U.S. Senator Rand Paul came to central Iowa this weekend. He drew more than 200 people to an event in Des Moines on Friday night, packed a restaurant in Marshalltown on Saturday morning, and took in the Iowa State men’s basketball game that afternoon. It was Paul’s first visit to our state since October, when he campaigned in eastern Iowa with Congressional candidate Rod Blum and Senate candidate Joni Ernst. Clips with more news from Paul’s appearances are after the jump, along with excerpts from Shane Goldmacher’s recent article for the National Journal, which depicted former Iowa GOP chair A.J. Spiker as an “albatross” for Paul’s caucus campaign.
Before I get to the Rand Paul news, some quick thoughts about Representative Blum, who joined Paul for his Marshalltown event. Blum didn’t endorse a candidate before the 2012 Iowa caucuses and told The Iowa Republican’s Kevin Hall that he doesn’t “plan to endorse anyone” before the upcoming caucuses, adding,
“I might at the very end. We need a strong leader. We need genuine, authentic leadership and I may rise or fall in my election in two years based on who this presidential candidate is.”
I will be surprised if Blum doesn’t officially back Paul sometime before the caucuses. The “Liberty” movement got behind him early in the GOP primary to represent IA-01. At that time, many Iowa politics watchers expected the nomination to go to a candidate with better establishment connections, such as Iowa House Speaker Kraig Paulsen or State Representative Walt Rogers. Paulsen eventually chickened out of the race, and Rogers bailed out a few months before the primary after overspending on campaign staff. Arguably, Blum owes Liberty activists for helping him scare off the strongest Republican competition. Without them, he might be a two-time failed GOP primary candidate, rather than a first-term member of Congress.
The case against Blum endorsing Paul before the caucuses is that doing so might anger GOP supporters of other presidential candidates. Even if Paul remains in the top tier by this time next year, 70 percent to 80 percent of Iowa Republican caucus-goers will likely prefer someone else. Blum will need all hands on deck to be re-elected in Iowa’s first district, which is now one of the most Democratic-leaning U.S. House seats held by a Republican (partisan voting index D+5). It will be a top target for House Democrats in 2016.
Still, I think Blum would be better off endorsing than staying neutral. Most Republicans in the IA-01 counties will vote for him in the general election either way. By getting behind Paul when it counts, Blum would give Liberty activists more reasons to go the extra mile supporting his campaign later in the year, regardless of whether Paul becomes the presidential nominee or (as I suspect) seeks another term as U.S. senator from Kentucky. Besides, if Blum really believes that Paul’s outreach to youth and minorities has the potential to grow the GOP, he should invest some of his political capital in that project.
What do you think, Bleeding Heartland readers?
Plenty of Iowa Republicans were happy to dish to Shane Goldmacher while he was writing his February 4 piece for the National Journal, “Rand Paul’s Iowa Albatross”:
One of Paul’s two top Iowa operatives, A.J. Spiker, is so deeply disliked and mistrusted by so much of the Iowa Republican establishment that party activists, officials, and strategists say he is damaging Paul’s credibility in the state.
“Toxic,” Andy Cable, an Iowa Republican activist for more than 30 years, said of Spiker. “Rand Paul will get little or no exposure in the rural counties around Iowa, and most of that will be directly related to having A.J. Spiker as his front man.”
Spiker was supposed to have been one of Rand Paul’s secret Iowa weapons in 2016: a Ron Paul acolyte-and-activist-turned-party-insider, a man who became the surprise chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa after Paul forces took control in 2012. When Doug Stafford, Paul’s chief strategist nationally, hired Spiker away from the party almost a year ago, Stafford declared, “His ability to work with the grassroots is unmatched.”
But Spiker’s tumultuous and controversial chairmanship-which ran from just after the 2012 Iowa caucuses until early 2014-so thoroughly alienated the Republican grassroots and establishment here that many view him as more of a liability for Paul than an asset.
Click through to read the long list of harsh comments about Spiker. It’s not surprising that many Iowa Republicans have hard feelings. When Spiker and his allies were running the Iowa GOP, it often seemed that the “Liberty” movement’s priorities trumped unity within the party. He left the Iowa GOP well before the end of his term in order to work for Rand Paul’s PAC but had faced calls for his resignation months earlier.
Not only did Spiker leave the Iowa GOP in financial trouble, his executive director screwed around with the new leadership’s ability to access “social media accounts, email lists, voter rolls email accounts, donor lists and even online access to the bank account.” The average Iowa Republican caucus-goer won’t know anything about that, but some key activists will remember.
