Rand Paul

Some excellent analysis by Frank Rich at the NY Times. I find it bizarre that Rand Paul can say these things, though he is a doctor and the son of a man who's been in Congress since 1976 (when Rand was a teenager). Rand went to Duke for med school - not an Ivy League, but a very good university. Who exactly constitutes the "establishment" if not him? And does he include himself among the "rabble" - hilarious and infuriating! Like GW Bush, who grew up in Texas, but went to both Harvard and Yale, and grew up in a powerful political family, and was able to build his political persona on being an outsider and a down home guy. Why do people let them get away with this???

. . . it’s Paul’s brand of populism, not his views on Jim Crow or Iran, that are most germane to the Tea Party’s birth and its future — both within the G.O.P. and as a force that will buffet Obama and the Democrats. Paul most abundantly embodies the movement’s animus when he plays on classic American-style class resentment. His campaign loved to deploy the full name of his opponent, Charles Merwin Grayson III, a Harvard-educated banker’s son. In his victory speech Tuesday night, Paul said the voters’ message was to “get rid of the power people, the people who run the show, the people who think they’re above everybody else” — or, as he put it on an earlier occasion, the establishment who “from their high-rise penthouse” look down on and laugh at the “American rabble.”

That Paul gave his victory speech in a “members only” country club is no contradiction to white Tea Partiers. Their anger is directed at a loftier club that excludes them as well: the big-government and big-money elites partying together in that high-rise penthouse. At the Utah state G.O.P. convention this month, the mob shouted “TARP! TARP! TARP!” as it terminated the re-election bid of the conservative Senator Robert Bennett. It was Bennett’s capital crime to vote for a bailout of Wall Street’s high-flying bankers.