And just think, it's only April. Of 2015.
Rand Paul's off-the-cuff joke about
being glad his train didn't stop in Baltimore was poorly received by many. Luckily, Rand Paul has a group of official Black Friends who can explain to him
why these things keep happening.
On Wednesday afternoon, Paul spoke for about an hour with black advisers who told him what they were hearing. The Republican presidential contender told them he understood the concern and expressed regret for his words.
"He said 'OK, I understand what everyone is saying, you're right. I shouldn't have said it that way,'" said Elroy Sailor, a senior adviser and director of strategic planning for Paul. "He recognizes that people listen and hear things differently. Certain words resonate with different constituencies.'"
Not a breakthrough, perhaps, but you have to admire the patience of his "advisers." Yes, perhaps hold off on casual jokes about violent protests in an American city after another unarmed black American inexplicably wound up dead at the hands of a local police department. Just for a day or two, so that it does not clash so obviously with your campaign platform of pretending to give a shit about these things.
Paul, who declined to be interviewed for this story, spent years forming this group of black advisers. The process began shortly after he bombed during a 2013 speech at Howard University. His tone was lecturing as he offered a history lesson on Republicans to some of the nation's brightest black students. Some accused him of "whitesplaining" politics.
I have to say, being one of Rand Paul's official black friends, one of the people he reaches out to after one of his many gaffes in his apparently long and arduous journey to eventually someday not piss off black people, sounds like the worst job you could ever wish on someone. Then again, having to talk to Rand Paul about any other subject sounds equally terrible. We may not have perfect lives, you and I, but at least we won't have to talk policy with Rand Paul today.
There are big doubts that Paul's efforts will pay off politically. In Louisville, there's skepticism about Paul among traditional civil rights leaders, who see him as an opportunist.
What, just because what he says seems to depend entirely on who he's talking to at the moment, or because all his high-minded talk about civil rights almost never quite seems to make it into any actual action on those issues? Yeah, go figure.