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Rand Paul has long history of controversial views
How controversial words hold up may hold key to Kentucky Senate race
By Andrew Wolfson

He ignited a furor with his explosive remarks that private business should have the right to discriminate -- and that President Barack Obama's administration sounded "un-American" in criticizing BP too harshly for the Gulf oil spill.

But Rand Paul, Kentucky's Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, has a long history of making unconventional comments about social programs, housing discrimination, military spending and limiting the role of government.

A Courier-Journal review of two-dozen public appearances by the Bowling Green eye surgeon since 1998 shows that Paul has condemned Medicare as "socialism;" denounced seat-belt and anti-smoking laws as "Nanny-state" paternalism; called for voluntary, rather than mandatory, accommodation of people with disabilities; and suggested using satellites to monitor America's borders for illegal immigrants.

Zealously advocating for free-market economics, he also has criticized private health insurance, saying it keeps patents from negotiating lower prices with their doctors.

"We need to get insurance of out of the way and let the consumer interact with their doctor the way they did basically before World War II," he said on Kentucky Educational Television's Kentucky Tonight on Dec. 2, 2002.

The son of America's most famous libertarian, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who ran for president in 2008, Rand Paul also has uttered remarks one wouldn't expect to hear from a Republican candidate in a conservative state such as Kentucky.

He has branded President George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives "a horrible mistake," condemned torture of terror suspects, called for cutting the defense budget and defended his father's proposal to reduce the number of U.S. military bases overseas.

"As Republicans, it has been easy for us to say, let's just kick that welfare queen off the welfare rolls and we'll balance the budget," he said. "You will have to cut domestic spending, but you will have to look at military spending as well."

Whether Paul has changed his position on any of those issues -- or would try to advance them in the U.S. Senate -- isn't clear.

He declined to be interviewed about his past public remarks, although his staff was provided a list of the appearances where the statements were made.

'Long legacy of statements'

Political scientists and other analysts say that Paul's track record of controversial comments is extraordinary for a new political candidate, most of whom prepare for years to run for office by studiously avoiding theoretical remarks that could alienate voters.

Both of Paul's main opponents, Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson, whom he trounced in the May primary, and Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway, whom he will face this fall, have seized upon his past comments in an attempt to label him as a candidate with "dangerous" ideas that would hurt Kentucky.

"What struck me most about Rand Paul is that he is like a Supreme Court candidate with a long paper trail," said Professor Stephen Voss of University of Kentucky. "He will have to defend his long legacy of statements."

Kentucky Educational Television analyst John McGarvey, a Louisville lawyer, said Paul could struggle as voters come to know his record in more detail.

"How is the farmer going to feel about a guy who wants to wipe out agricultural subsidies?" McGarvey said. "How will a senior citizen who usually votes Republican feel about Paul's views on Social Security? Or a business Republican who knows he is going to need help from Washington?"

Michael Baranowski, who teaches political science at Northern Kentucky University, said Paul's pronouncements -- including his controversial comments to The Courier-Journal editorial board and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- make sense if considered in the context of his libertarian political philosophy.

But Baranowski said, "Candidates who expect voters to consider their view in context generally don't win elections."

Paul faces another challenge, UK professor Ernest Yanarella said.

"Ideologically, he prefers to live in a bygone era that is no more, due to mammoth changes in society, politics, culture and especially the economy," Yanarella wrote in an e-mail. "The problem is many Americans, perhaps a majority, like a balance between individualist principles and effective government, even Big Government when it provides Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."

Still, said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, independent-minded voters may be attracted to the fact that Paul is a "square peg that refused to fit into a round hole."

"Many of his past positions, on both right and left, would have been enough to defeat a candidate for high office in the past," Sabato said. "If you go issue by issue, and focus just on which people will disagree, you can add up the opponents into a very large majority of the population."

But Sabato said the key to Paul's success so far is that he isn't being judged according to the usual rules.

"Voters seem to be giving him a pass," Sabato said, "almost saying, 'Well, that's just Rand; he's not a politician.'"

