The Kansas City Star’s Jason Whitlock gets it exactly right in this commentary on Rand Paul’s Civil Rights Act dust-up: Commentary: Rand Paul’s calculated Civil Rights faux pas.

Rand Paul is not as politically unsophisticated as the media, tea party organizers and Republican strategists would like you to believe.

In the hours after his victory in a Republican senate primary, Paul did not let it slip accidentally during an NPR interview that he opposed aspects of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. And it certainly was no fluke that later in the day on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show he repeated his “libertarian” philosophies supporting a business owner’s right to discriminate racially.

While he wasn’t quite George Wallace standing on Jefferson Davis’ gold star and proclaiming “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” Paul still played defiantly to his angry base of tea partiers.

They’re taking their country back. How far back? Apparently the goal is 1963, a year before the federal government made it illegal for restaurants, hotels, department stores, etc., to deny African-Americans service.

Paul, a doctor, is not stupid, nor is he a political novice. No way. He’s the son of an Air Force surgeon who is a political veteran. Paul was born and educated in the South. He’s been a player in the Kentucky political scene since at least 1994, when he founded the Kentucky Taxpayers United.

Paul knew what he was doing. He executed a calculated, bold, political-branding move.

Agreed. This was not a slip-up, or some kind of libertarian air-head moment. Rand Paul was very deliberately playing to the neo-Confederate base, the people for whom the GOP devised the cynical “Southern Strategy.” And wonder of wonders, it worked.