Paul’s Victory Poses Test for Tea Party on Defining Principles

Paul’s Victory Poses Test for Tea Party on Defining Principles
By KATE ZERNIKE
Copyright by Reuters
Published: May 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/us/politics/20teaparty.html?th&emc=th


BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — Rand Paul’s win in the Republican Senate primary here is the first authentic Tea Party victory — a candidate from the movement, powered by it.

Tea Party backers helped Marco Rubio, right, drive Gov. Charlie Crist from the Republican Senate primary in Florida.

But Mr. Paul’s campaign from now to November will present the young movement its toughest test yet — as voters focus on what the Tea Party is for, rather than what it is against.

Voters will have to decide whether they will embrace what Mr. Paul acknowledges are “tough choices” — like his proposals to raise the age of Social Security eligibility, to slash spending deeply enough to balance the budget every year even while cutting taxes and relying more on charity to provide the social services that the government has since the New Deal.

So far, the Tea Party’s victories have come largely as the result of voter protests. In Utah, Tea Party supporters helped vote out Senator Robert F. Bennett because they opposed his support of the bank bailout. They helped elect Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts to stop the health care bill. And while Tea Party backers helped Marco Rubio drive Gov. Charlie Crist from the Republican Senate primary in Florida, Mr. Rubio is not from the movement.

In contrast, Mr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, was an early adherent of the Tea Party — if they issued cards, he said in an interview last month, “I’d be a card carrying member.”

And his campaign is a microcosm of the unlikely, and sometimes contradictory, mashup that created the Tea Party movement, one that brings together idealistic and largely young supporters who espouse the small-government ideas of the Austrian economic school and public choice theory, with largely older voters who fervently want change in Washington but who also think big government programs like Social Security and Medicare are worth the costs.

Democrats have already begun shifting the debate to what Mr. Paul and Tea Party ideology say about the role of government.

Groups like FreedomWorks, which has helped mobilize the Tea Party movement, and supporters who came to the party through the quixotic presidential campaign of Mr. Paul’s father, Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, embrace arguments that government should not provide what individuals can provide for themselves. So, police and public safety are acceptable functions of government, but government should not take from one person’s income to provide for another’s health or well-being.

“Capitalism is freedom, it means the freedom to voluntarily exchange goods, and retain the fruits of your labor,” Mr. Paul told supporters in Bowling Green on Tuesday night.

Likewise, when Mr. Paul and Tea Party supporters define “constitutionally limited government” they argue that much of the New Deal, as well as social programs like Medicare that were enacted later, were a gross violation of the founding document.

Those ideas may be hard to sell in a general election, even to Republicans here.

Kentucky has two Republican senators now, the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and Jim Bunning, whom Mr. Paul is seeking to succeed.

But Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, said Republican voters here tend to be social conservatives, with a long populist streak.

“Paul’s constitutional Republicanism is not bring-home-the-bacon McConnell-style Republicanism,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who return McConnell to office when he runs because they think the state needs that money. Paul can’t appeal to those people very easily.”

To win in November, Mr. Paul will also have to win over Democrats, who could not vote in the Republican primary but make up the bulk of Kentucky voters.

Democrats are trying to portray Republicans who win with Tea Party support as being out of the mainstream.

They wasted little time in calling Mr. Paul an “extreme candidate,” as Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released a Web advertisement highlighting Mr. Paul’s statements that he would eliminate the Department of Education, cut taxes on corporations and capital gains and raise the retirement age, even as he has said that he does not want to cut payments to doctors like himself who take Medicare patients.

“While Kentucky struggles with a still recovering economy and with high unemployment throughout the state,” the committee said in a statement, “Rand Paul’s policies are more about helping himself than helping Kentuckians.”

Voting in the Republican primary in Mr. Paul’s precinct here, Martha McKenzie, 84, said Mr. Paul was too idealistic. “He says things, and I wish they could be that way, but I know they’re not,” she said. “I don’t mind paying taxes. Not when it’s to help people. We didn’t get this way in a few years, we’re not going to get out of it in a few years. You can’t cut things all of a sudden, not without hurting people.”

Her niece Donna Wolbe, 57, said she worries about what she called Mr. Paul’s “my-way-or-the-highway” politics. “You want to feel like the person you’re voting for is going to be effective,” she said. “You’re not effective if you alienate people.”

Even many people who support the Tea Party say the benefits of government programs like Medicare and Social Security are worth the cost to taxpayers; in a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, about 6 in 10 people who identified themselves as supportive of the movement said so, and 72 percent of those 65 and older did.

Mr. Paul is honest with his supporters about how difficult it will be to balance the budget in practice.

“In order to preserve our great nation, tough choices will have to occur,” he told supporters here on Tuesday night. “So many Republicans have been elected. and they say, ‘We’ll cut your taxes, but then we’ll bring you home the pork.’ It’s coming to an end because we can’t manage this debt.”

The television cameras focused on the message he said he brought from the Tea Party: “We have come to take our government back.”

But many of the cameras were gone as he argued against government regulation of banks. “When we had a crisis and things were teetering in the balance, people blamed capitalism, wrongly so,” he said. “It’s the government that needs to be regulated. It’s the Federal Reserve that needs to be restrained.”

Mr. Paul’s campaign manager, David Adams, who was the M.C. of what is known as the first Kentucky Tea Party in March, called the victory “a good day for the Tea Party,” but acknowledged the work ahead.

“The budget is out of whack; the debt is large and growing,” Mr. Adams said. “The reason for this excitement is to build up a head of steam so we can fix the problems. It will be difficult. The only thing we’ve proven today is that we have the ability to do it.”

The campaign will have until November to prove that other people agree.