Republican consultant Ted Jackson, who isn't involved in Paul's campaign, said some of his positions may be "problematic to some people."

But ultimately, he said, "Voters will look at both candidates and decide whether Jack Conway's or Rand Paul's better represents their views. And I believe that Rand Paul's positions are more consistent with the average Kentucky voter's than Jack Conway's."

Views on the left

Although he has never run for public office until now, Paul, 47, has been speaking out on political issues for decades.

At 21, while standing in for his father, he debated then-U.S. Rep. Phil Gramm, who was running against Ron Paul for an open Senate seat in Texas.

The younger Paul began appearing regularly on KET in the late 1990s as chairman of Kentucky Taxpayers United, an anti-tax group.

Yet his views that fall on the left wing of the political spectrum may surprise voters, especially Republicans. Like his father, Paul has called for reduced military spending and pulling back on U.S. commitments abroad.

Appearing at a kickoff rally for his father's presidential campaign in Montana on Jan. 31, 2008, he said that national defense is the primary function of the federal government but added, "Does that mean you have a blank check for the military-industrial complex?"

"As conservatives," he said, "we say that throwing more money at a problem doesn't always fix it. But then all the sudden, we lose our brains and say, a billion dollars here, a trillion dollars there to Halliburton. We keep spending with no restraint. ... We need to recognize as Republicans that we can't give a blank check to the military."

In an interview on May 15, 2009, Paul told the host of Antiwar Radio that he would have voted against going to war in Iraq and that he opposes a long-term occupation of Iraq or Iran.

In the same interview, he said, "I think torture is always wrong" and that "our country should have a higher ideal than that."

He also said at the Montana rally that Americans "need to figure out what is going on with terrorism and why they attack us."

"Some Republicans are not going to want to hear this," he said. "But I live near Fort Campbell, and there are 50,000 soldiers there. I tell people you have to truly imagine what your feelings would be if those soldiers were Chinese soldiers and they were occupying the United States. We wouldn't have it. Republican and Democrat, we'd be blowing up the Chinese with roadside bombs as they were coming off the base. No country wants foreign soldiers on their land."

Defending his father's proposal to withdraw U.S. troops from Korea, Japan and Europe, Paul said, "We have such sophisticated weapons that nobody can challenge us militarily in the world. We don't need to be provoking these crazy people by being in their countries. Will they still sell us their oil? They have to if they want to exist. They'll go back to being Bedouins in the desert if they don't."

Addressing President Bush's program of funneling government money through religious-based charities, Paul said on KET's Kentucky Tonight on June 30, 2008, that "churches do charity work, and that is wonderful, but they shouldn't be corrupted with government money."

He also said the initiatives "obscure the church-state separation that there really ought to be."

Limited government

Most of Paul's pronouncements over the years have had a more conservative bent.

Appearing on the 2008 Kentucky Tonight segment, he said he favors a government that does "the least it has to do," rather than one that "coddles us from cradle to grave."

"We start with the idea that it is the people's money and you work hard for it; and we should take as little from people as possible; and when we do, we should spend as little as possible and do it efficiently," he said.

Noting Americans' generous contributions in the wake of the Asian tsunami in 2005 and Hurricane Katrina in 2006, Paul said in the same Kentucky Tonight appearance, "I think we can take care of those in our society who are the have-nots, the can-nots, the mentally ill ... without government."

Interviewed on the Christian Broadcasting Network in a clip posted online last month, Paul also said, "Christianity and values is the basis of our society."

"I'm a Christian," he said. "We go to the Presbyterian Church. My wife's a deacon there. I think that it in some ways it's funny, 'cause people talk about laws and say we have a law against this. Laws really work because most of us don't need the laws. Ninety-eight (percent) of us won't murder people, won't steal, won't break the law. ... "

Paul lamented in the May 2009 Antiwar Radio interview that there is too much democracy in the modern United States.

