On a crowded Saturday in August at the Kentucky State Fair in Louisville, between vendors selling funnel cakes and Christian T-shirts, three volunteers manned a booth for Rand Paul's Senate campaign. They smiled, waved, and seemed to be having a good time—until I stopped by and announced that I planned to hang out. "We can't let you do that," said one, who declined to give her name. So I talked to the only person who would give me the time of day—a woman in a wheelchair who had stopped by to grab a Paul bumper sticker. I asked her if she agreed with Paul's stance that the Americans with Disabilities Act is an unfair burden to business owners. She looked to the volunteer for clarification, but now she, too, encountered the Paul campaign's code of silence. "I can't talk to you, ma'am," the volunteer apologized. "I don't want to mis-say something."
Stalking jittery campaign workers certainly wasn't how I'd hoped to cover Paul, who is seen as one of the tea-party-type Republicans most likely to capture a statewide seat this fall. But then, I didn't have much choice: Paul, the son of libertarian stalwart Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), has gone to near-comic lengths to avoid what Sarah Palin calls the "lamestream media." Everyone, from Paul and his top staffers to the lowliest door-knockers, has virtually stopped talking to reporters. The campaign did not return any of my phone calls requesting interviews over the course of three months. Even after I flew across the country and drove two hours to Paul's busy campaign HQ in Bowling Green, I was politely turned away. "I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful," said a volunteer who avoided eye contact, seemingly shaken by the appearance of a live journalist. After myriad phone calls, I finally got one of Paul's county-level campaign coordinators on the line, but he demurred: "It's nothing to do with you; I just don't do interviews, period."
"I think everybody is very wary of being painted in a poor light," explained Ginny Saville, assistant head of the Lexington Rand/Ron Paul Campaign for Liberty Meetup group and the only person even loosely affiliated with Paul who would agree to an interview. She worried that reporters like me might portray Paulites as "a bunch of gun-totin', Bible-bangin', anti-Semitic racists—all the things that are pinned on us a lot. I think everybody is very, very gun-shy of the media right now." ...........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/rand-paul-kentucky-media
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