Tea Party titan Rand Paul, visiting Howard University on Wednesday, told students that he had been called “either brave or crazy to be here” at the historically black college. Probably some of each: brave, because he’s trying to sell himself and fellow Republicans to African-Americans, a singularly resistant demographic; and crazy, because he based his pitch on revised history and airbrushed facts — and the Howard kids weren’t fooled.
“No Republican questions or disputes civil rights,” the senator from Kentucky proclaimed. “I’ve never wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act.”
Howzat?
As a candidate in 2010, Paul questioned the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act’s Title II, which prohibits private discrimination. “I don’t want to be associated with those people,” he said when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked him about private businesses that refuse to serve black customers, “but I also don’t want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that’s one of the things freedom requires.” Asked by the moderator at Howard to explain his claim that he never spoke out against the Civil Rights Act, Paul provided the creative rationale that he was talking “about the ramifications of certain portions of the Civil Rights Act beyond race, as are now being applied to smoking, menus, listing calories and things on menus and guns.”
Uphill battle
Paul acknowledged that his wooing of African-Americans “is an uphill battle,” and his hour with the students confirmed this. Talking about the Republicans’ historical support for civil rights, he said: “I’ll give you one example. The first, one of the African-American U.S. senators was a guy named, uh, I’m blanking on his name, from Massachusetts.”