"We were at one time a constitutional republic where we had restraints, and now we are much more of a pure democracy and this is what many of the founding fathers feared," he said. "Jefferson called a democracy nothing more than a mob rule, where 51 percent get to decide what the other 49 percent have in rights."

A strong supporter of capitalism, Paul complained at a Boston tea party rally on March 2, 2009, that capitalism was unfairly being blamed for the recession.

"We have very little vestige left of laissez-faire capitalism," he said. "We have a largely regulated economy, and we cannot let capitalism take the blame for this, or we will have less capitalism."

Paul also told the protesters that "the other thing just infuriates me is that they blame greed. Not that greed is a good thing to have. ... But it is an indirect way of blaming capitalism. What is greed? Greed is an excess of self-interest, but what drives capitalism? Self-interest and profit. They are good things."

And he has criticized the Obama administration for treating BP unfairly over the Gulf Oil spill, including in a May interview with Good Morning America.

"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business. I've heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill. And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be someone's fault instead of the fact that sometimes accidents happen."

Like many conservatives, Paul denounces what he describes as the overregulation of society.

"When I built my first house, the government ... was even interested in what kind of toilets I had in my house," he said at the 2009 tea party rally.

"How did we get a regulation that requires how much water is in our toilet? Well, it came about through the Clean Water Act of 1994. What happens in Congress is that when you call something the Clean Water Act, everybody is afraid to vote against it because everyone is for clean water. So they fall over themselves to vote for things and they don't read the legislation."

Environmental Protection Agency spokesman Dale Kemery said in an interview that there are no requirements associated with toilets in the 1972 Clean Water Act. He said it was the national Energy Policy Act of 1992 that included requirements to set the flush volume at 1.6 gallons per flush.

Civil rights

Paul ignited a national furor after telling The Courier-Journal's editorial board on April 17 -- and later MSNBC's Rachael Maddow -- that owners of private business should not be covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

While condemning racism and discrimination by government, Paul told the newspaper that "in a free society, we will tolerate boorish people with abhorrent behavior."

He said on WHAS Radio's Joe Elliott show April 25 that "when you believe in freedom, you believe in the freedom of people to act both good and poorly."

Paul subsequently said he would have voted for the historic civil rights legislation. But his original criticism mirrored the views of his father, who stood up on the House floor when it celebrated the 40th anniversary of the act in 2004 and denounced it as "a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society."

Rand Paul expressed much the same view in a May 30, 2002, letter to the editor of the Bowling Green Daily News, in which he said the U.S. Fair Housing Act "ignores the distinction between private and public property."

"Should it be prohibited for public, taxpayer-financed institutions such as schools to reject someone based on an individual's beliefs or attributes? Most certainly," Paul said. "Should it be prohibited for private entities such as a church, bed-and-breakfast or retirement neighborhood that doesn't want noisy children? Absolutely not. Decisions concerning private property and associations should in a free society be unhindered."

Fair-housing advocates, including Arthur Cosby, executive director of the Lexington Fair Housing Coalition, said they were concerned to learn about Paul's view, given that most housing discrimination is by private citizens.

"Enforcement against private entities is a very big part of what we do, and I think the community is better off for it," Crosby said.

Asked by a blogger in Lexington on May 15 whether he supports the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, Paul said:

"I think a lot of things on employment should be done locally. For example, I think we can come up with some common-sense solutions. If you have a three-story building, and if you have somebody apply for a job, you might get them a job on the first floor ... as opposed to making the person with the business put in an elevator. So things like that should be fair to the business owners. I think we should try to accommodate people."

After being attacked for that stance, Paul wrote in an opinion piece June 5 in the Bowling Green Daily News that he doesn't want to repeal the 20-year-old disability law, which was passed with bipartisan support.

"I have simply pointed out areas within these broad federal laws that have financially burdened many smaller businesses," he said.

Jan Day, chief executive of Louisville's Center for Accessible Living, said disability activists reacted with "anger and disbelief" when they learned "we have a candidate for federal office with this kind of thinking."

