VDARE

Patrick Cleburne at VDARE speculates:

“Or it could simply be that he has been bought, which is what I think.”

Rand Paul was supporting amnesty within 24 hours of the 2012 election on cable television and later in a Politico interview where he said that the existence of the Union requires the Republican Party to perpetually shift to the Left to stay competitive in national politics:

“In an interview with POLITICO, Paul said he’ll return to Congress this week pushing measures long avoided by his party. He wants to work with liberal Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Republicans to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for pot possession. He wants to carve a compromise immigration plan with an “eventual path” to citizenship for illegal immigrants, a proposal he believes could be palatable to conservatives. And he believes his ideas — along with pushing for less U.S. military intervention in conflicts overseas — could help the GOP broaden its tent and appeal to crucial voting blocs that handed Democrats big wins in the West Coast, the Northeast and along the Great Lakes. “We have three big regions where we’re not competitive,” Paul said. “And we have to be competitive in those regions.”

A few weeks later, Rand Paul was on CNN making the same argument:

“He said that the GOP is not competitive in so many region of the United States that they are geographically pigeonholed into areas that they have to carry in order to win a national race. “We need a new type of Republican. I think that involves some of the ideas of libertarian-leaning Republicans. People who believe that we need a less aggressive foreign policy. People who believe that we’re not going to deport 12 million Hispanic folks and send them home,” Paul said.”

This speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce is just the latest in a long series of maneuvers (the filibuster stunt last week was calculated to appease his libertarian base) to position himself as “a new type of Republican” for a 2016 presidential campaign.

We didn’t hear about any of this when Rand Paul was running for his Senate seat in Kentucky which is one of the whitest states in America with one of the smallest Hispanic populations in the South. Now he is “pivoting” on everything from gay marriage to comprehensive immigration reform to appeasing the Jewish Lobby to drug legalization to keep the Christian Zionists happy while broadening his appeal in the West Coast, Upper Midwest, and Northeast.

We’ve seen it happen countless times before on any number of issues … such as Mitt Romney’s tough talk on immigration in the 2012 Republican Primary, which he quietly shelved in the general election when he had to run in a national electorate, or back when Obama and Hillary Clinton were against “gay marriage” because of the threat posed by swing voters in states like Ohio and Virginia.

If Rand Paul was only running for reelection to the Senate in Kentucky, he wouldn’t be adopting any of these new positions. The existence of the Union and the challenge of running for president of the Union in a national electorate among all the constituencies that compose the Union and getting to 50% is what is driving this insanity.

Note: It should also be noted that you can’t even compete at that level without the support of deep pocketed billionaires like Sheldon Adelson. If you are serious about running for president, you can’t get past the gate without selling out.