Kentucky senator Rand Paul thinks the credibility of Matt Bevin, a tea-party candidate challenging Senator Mitch McConnell, has been damaged by the controversy over his past endorsement of the 2008 Wall Street bailouts.

“Paul told reporters Monday that a lack of consistency can be harmful and said that applies to Bevin,” the AP reports.


McConnell’s support for the 2008 bailouts has been one of Bevin’s main lines of attack against the generally conservative Senate minority leader. Senator Rand Paul, who defeated a more established candidate in 2010 when making, like Bevin, his first run for political office, has endorsed McConnell, but says he’d decided to do so before Bevin had entered the race.

Bevin signed a letter to clients of an investment firm he was running in 2008 saying that the authorization of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was a “positive development.” He now claims that he had to sign the letter as a regulatory matter, and couldn’t legally ask that his investment officer, who wrote the letter, change it. It’s just as likely, however, that Bevin could have run afoul of securities regulations by signing his name to something if he didn’t believe it. ​