Justine Lisser, a senior attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington, which enforces the employment portions of the disability act, said the law does require workers' disabilities to be accommodated. But she said, "We are unaware of any case in which an employer has been forced to install an elevator."

Retirement, health care

Paul also has advocated letting people opt out of the Social Security program and invest their own retirement savings, as was proposed unsuccessfully by President George W. Bush.

"I think the average American is smart enough to make their own investments," he said on KET's Kentucky Tonight on Oct. 26, 1998. "The more freedom the better ... Reform is going to happen, and I hope it's privatization."

Speaking on the same issue the next year on Kentucky Tonight, Paul spoke in more detail, saying workers should be allowed to invest part of their Social Security benefits, keeping "a base line ... that is sort of a security net."

Paul said the problem with the program is that for people younger than 60, Social Security is a bad investment.

"You would probably do no worse sticking your money under your mattress," he said.

Paul, who has practiced medicine in Kentucky since 1993, has spoken often about health care, including his belief that Americans have no "right" to it.

Speaking at a town-hall meeting on the subject in Lexington on Nov. 14, 2009, he said, "I think you don't have a right to happiness -- you have the right to the pursuit of happiness ... if you think you have the right to health care, you are saying basically that I am your slave. I provide health care. ... My staff and technicians provide it. ... If you have a right to health care, then you have a right to their labor."

Paul also has said there is no right to health care paid for by taxpayers.

In a Nov. 7, 1999, letter to the Bowling Green newspaper, he said: "If you maintain a right to health care or housing, you must argue that your belief ... is sufficient to send armed tax collectors to your neighbors house to expropriate that 'right.'"

Asked whether he supported a bill to expand health insurance to cover 50,000 children in Kentucky who didn't have it, Paul said on KET in 1998 that it eventually would lead to universal coverage, which he said he opposed because it would drive up costs.

"Demand is infinite for something that is free," he said. "It sounds mean-spirited to say something has to cost something so somebody won't go to the doctor, but you have to have it cost something."

Advancing his belief that health care prices should be set by the marketplace, Paul also has attacked having government set Medicare reimbursements for doctors.

"The fundamental reason why Medicare is failing is why the Soviet Union failed -- socialism doesn't work," Paul said on Kentucky Tonight on June 16, 1998. "You have ... no price fluctuation."

Paul also has advocated medical-savings accounts, which he says would allow patients to pay for care themselves and negotiate lower costs with their doctors. He also has said that higher deductibles are needed to reduce the demand for care, which he says would, in turn, result in lower prices.

"In our country, people primarily get access to health care through insurance, and that is part of the problem," he said on Kentucky Tonight on Jan. 29, 1999.

"If you go to the doctor, you don't pay directly for your doctor's services, your insurance company pays for it. ... So the price goes up indiscriminately because nobody is there to barter down the price. What we need is higher-deductible plans, people paying more cash as they go into the doctor, and then what we'll have is the prices will level off."

Noting that "computers are half the price they were 10 years ago," Paul said, "Why does capitalism work for computers and not for health care? It is because you have a third-party system paying for the health care, and not the patient."

Critics of Paul's views, including Dr. Vipul Mankad, former chairman of UK's pediatrics department, said his proposals are nostalgic and impractical.

"Who is going to want to give up their insurance?" said Mankad, noting that private medical insurance spares people bankruptcy when they are hit with catastrophic costs and also allows them to get preventive care that reduces future expenses.

AARP, the largest organization for seniors, has strongly opposed letting workers invest part of their Social Security contributions, fearing it would undermine the "security that the program provides," said David Certner, its legislative policy director in Washington.

He also said its members "strongly support Medicare" and that its costs have risen more slowly than those for all medical care.

Several federal government studies have found that Medicare administrative costs are far smaller than those for privately insured coverage -- about 2 percent of total payments, versus 15 to 20 percent.

The Council for Affordable Health Insurance, an insurance industry group, found in a 2006 study that the gap was smaller but that Medicare still had lower costs.