When Rand Paul launched his presidential bid in early April amid an array of diverse faces, he talked about focusing on the inner cities and the other America, a place where “people experience a daily ugliness that dashes hope and leaves only the fatigue of despair.”

But three weeks into a campaign where he’s promised to broaden the GOP’s base of support in some of those places, he’s missed critical opportunities to change the party’s dialogue with minority communities.


On Tuesday, as Baltimore burned in the wake of the latest episode surrounding the alleged use of deadly excessive force, Paul’s response was notably off-key.

“I came through the train on Baltimore last night,” Paul told host Laura Ingraham. “I’m glad the train didn’t stop.”

The senator’s breezy response came just before he blamed the violent uprising there on “the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society.” He also expressed his sympathy for “the plight of police,” all without speaking to the circumstances surrounding the troubling death of Freddie Gray in the custody of Baltimore Police.

His camp now acknowledges the lost chance.

“We recognize how it may have sounded to some people,” said Elroy Sailor, a senior adviser to Paul who has helped orchestrate more than two years of sustained outreach by Paul to the African-American community. “We’re listening and learning every day and we learned from this. We’re also leading this conversation.”

But Paul’s mixed messaging marked the second time in his first month as an official candidate that he missed a moment to give fuller definition to his claim that he is the Republican presidential candidate whose understanding of inner-city issues can broaden the GOP’s appeal to African-American voters.

“You can say you’re concerned about our issues but when this is happening and you make a snide, demeaning remark, it shows that he doesn’t understand the frustration in our community,” said John Bailey, director of the non-partisan Colorado Black Roundtable. “If he was really concerned, he wouldn’t be relieved his train didn’t stop [in Baltimore]; he’d have gotten that train to stop and gotten off to see what’s happening.”

The Baltimore stumble came after another failure to put rhetoric into practice. The day after his early April campaign launch, as attention focused on South Carolina — where a video showed a local police officer shoot an unarmed black man as he tried to flee — Paul took the stage in New Hampshire and said, “Today we sit atop a powder keg.”

He was talking, though, about the national debt.

Asked later that day about the shooting of Walter Scott — after he didn’t weigh in on his own — Paul steered clear of addressing the outrage from many African-Americans, instead noting that “98, 99 percent of police are are doing their job on a day-to-day basis and aren’t doing things like this.” The following day, at a campaign event just 20 miles from where Scott has been killed, Paul didn’t mention it at all.

“It just reinforces my opinion that he still doesn’t understand the plight or circumstances of our community,” said Raoul Cunningham, the head of the NAACP branch in Paul’s hometown of Louisville.

On Tuesday, almost as soon as he lamented the breakdown of the family structure, Paul corrected course and said it wasn’t the time to talk about the root causes of the violence in Baltimore. But by then it was too late, and his scattershot approach suggested a surprising level of uncertainty in his approach.

“All of these candidates are going to have to reckon with these issues,” said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who has also advised Paul about his African-American outreach. “I don’t mind if they take their time figuring out how to approach it, but they won’t be able to avoid it when it’s always in the news.”

While Paul’s reluctance to wrestle with the root causes of the underlying anger in many black communities may be a missed opportunity, it’s also evidence of the difficulty in reconciling his views with a predominantly white Republican base that’s more attuned to law and order issues.

Some African-American Republicans who are impressed by Paul’s efforts to understand and address inner-city issues worry that his recent comments didn’t reflect that work — and fear it could set back what they see as a sincere initiative.

“I do feel that he’s genuinely concerned about criminal justice reform and bringing solutions to minority communities,” said Glenn McCall, an RNC committeeman from South Carolina who is African-American. “But we don’t want to come across as being patronizing.”

If Paul’s comments are being scrutinized closer than most, it’s because the Kentucky senator has focused so much energy on outreach to minority communities. Over the last three years, Paul has met with civic leaders in Detroit, Atlanta and Chicago; he’s sought out the counsel of J.C. Watts, Steele and other African-American Republicans. He’s spoken at historically black colleges about revitalizing inner cities and sponsored legislation with Democratic Sen. Cory Booker aimed at reforming the criminal justice system.

Last summer, following the police-involved shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, Paul traveled there to meet with local leaders and penned a provocative op-ed for Time magazine calling for the demilitarization of police and acknowledging that many African-Americans legitimately feel as if they are being targeted by police officers.

“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention,” Paul wrote last August.

But that was then — before he was a presidential candidate and had to work out the hard math of constituency politics.

“He’s trying to win a Republican primary, so it’s business as usual,” said Bailey.

McCall believes there’s still time for Paul to distinguish himself among the GOP field, and thinks there’s more of an opening than he may realize. “This is a great opportunity for these candidates to go in and engage with some of these community members, the black pastors saying they want to rebuild,” McCall said. “It’s a great opportunity to start building that rapport, that trust.”