Speaking to Goldmacher, longtime Iowa Republican consultant Steve Grubbs downplayed the problem:
“Anybody who has been in politics in a key role as long as I have, or A.J. has, develops a list of people who don’t like us,” said Grubbs, who served as an Iowa state party chairman himself in the late 1990s. “A.J. is a key player in the liberty movement, and that is a central part of Senator Paul’s political base. My role is to work not only with liberty voters but with pro-business and agricultural voters and social conservatives. The combination makes for a complete team.” […]
Grubbs suggested that much of Spiker’s work would be confined to motivating Paul’s existing libertarian-leaning base. “If A.J. helps us with the liberty vote, I’m confident that I can make important inroads into the rest of the Republican establishment,” Grubbs said. (Indeed, Branstad and others spoke well of Paul’s hiring Grubbs, “He also has Steve Grubbs, a former legislator and somebody who’s worked with a lot of Republicans here,” the governor said.)
For now, Paul doesn’t sound worried about being associated with Spiker. Jennifer Jacobs reported for the Des Moines Register,
Members of Paul’s team told the Register on Thursday that no such meeting has been scheduled, and they’re unaware of any sort of intervention. […]
Paul, in his conversation with the Register, expressed strong confidence in Spiker, and signaled that he has no intention of shaking him loose, despite the fresh reports about how Spiker is still mistrusted in certain circles.
“Our goal is not to re-litigate old disagreements,” Paul said.
He praised Spiker and and his other Iowa strategist, Steve Grubbs, for having the skills to organize in various factions of the GOP caucusgoing electorate.
“We have the best of both worlds in that A.J. has got a great reputation within the liberty movement and he also works well with Christian conservatives,” Paul said. “There are always going to be people who have chosen other candidates or who for one reason or another hold a grudge. But I think really with both A.J. and with Steve that there’s a broad reach to a broad swath to the party.”
Assuming Paul launches his presidential campaign this spring as expected, he will start with a strong base of support in Iowa. Not many candidates would draw more than 200 people to an event on a cold Friday in February. The senator may be less of an iconoclast than his father Ron Paul, but he has carved out a niche for himself with some distinctive policy stands. No one else will start a stump speech with the rallying cry, “Anybody here want to audit The Fed?”
I don’t agree with many Republican presidential candidates on many issues, but I could get behind letting the Government Accountability Office audit the Fed, and I’m certainly for drug sentencing reform. Paul touched on that issue Friday night too:
During his speech, Senator Paul got applause when he railed against the Obama Administration’s surveillance program, but the crowd also cheered when Paul expressed a willingness to work with President Obama on the issue of criminal justice reform.
“I think putting a kid in jail for 55 years for selling marijuana is obscene,” Paul said. “We ought to get ’em back to work and into productive use (in society) and not put ’em in jail forever.”
During the interview after his speech, Paul argued his sentencing reform message resonates with young people, in particular, and can bring new people into the GOP.
“And I think that maybe what’s unique about maybe a candidate who has a little bit of a Libertarian-ish edge,” Paul said.
Paul has previously supported making it easier for ex-felons to regain voting rights, but to my knowledge he did not raise that issue in Iowa this weekend. He drew a contrast between himself and many establishment Republicans on foreign policy. Rod Boshart covered the Friday night event for the Cedar Rapids Gazette:
“You’re going to get a choice on who the nominee is for the Republican Party. You’re going to have nine, 10, 15, 20 who are eager to go and want troops on the ground. They want 100,000 troops on the ground right now,” Paul told the Iowa crowd. “If there’s one true thing I can tell you that I think they cannot object to that the facts clearly demonstrate – every time we have toppled a secular dictator, we’ve gotten chaos, and we’ve gotten a rise in radical Islam, and we’ve been less safe.
“Whether I’m in the Senate or I do run for the nomination, I can tell there will be one loud voice in our party saying think of the unintended consequences,” he said.
The Des Moines Register posted a video clip of Paul talking about a potential war vote in Congress. That message will resonate with many people.
Paul also talked foreign policy in Marshalltown on Saturday morning. Mike Donahey reported for the Marshalltown Times-Republican,
In his remarks, Paul decried the ‘imperial presidency” of Obama, criticizing him for his issuance of several executive orders on immigration and spying on Americans without warrants.
“The worst thing President Obama has done is the usurpation of power,” he said. “It is the collapse of the separation of powers. One of the great things about our republic is the system of checks and balances. Over the last 100 years we have seen power being removed from the people little by little.”
However, he saved some of his harshest criticism for former Secretary of State, and presumptive Democrat nominee for president, Hilary Clinton.
Paul claimed Clinton, as Secretary of State, ignored repeated requests for help and more security for the Libyan embassy.
