Lauren Valle wanted to create bad publicity for Rand Paul’s
Senate campaign by having herself photographed next to the
candidate while displaying a sign that mocked him as a tool of
corporate interests.
Miss Valle’s stunt didn’t go off as planned, but the
23-year-old MoveOn.org activist certainly succeeded in her larger
goal of creating bad publicity for the Kentucky Republican’s
campaign. After she shoved her way through a crowd awaiting the
candidate’s arrival for a debate at a TV studio Monday in
Lexington, some of Paul’s supporters grabbed Miss Valle, pulled off
the blonde wig she was wearing as a disguise and wrestled her to
the ground. At least two TV news cameras recorded the most
outrageous moment of the melee, when a man wearing a “Rand Paul for
U.S. Senate” T-shirt stomped his foot on Miss Valle’s shoulder as
she lay helpless on the pavement.
The trademark rapidity of news in the Internet Age took it
from there. At 11:03 p.m., Atlantic Monthly senior editor
Joshua Green posted an article headlined: “MoveOn Supporter
Brutally Attacked by Rand Paul Supporter,” complete with a
YouTube video from a Kentucky TV station. The video clip was,
as Green said, “truly awful.”
Awful as it was, however, that footage didn’t tell the
whole story. Yet no one online nowadays waits for the whole story
before reaching their conclusions. “Rand Paul
Supporter Stomps Head of Female,” said one “progressive”
blogger. By midnight, a liberal blogger in Kentucky (who also
happens to be a state employee) had pronounced the incident the
work of GOP “Brownshirts.”
Overnight and into the next day, more bits and pieces were
added to the story. By early Tuesday afternoon, a Paul supporter
named Tim Profitt had been identified as the Lexington stomper. He
admitted his involvement, apologized, and was banned from further
participation in the Republican’s campaign. Rand Paul issued an
official
statement condemning Profitt’s action as “deplorable. And so
much for the story, at least insofar as the Republican Senate
campaign in Kentucky is officially concerned. Given that Paul
seemed to hold a
strong lead in the race over Democrat Jack Conway, it is
unlikely that Monday’s unfortunate incident will prevent the GOP
from holding on to the seat vacated by retiring Sen. Jim Bunning.
However, the whole story of this incident has not yet been told,
and this one seemingly minor event in Kentucky may yet prove far
more significant than its influence on the outcome of one of more
than 30 Senate races that will be decided Nov. 2.
For the past 18 months, ever since the Department of
Homeland Security released an
April 2009 report depicting Tea Party activists as the tip of a
dangerous iceberg of right-wing extremism, Democrats and their
media allies have been trying to depict opponents of President
Obama’s policy agenda as crypto-fascists. And if conservatives can
be permitted to speculate without being accused of succumbing to
the Hofstadter “paranoid style,” Lauren Valle’s actions Monday in
Lexington certainly seem… well, peculiar.
Miss Valle appears to be an itinerant all-purpose
protester. Two years ago, while a student at Columbia University,
she was the youngest of five
Americans detained by Chinese officials after unfurling a “Free
Tibet” banner at the Beijing Olympics. In May of this year, she was
charged with felony trespassing in Louisiana when she and other
Greenpeace activists illegally boarded a ship, unfurled a banner,
and painted the ship with slogans, a protest evidently timed to
coincide with an appearance in the area by Interior Secretary Ken
Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. (Their
banner read: “Salazar Ban Arctic Drilling.”) Law enforcement
officials
said the Greenpeace group had been in the area for two weeks
and “had been repeatedly warned not to hamper clean up operations
and not to trespass.” A local
news account of that incident noted that none of the Greenpeace
activists was from Louisiana — four were from Washington, D.C.,
one was from New York, one was from California, and Miss Valle is
from Massachusetts.
From Beijing to Louisiana, this Ivy League radical somehow
ended up in Kentucky. On MSNBC Tuesday evening, Keith Olbermann
told the story of the Lexington incident with the label “Thuggish
Behavior,” interviewing Miss
Valle. She explained that she had been hired two weeks
earlier by MoveOn.org to appear in costume as an “executive” of a
phony organization called RepubliCorp with the slogan, “We buy
democracy, one race at a time.” MoveOn, a liberal organization that
is non-partisan in name only, issued a “Bird-dogging
Guide” instructing activists: “Research your Republican
target’s schedule” and “Stage your RepubliCorp stunt and attract
media attention.” In this mission, professional protester Lauren
Valle was eminently successful. Olbermann overlooked the irony
that, while MoveOn declared that its protests were intended
to “expose the unprecedented flood of corporate cash
to Republican campaign coffers,” Valle was paid to travel to
Kentucky for her stunt, while her assailant Tim Profitt was an
unpaid local volunteer. Indeed, Profitt had donated $1,900 to the
Paul campaign, according to FEC records.
Profitt told the
Associated Press that he and one of his friends
had talked to police officers at the scene, trying to warn them
that Valle “was getting ready to do something,” but the police
answered, “That’s not our job.” When the Republican candidate
arrived, Profitt and his friends tried to block Valle’s path to the
candidate because they were “concerned about Rand’s safety,”
Profitt told the AP. Meanwhile, Olbermann’s MSNBC colleagues
Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews compared Profitt’s
actions in Lexington to Nazi Germany. Olbermann, Schultz, and
Matthews were, of course, paid with “corporate cash” to denounce
Paul’s volunteer supporters as thugs and Nazis.
Nearly two years after the election of Hope and Change,
Republicans now hope they are just six days way from yet more
Change. Despite every effort by Democrats and their media friends,
analysts are now
predicting a GOP “blowout” victory on Election Day. Miss Valle
herself perhaps best described the anticipation when she called
Monday’s incident “an extreme example of the kinds
of sentiments that people are feeling in many races across the
country” and added: “I think that tension is
incredibly high.”
No doubt about that, Miss Valle. And apologies in advance
if next Tuesday feels like yet another kick in the head for
Democrats.
