Rand Paul’s Voting Base

As I scroll down the newsfeed on my phone, I read political blurbs about how this baby-faced candidate promised to solve many different issues in America. All of these sit under the headline “Rand Paul—Defeat the Washington Machine.”

A good eye can catch the expert political tip-toeing; it can see that those blurbs are so deftly crafted to show just enough advocacy to align Mr. Rand GOP Paul with every rich white male in America. But most people don’t have a good eye. Most people see that Paul has devoted an entire little blurb to “energy” and think, “Hey! Energy! This guy can’t be so bad!” But they fail to realize that when he says, “Allowing businesses to compete in a free market will not only produce the most efficient forms of energy, but will also pass along the cost savings to the consumer,” this will only result in maintaining Big Oil. They don’t realize that clean-energy companies can’t survive in the free market economy since that economy is already monopolized by the billions of dollars of infrastructure that oil companies have. The evidence for this is clear: Elon Musk is the only person who has been producing a somewhat successful standalone electric car company, Tesla, but the only reason he’s been able to do this is because he was lucky enough to make billions and is completely okay with spending some of his own money to try and start something groundbreaking. Plus, Paul’s advocacy, as stated on his site, of the Keystone Pipeline shows that he doesn’t have clean, self-sufficient energy in mind.

If Paul is elected, he hopes to implement a Flat Tax of 17 percent, known as the EZ Tax. It’s harder to believe that Paul’s first priority is stimulating the economy and reducing debt when, if he’s elected, America is going to have to, once again, learn the hard way about why trickle-down doesn’t work with greedy CEOs. The so-called 1 percenters making billions of dollars on Wall Street won’t hire more or pay better wages, nor will they let other, more innovative, small businesses start to grow since its these very same businesses that threaten the cash-cow corporations paying the stockbrokers to manage their millions. Instead, they’ll take those breaks and give themselves big, fat Christmas bonuses. To me, it’s wrong to think that the Goldman-Sachs-type CEOs at the top, who contribute to the majority of “the 1 percent,” and who rake in cash from their own investments, should go completely untaxed with Paul’s proposed elimination of Capital Gains taxation.

Paul’s platform truly is starting to look like it keeps the whole country in mind.

Another aspect of Paul’s campaign that scares me isn’t just his ability to potentially further polarize the 1 percent and the rest of America with his EZ Tax, but it’s his foreign policy mindset. Should Paul be elected, I see a repeat of the Bush foreign policy messes of eight years ago. Paul thinks that we need to “empower our military to fight and win if and when we choose to fight,” because “our freedom is threatened from outside our borders, and we need to protect ourselves against Jihadists.” He also wants to redistribute spending and cut areas that are better run by state governments.

This is political code for “More military money, less education spending.”

Under his trying to cut all aid to the “Haters of America,” it’s obvious that Paul won’t support an Iran deal. It’s plain to see he’s completely for walking around with a big stick and dropping troops in places he sees fit. This only destroys all work at building a peaceful foreign policy that the Obama Administration has done for the last two terms. So far, the Administration’s ideology with foreign policy has been: “If we treat other countries nicely now, they probably won’t want to murder us in the future, so, let’s relieve sanctions or give aid and pull our troops out, etc.”

While the removal of troops has arguably led to the formation of radical group ISIS, the entire premise that there were nukes in Iraq wrongly led us to drop troops in and snoop around. And what did we find? Not too much.

I see that foreign countries don’t like it when we get up in their faces and go poking around. Obama has tried to respect that. But it seems that Paul is only going to fuel more foreign intervention. So, as I sit watching Paul’s wife desperately try and make her husband seem relatable to the audience of Americans, I’m unmoved. And most of all, I’m worried.

I’m worried because there is a bigger problem at stake, which Paul’s shoddy policies and pseudo-empathy and 1 percent favoring ideas illustrate, and its that our society is kind of brainwashed.

Tons of people are going to vote for this guy. He’s raised millions already from campaign donations from American citizens on his website, American citizens who struggle because they’re sick and can't afford healthcare or to go to the hospital, but go anyway; citizens who don’t even try to work and are on welfare but think that “those ghetto people” are leeching from the taxes that they don’t even pay! And they love Paul because he says he doesn’t want “double taxation” (a genius marketing word created by rich men to get poor people supporting lowering taxes on the 1 percent) when they don’t even have money in the stock market or own businesses that pay taxes.

Why? Because he’s Republican, so tons of people who’ve grown up around their grandparents, or watch Fox News, or live in Alabama, will vote for him, blindly.

And this is a major problem.

Yes, people get snippets, here, and sound bytes there, of their candidate advocating for something the individual supports, but how much do they really know about what he has in mind? How much do they know about what he even means when he says “double taxation” or “free-market healthcare?”

Its funny how, if this whole pageantry of party-associations was done with, or at least diluted, citizens would be forced to learn about candidates.

Whether or not it regards Rand Paul, most Americans don’t vote on a candidate; they vote on a color, they don’t pick by platform and they pick by party. They don’t do their research.

Because do you think they’d vote the same way if they did? ♥