Writing for The Iowa Republican, Kevin Hall posted video of Paul’s speech to about 140 people in Marshalltown. He highlighted a different portion of the remarks:
When Senator Paul veered into foreign policy, his words raised a few eyebrows. Amid new allegations from the man known as the 20th 9/11 hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, that high-ranking Saudis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, Senator Paul bolstered those claims.
“Do you know that the missing pages of the 9/11 report that are not allowed to be made public, I can tell you what I think is in them because I haven’t read them. They’re still top secret. There are links of the attackers on 9/11 to high people in the Saudi Arabian government and wealthy people in the Saudi Arabian society,” Paul claimed.
The Saudis asked for the redacted 28 pages from the 9/11 Commission Report to be released a dozen years ago. Other members of Congress have made accusations similar to Rand Paul’s.
“They’ve been financing radical Islam for 30, 40, 50 years. If they’re an ally, they need to be told no more,” the Kentucky senator added, saying the Saudis need to help in the fight against ISIS.
Rand Paul’s final comments to the Marshalltown crowd were even more provocative.
“This country is the greatest country ever. We just need to unleash the American public, unleash the ingenuity. When that happens again, I say Katie bar the door, I say America will be the greatest country on the Earth again. Thank you very much,” Paul concluded, without telling the crowd which country is the greatest on Earth right now.
Hall’s never been a big fan of “Paulinistas,” so I’m not surprised to see him try to spin those last comments as a horrible faux pas (with a headline saying Paul “claims America is no longer greatest country on earth”). The context makes clear that Paul wasn’t dissing the U.S., he was just saying we could be doing better with the potential we have.
Later on Saturday, Paul attended a couple of political events in Ames as well as the Cyclones basketball game. The likely presidential candidate received the endorsement of former Iowa House Republican Steve Sukup, who was a candidate for governor in 2002. Jennifer Jacobs of the Des Moines Register received “exclusive access” to the fundraiser Sukup held for Paul in Ames.
Sukup, who served in the Iowa House from 1994 to 2002, is the chief financial officer for the Sheffield-based Sukup Manufacturing, which sells its agribusiness products in all 50 states and 100 countries. He has credibility in Iowa agriculture, and Iowans can’t drive far without seeing grain bins marked with the family’s last name. […]
Asked why he’s endorsing Paul, and so early, Sukup told the Register: “He has broad appeal. The last time around, they cornered us in with an ‘us against them’ type deal. Dr. Rand Paul is, ‘Hey, I take care of everybody.’ ”
Sukup said he agrees with Paul’s stances on limited government, individual responsibility and a fair tax system. “He’s very principled, and that’s what I think the country’s looking for.”
The fundraiser audience of 30 people was full of business leaders – the owner of a chain of McDonald’s restaurants, a real estate company owner, the owner of multiple ethanol plants, an insurance company owner – who mentioned “electability” when asked what they’re seeking in a candidate. None aside from Sukup seemed ready to commit to anyone – it’s a year out from Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, and no one has even officially declared a candidacy yet.
But they were all interested in listening to Paul. Marti Rodamaker, a banker, said she was curious to learn more about Paul’s stance on auditing the Fed. Her husband, Bill Rodamaker, who described himself as fiscally conservative but socially moderate, said he wanted to hear more of Paul’s foreign policy positions. Paul talked about government overreach, radical Islam and balancing the federal budget.
To my knowledge, Paul didn’t say anything new about the vaccine controversy while in Iowa. He caused a stir last week by suggesting that most vaccinations should be voluntary. I haven’t seen any comment from Blum addressing vaccine policy, other than a brief statement from his spokesman confirming that his children were all vaccinated.
Final note: Benjy Sarlin wrote an interesting piece on how Representative Peter King of New York and former UN Ambassador John Bolton are both considering no-hoper presidential bids in order to battle Paul on foreign policy. Excerpts:
“I want to take advantage of the opportunity of my name being there to get around and raise the issues I want, which is mainly foreign policy, national security, counterterrorism and really preventing the Rand Paul’s and Ted Cruz’s from taking over the party,” King told msnbc. […] Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton is looking at a White House bid as well and spoke last month at Rep. Steve King’s GOP candidate showcase in Iowa.
In interviews with msnbc, King and Bolton each made clear that Paul’s rise within the party loomed large in their thinking.
“That really generated my concern,” said King, who has likened Paul to infamous Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. “What he was appealing to the Republican Party, to me, would be disastrous policy wise and also politically.”
Bolton, who spoke to msnbc after his speech in Des Moines [at the Iowa Freedom Summit], said he planned to force Paul to account for his “neo-isolationism” (a label Paul rejects) should they meet on the primary trail.