Politicians have much to learn from the amazing scene in the US Senate on Wednesday, when Kentucky’s Rand Paul took over the floor and spent 13 hours discussing unmanned drone attacks and US foreign policy.
The lesson: Do interesting, unexpected things and you can highlight issues important to you, advance policy goals you think are critical for the future of the country and elevate your own standing to the level of a national figure.
“Interesting” doesn’t mean ruminating about rape or tweeting pictures of your torso or “hiking the Appalachian trail.” It requires educating yourself, speaking fluently about issues and knowing how and when to find your moment and make your point. William Kristol calls this “policy entrepreneurship.”
The risks are substantial, but the rewards are outsized if done well. Perhaps the foremost example of it in the past few years was the rise of Paul Ryan — a wonky young congressman of no particular standing who decided to become his party’s foremost expert on the budget.
It was hard labor, and intellectual and fiscal honesty required Ryan to go places long considered toxic. Yet he put his ideas forward, and opened up a national discussion on entitlement reform vital to the nation’s future.
Rand Paul is the first Washington politician since Paul Ryan to seize an opportunity on a controversial issue that cuts across partisan lines — in this case, the Obama administration’s use of unmanned aircraft to target and kill terrorists — and run with it. Like Ryan, he did it with supreme competence.
I watched six hours of his 13-hour marathon filibuster, and the clarity, calm and sangfroid with which he spoke was so literally exceptional it was a sad demonstration of just how bad most politicians are when it comes to making an elementary case about anything.
You could see, on Twitter and elsewhere, how instantly galvanizing Paul’s stunt was — so much so that as the day passed, more and more members of his party showed up to show support and ask him questions so that he could relax for a moment.
And yet, while Paul’s brilliant advocacy and command of the public stage were remarkable, in the end it is his opinions that matter. And they are highly problematic at best and genuinely worrisome at worst.
He began on a very narrow point — whether a president could order military drone strikes on unarmed US citizens who are not enemy combatants on American soil. The answer is obviously no — though for some reason Attorney General Eric Holder found it difficult to say those words in a hearing on Wednesday. (He finally said them categorically in a one-sentence letter yesterday.)
But as Paul continued to speak, he broadened his message. It wasn’t just the drone strike against al Qaeda leader Anwar al Awlaki, killed in Yemen even though he was born in the United States — or the drone strike a few weeks later that killed Awlaki’s 16 year-old son.
In point of fact, Awlaki’s membership in an enemy organization as an unconventional soldier stripped him of any and all due-process rights as it did, say, confederate soldiers fighting against the union in the Civil War. And we don’t know the circumstances under which his son perished.
But the real problem, as Paul made clear, isn’t the use of drones against US citizens on American soil; it is American foreign policy itself, under both this president and his predecessor.
His indictment was radical, sweeping, total, unconditional — and wildly overdrawn. Just to take one example, he said we are living in a state of perpetual and endless war, and used Iraq as an example — Iraq, from which we pulled out entirely in 2011. To listen to Paul, you’d think America was already a police state, and the planet its evil playground.
Yes, many people believe this, but that doesn’t make it true. It wasn’t true under Bush and it’s not true under Obama. Moreover, the logic of Paul’s view is that the United States is the aggressor in the war on Islamist terror rather than a bystander unwillingly drawn into a battle that has not yet been won.
Rand Paul, who turned 50 this year, is one of the most talented politicians of his generation. And one of the most dangerous.