In his Washington Post column Monday, former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson insists that Rand Paul—the Kentucky senator, and my former boss—is “no Jack Kemp” when it comes to Republican minority outreach.

Gerson’s reasons? Lingering confusion about where Paul stands on the Civil Rights Act. The senator’s allegedly troubling libertarian philosophy. Paul’s preference for smaller federal budgets. The fact that Paul used to employ a former radio shock-jock who said stupid and offensive things about Abraham Lincoln (that aide was me).

This is the worst sort of navel-gazing.

Kemp was known for reaching out to African Americans more than any other Republican of his generation.

There is no Republican doing this more today than Rand Paul.

Not even close.

Racially explosive events of the type we’re seeing in Ferguson, Missouri, have historically elicited a knee-jerk response from conservatives—that African Americans have no real foundation for their grievances and are largely imagining oppression and racism.

When black Americans have felt targeted or threatened by heavy-handed police or policies, Republican politicians have dismissed their worries, emphasizing a more colorblind society. Commentators on the right regularly exhibit faith in our justice system and institutions, while preaching that there probably is something wrong with individuals who run afoul of the law.

Many conservatives had more sympathy in 1992 for the Los Angeles Police Department than they did for Rodney King. In 2012, conservatives rallied to make gunman George Zimmerman a hero and the late Trayvon Martin a villain.

Some of these are complex situations. Some, like the King beating, really aren’t.

Still, the last thing anyone expects when these controversies arise is for conservative Republicans to even consider the side of African Americans, much less take it.

Rand Paul is a revolutionary exception.

In Ferguson, true to form, many conservatives’ first impulse has been to give police the benefit of the doubt and to criticize the protesters. It is true that well-intentioned police officers have probably been overly villainized and also that protesters committing violence have tainted what is mostly an understandable public reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown.

Paul gives the police credit and looters criticism as well. But he zeroes in on the larger, systemic problem of the militarization of law enforcement and takes a real political risk in the process.

When the local police resemble a small army battalion, Paul writes, “it is almost impossible for many Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them.”

He adds, “Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.”

“This is part of the anguish we are seeing in the tragic events outside of St. Louis, Missouri,” Paul continues. “It is what the citizens of Ferguson feel when there is an unfortunate and heartbreaking shooting like the incident with Michael Brown.”

At heart, Paul’s critique of police militarization is really about a more consistent application of libertarian or limited government ideas. If you're against big government, you probably should be more skeptical of tanks rolling down Main Street America. The citizens of Ferguson have certainly had this concern. Conventional conservatives should too.

Jack Kemp went to great lengths to bring the limited government message to new communities. So is Rand Paul.

Part of Gerson’s critique of Paul’s minority outreach is that the Kentucky senator is somehow too anti-big government. Writes Gerson, “Rand Paul’s 2013 proposal for a balanced budget in five years — which would have eviscerated large portions of the federal government and weakened the social safety net — was less of a blueprint for reform than a demolition order.”

Paul’s budget would have balanced in five years and was without question the most aggressive of any Republican. Eighteen Republican senators voted for that “demolition order,” including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Are we to believe that Jack Kemp would have been as comfortable with a $17 trillion national debt as Gerson apparently is?

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We are still learning the details of what occurred between Brown and officer Darren Wilson. But the reaction to the shooting is telling regarding conservative attitudes about race relations.

My Facebook social media feed has been full of those eager to portray Brown in the worst possible light—he stole cigars, he had marijuana in his system, he probably had some overdue library books—and any other anecdote that might reinforce their worldview that this 18­year­old was really just a no­good thug and the officer did what he had to.

I recognize what they’re doing. I used to do the same thing. I thought, as a conservative, it was what I was supposed to do and believe.

And Rand Paul? For someone who is flirting with a presidential run to take this stand at this time is risky. It could backfire as opponents use it to whip up GOP primary voters against him.

Risky, but the right thing to do.

Rand Paul is trying to do for conservatives and the Republican Party what he and his father Ron Paul once did for me—open minds to the idea that America’s problems are not due to black people in the inner city or even brown people coming across our border.

In fact, for libertarians, our country’s problems are not really due to individual, everyday people at all. The problem is those who wield too much power. The problem is allocating authority in ways that give certain agencies, departments and various governmental institutions too much of an incentive to abuse it.

The problem is big government. In this case, an overzealous and oversized police force. This is not what conservatives usually think of as “big government.” But Rand Paul is asking them to see the matter in a different light.

Quoting other writers in his Time op-ed, Paul portrays the militarization of law enforcement as something that might have created an environment where police officers see themselves as in a war zone and the citizens they are supposed to protect as the enemy. Like soldiers on a battlefield, the police officers’ first rule is to protect their own.

In such an environment, black Americans habitually feel like they are targeted or at least given less consideration because of the color of their skin. In an illuminating story at Politico Magazine about the startling lack of accountability when it comes to police brutality, retired lieutenant Air Force colonel Michael Bell writes:

After police in Kenosha, Wis., shot my 21-year-old son to death outside his house ten years ago — and then immediately cleared themselves of all wrongdoing — an African-American man approached me and said: “If they can shoot a white boy like a dog, imagine what we’ve been going through.”

Yes, imagine what black Americans have been going through.

This is exactly what Rand Paul is asking conservatives to do.

Paul’s minority outreach efforts are but one part of a larger, libertarian-leaning package that Beltway Republicans like Michael Gerson find alien. If we are living in a “libertarian moment,” as the New York Times’ Robert Draper recently explored, where Millennials and others want relaxed drug policies, less government spying on citizens, a less interventionist foreign policy and to allow homosexuals to marry—Gerson finds himself on the opposite end of each of these trends. His idea of what the Republican Party should be—and will probably become if America’s 80 million Millennials have anything to do with it—is seriously outdated.

It is precisely Paul’s libertarianism and its focus on misplaced power instead of just “bad people” that make him the only high profile Republican leader willing—or able—to potentially revolutionize how conservatives think about race and race relations.

This is what critics like Gerson get so wrong about Paul and libertarianism. And instead of arguing against it directly, Gerson habitually finds it easier to remind everyone of the confusion over Paul’s stance on the Civil Rights Act or the “Southern Avenger.” Does a single MSNBC interview and some old, renounced columns by a third party—me—discredit everything Paul has done in terms of outreach since?

This is more parlor trick than critique. It’s too easy, to the extent that it goes unchallenged.

I’ve done my own reckoning with my past—maybe it’s time for Gerson to do some soul-searching of his own. After all, as George W. Bush’s top speechwriter, he helped reportedly helped inject the “mushroom cloud” scenario and “yellow-cake to Niger” language into the president’s speeches—the same language that helped scare the nation into going to war with Iraq in 2003.

Jack Kemp was one of the few high profile Republicans who possessed the wisdom and foresight to oppose that intervention. Said Kemp in 2003, “it would be a tragedy if a few war hawks pushed us into an unnecessary invasion and occupation of an Arab country.”

I will regret the stupid things I said as the “Southern Avenger” for the rest of my life and have denounced them. I do not know if Michael Gerson feels remorse for the damaging and misleading language he has helped craft—words that led to the national tragedy Jack Kemp warned us about.

But let’s leave Jack Kemp out of this. Fine, Rand Paul is not Jack Kemp. But no Republican today is doing more to honor and continue Kemp’s legacy of trying to bridge the longstanding gulf between black America and the Republican Party. We should be applauding him—not tearing him down.