Rand Paul Goes to New York City

Speaking at the Kentucky Freedom Festival on Saturday, Republican Senate hopeful Rand Paul informed Tea Party activists that “we have to get our policy out there, we’re not going to get a lot of help from the newspapers.” He urged grassroots groups to raise money and purchase air time, arguing, “Until we buy advertising, the message is controlled by the other side.”

Today Paul is honing in on some of those advertising dollars, but from an altogether different type of benefactor: Steve Forbes, along with E. O’Brien Murray, Mallory Factor and James Higgins of the Free Enterprise Fund, is hosting a gilded fundraiser for Paul in the Big Apple.

The last time Paul ventured outside Kentucky to raise funds, it didn’t play too well with his supporters back home, eliciting claims that he had “capitulated to the establishment.” That was in Washington, D.C., however, and it evoked a particular animus because it included senators who had voted for the federal bailout of the banking industry — a source of funding Paul had pledged explicitly not to accept. Despite a general backlash against the bailout of Wall Street, folks in Washington have been the subject of far greater ire than the folks in Manhattan.