How Rand Paul's civil-rights views escaped media scrutiny

[BridgeTheGap]

The editorial board of Louisville's Courier-Journal didn't mince words following its sit-down with Rand Paul last month. Much of what the Republican Senate candidate supports, it wrote, "is repulsive to people in the mainstream," including "an unacceptable view of civil rights."

And yet Paul's view that the federal government should not have the power to force integration on private businesses — part of 1964's landmark Civil Rights Act — didn't get the attention of the national press until Wednesday, following interviews with NPR's Robert Siegel and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. (Watch the exchange with Maddow below. Paul subsequently changed his position Thursday, after an intense 24 hours of media fallout.)

It's not as if the national media ignored the Kentucky contest. To the contrary, Washington political reporters headed out to cover the horse race — who's up, who's down — and wrote extensively on how the election plays into a larger narrative of tea party candidates like Paul fighting against the GOP establishment.

Somehow lost in all that coverage was any focus on Paul's views on the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, a Lexis-Nexis search for "Rand Paul" and "Civil Rights Act" yields no results for the weeks after the Courier-Journal editorial ran.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100520/pl_ynews/ynews_pl2167

[ingac70]

1. It was best to keep a lid on it until he won the primary...

so the world can see exactly what this Tea Party business is all about.

[groovedaddy]

3. I knew a number of Dems in KY, a few bloggers, who regularly attacked Paul during the primary,

I contended all along that, if you're a Dem, YOU WANT PAUL to be the repub candidate. Trey Grayson, the current KY sec of state whom Paul defeated, would have been a much tougher candidate to beat.
I haven't seen the polling on this race since the primary, but I'm convinced that this one is in the bag for the D side.

[dbmk]

2. How do you escape

..from something that is not there?