, after Rubio tore into him for supporting Obama’s outreach to Cuba, Paul accused Rubio of behaving like an “isolationist” for refusing to engage diplomatically with a neighbor. Same move here. It’s not me who’s a shill for Obama’s foreign policy, says Paul, it’s McCain, Graham, and the other hawks who unfailingly cheer O on every time he intervenes somewhere abroad, pausing occasionally to criticize him only for not intervening more forcefully. I wonder if Rand likes that sort of tu quoque on a visceral level, because he enjoys watching hawks squirm when they get accused of “weakness” or being dupes for Obama, or if there’s a strategy behind it. Probably both: A counterattack like this could work better than we think at the debates, when plenty of low-information Republican voters will be watching without much of a sense of how Paul differs from conventional GOP hawkery. That’s why critiques about “isolationism” and shilling for Obama are so potent and dangerous to him potentially. The average Republican voter may not know the ins and outs of foreign conflicts and whether intervening is a good or bad idea, but hearing that Rand Paul is on Obama’s side on some of them will be received as shorthand for “Rand Paul is weak and too far left.” Paul’s strategy is to counter that by pointing out how many times hawks have been on Obama’s side too. Even if he doesn’t win many voters over with that argument, it’ll be a huge victory for him if he succeeds in neutralizing hawkish attacks by convincing Republicans that his points of agreement with O are really no more damning than Graham’s are.
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