Sen. Rand Paul (R- Ky.) will likely garner at least one prominent liberal vote if he runs against assumed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher told The Hill that he would consider voting Republican in a Clinton/Paul mash-up.
“I wouldn’t say leaning, but I would say for the first time in a long time I’d be considering the Republican product. I might choose their toothpaste when I’m in the aisle,” Maher said.
This isn’t the first time Maher, who makes a living by making fun of Republicans on HBO, has shown some support for Paul. He commented on the 2014 CPAC straw poll results back in May and said that Paul was likely the only GOP candidate to give Clinton a “run for her money.”
“Rand Paul is an interesting candidate to me. Rand Paul could possibly get my vote,” Maher told The Hill. “As I always used to say about his father, I love half of him. I love the half of him that has the guts to say we should end the American empire, pull the troops home, stop getting involved in every foreign entanglement… He’s way less of a hawk than Hillary, and that appeals to me a lot because I’m not crazy about how warlike she is.”
Though most of Maher’s views are on the extremely liberal side, he is often referred to as a libertarian. Paul also has a lot of support from the libertarian movement. Maher told Parade Tuesday that he used that term to describe himself “20 years ago like twice and the label has stuck.”
“If by libertarian you mean a very basic notion that we should be able to do whatever we want to do, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else, yes, I’m a libertarian,” Maher said. ” If you’re talking about the sort of radical version of libertarianism that’s been taken up by people like Ron Paul, where we don’t have meat inspectors because if someone dies from tainted meat, then no one will patronize that meat company anymore, that’s insane. I am a libertarian to a degree. Not to the degree where I want to get rid of stop signs and traffic lights because they’re infringing on my freedoms to fly right through the windshield.”
Maher’s support for Paul follows his recent comments on the need for more people to buck their political parties.
“The problem with this country… it’s just way too much conformity. What we need is more thinking outside the box. It is very sheep-like, the thinking of this country, and anything that shakes it up, I think, is a good thing. And that includes politically shaking up the views perhaps of your own constituency. I think one of the big problems with commentators on television is that they’re so ghettoized into their own camps and they go by a mantra of ‘never say anything that will upset our own audience.’ It seems like every question that is asked on an MSNBC show, the answer begins with, ‘You’re so right, Chris. You’re so right, Rachel. You’re so right, Ed.’ Everybody is always so right,” Maher told Parade.
“And you know, I’m usually in agreement with what they say over there. But I do think there is just too much cheering for your own team, sometimes without being very informed about the issue itself—just cheering for the blue team, booing for the red team, or cheering for the red team, booing the blue team, no matter what the issue is, no matter what the answer is. I love it when somebody goes against their own tribe and points out something that they may not be thinking hard enough about.”
