Taking the second tier seriously

An unsuccessful bid can put a contender in the running for a future job, either as vice president, or as in the case of 1988 Democratic long-shot Bruce Babbitt who ended up as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Interior.

Sometimes, as in the case of Paul, these second-tier candidates represent a category-busting type of thinking that cannot find a comfortable resting place in either major party.

Is Paul having an impact?
Asked Thursday what impact he is having on the Republican presidential race, Paul said, “I think it might be significant that one of the so-called front-runners needed to attack me on national television. They must think I’m having enough of an impact that they have to try to discredit me. That was the purpose of the (Giuliani) attack: to discredit me so that my foreign policy challenge wouldn’t be heard.”

He added, “What annoys them the most is that I don’t criticize foreign policy from the Left; I criticize it from the Right, from a conservative viewpoint, from a constitutional viewpoint. It drives them nuts.”

Paul, a ten-term House member from Texas and the 1988 Libertarian candidate for president, admits most Republican voters don’t agree with his non-interventionist approach to foreign policy.

“I think the majority of Republicans right now are in the camp of intervention — but they’re also asking a lot of questions because of what happened in last year’s election and they know that they lost the election over foreign policy,” he said.

Complete U.S. exit from Iraq
Paul supports withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq — not leaving some behind for counter-terrorism operations and training Iraqi soldiers, as advocated by Democratic contenders Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

And what of the consequences of U.S. exit from Iraq?

“It may be much better,” Paul said. “The Arab League may take over. Israel may be much more of a player there rather than us suppressing Israel. There’s all kinds of good things that could come of it.”

Paul will probably not be able to persuade Sen. John McCain to adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy. But in the long run, a contender can see vindication.

Case in point: Pete du Pont saw some of his ideas — considered extreme and unorthodox in 1988 — become mainstream.

In 1988 du Pont called for:

• Requiring welfare recipients to work, an idea which was incorporated into the 1996 welfare reform bill signed into law by President Clinton.
• Creating voluntary individual retirement accounts as an alternative to Social Security, a proposal which President Bush championed and tried to get Congress to enact in 2005.
• Withholding drivers’ licenses from high school students who test positive during mandatory random drug testing.
• Offering vouchers to parents so they could send their children to private schools, if local public schools were dysfunctional.

Discounted as an iconoclast who had little chance to become the 1988 GOP nominee, du Pont proved to be ahead of his time. So, too, could be today’s crop of contenders.

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