"I'M NOT sure Paul deserves any praise for his performance," wrote Jamelle Bouie at the Daily Beast. Mr Bouie was discussing a speech given by Rand Paul, Kentucky's junior senator and a possible candidate for president in 2016, at Howard University, America's pre-eminent historically black college. It is no secret that Republicans have a race problem—in 2012 Mr Obama won black, Hispanic and Asian voters by sizable margins—and in an increasingly multi-ethnic country, that sort of race problem translates into a long-term political problem, and Republicans know it. Republican leaders have been vocal about their need to appeal to Latino voters. Reince Preibus, the Republican National Committee chairman, just hired a field director and a communications director to boost outreach among Asian voters. And last month Mr Preibus convened a "listening session" at a black church in East New York, a predominantly black section of Brooklyn. But those were largely reactive measures, in keeping with many Republicans' belief that their problem in 2012 was the messenger, not the message. Mr Paul took a commendably more active approach. He is the first Republican to speak at Howard since Colin Powell delivered the commencement address almost 20 years ago. Mr Bouie was unimpressed: "Paul showed a complete unwillingness to deal with the actual issues that divide Republicans from the black community... [H]e condescended with a dishonest and revisionist history of the GOP." Other liberalcommentators heaped similar scorn on Mr Paul. It's true that parts of Mr Paul's speech, such as his presumption that students good enough to get into Howard would not know that Abraham Lincoln and the NAACP's founders were Republicans, could be read as condescending. And to his discredit he was a bit too eager to elide Republicans' record on race since mid-1960s, when the party made a successful play for white voters disaffected by Lyndon Johnson's championing of civil-rights legislation.

Part of that is Rand being Rand, as the saying goes: even for a politician Mr Paul is unusually sure of himself and to my ear often comes off as an odd mixture of belligerent and brittle. And his critics need to remember that Mr Paul is an ambitious Republican politician who lives in the real world, not an Aaron Sorkin show. The scales will not fall from his eyes to the swell of a string section and Martin Sheen's approving smirk. Mr Paul will have to compete in Republican primaries, and he cannot do that effectively if he calls those voters bigots. Republican racial rebalancing will be a subtle and lengthy affair, just as Democratic racial rebalancing was. I don't recall John Stennis or Robert Byrd being cast into the outer depths, and I'm willing to bet that Jimmy Carter won the South in 1976 with plenty of help from nostalgic segregationists.

Mr Paul's Democratic critics should be worried; his speech showed that once that rebalancing happens, Republicans—particularly the libertarian wing of the Republican Party from which Mr Paul hails—can make inroads with black voters on civil-liberties grounds. He won applause when he told the audience he opposed unduly harsh sentences for non-violent drug offences. He reminded his listeners that George W. Bush and Barack Obama both admitted to using drugs but "they got extraordinarily lucky". He called mandatory minimum sentences "heavy handed and arbitrary". Of course, these policies do not only appeal to black and Latino voters (said the pasty little man typing this post and cheering inwardly), but blacks and Latinos bear the brunt of America's cruel criminal-justice practices; they stand to gain the most by their reversal. They may not like everything in the Republican platform, but then again, socially conservative black Democrats are probably not the strongest cheerleaders for gay marriage. Such are coalition politics, and it is heartening to see Republicans, however imperfectly at first, begin the process of building a diverse, policy-based coalition.

Read on:Lexington says Mr Paul is running from Goldwater's ghost

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