Some of the people who should be the most enthusiastic about Pauls Presidential campaign have found themselves disheartened by it. Credit Photograph by Jon Hill / Redux
The Republican Convention is fifty-one weeks away, but, earlier this week, Politico published its first post-mortem of the campaign season. The subject was Senator Rand Paul, who last fall was hailed by Time as The Most Interesting Man in Politics, but now seems, in the estimation of Politico, to be the most interesting man whos struggling to stay in the Republican primary. A recent CNN/ORC poll found him tied with Ted Cruz for fifth place in the field, with support from only six per cent of those polled, behind Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio. An NBC/Marist poll found him in sixth place in Iowa, and in ninth place in New Hampshire.
Last fall, Rand Paul seemed like a less quirkyand therefore, perhaps, more electableversion of his father, the former Congressman Ron Paul, whose 2008 and 2012 campaigns for the Republican Presidential nomination were grand cultural phenomena. Ron Paul toured the country, telling Republican voters things you might think they wouldnt want to hear. In the 2012 primary, he finished in second place, behind Mitt Romney, in New Hampshire, with 22.8 per cent of the vote. Four years later, one poll has Ron Pauls less recalcitrant son at only four per cent. The Web site FiveThirtyEight points out that, nationwide, Rand Pauls support is currently lower than his fathers was at this point in 2012.
What went wrong? There is no shortage of explanations, partly because contemporary politics has no shortage of professional explainers. The Politico story claimed that Paul is allergic to buttering up big donors, and suggested that his campaign is chaotic. (It included a particularly vivid anecdote about a near-physical altercation between Pauls campaign manager and a member of his security staff, who was described as a a 280-pound retired New York police detective and Paul family loyalist.) Paul himself told a reporter for the Boston Globe that one of the obstacles he faced was a crowded Republican field. Obviously, everybodys numbers come down when you divide it many different ways, he said.
None of this quite explains Pauls collapse, especially considering that some polls from last summer put him in the lead. Writing in this magazine last year, Ryan Lizza traced Pauls incomplete journey from an idea-driven libertarianhe once supported the legalization of all drugs, and argued that a free society should tolerate unofficial, private discriminationto an elected politician more willing to consider the exigencies of party loyalty. After Mitt Romney lost to Obama in 2012, many voices in the Republican Party were calling for a change, and the official G.O.P. post-election report warned that public perception of the Party is at record lows. This seemed like an opening for a nonconformist such as Paul.
In 2012, Paul opposed the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, a government corporation that loans money to foreign customers of U.S. companies. He said it was absurd for the government to borrow money from overseas while also loaning money to foreign companies, and he was one of twenty Senators who voted against its reauthorization. Since then, the anti-Ex-Im movement has grown, and what was once considered a fringe movement celebrated a triumph when the Banks charter expired on the last day of June this year. Then, this past Friday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moved to revive the Bank, angering many of his fellow Republicans. Senator Ted Cruz, another Presidential candidate, accused McConnell of having told a flat-out lie by denying, at a lunch meeting, that he had a secret plan to revive the Ex-Im Bank. Cruz, canny as always, probably calculated that his blunt language would get him plenty of press, and he was right. (The effort to revive the bank seems to have failed.)
Paul, by contrast, has forged a strategic relationship with McConnell, who also happens to be Kentuckys other Senator, and his eagerness to argue against the Ex-Im Bank suddenly seemed to have cooled. Late on Friday afternoon, during a radio interview, Sean Hannity asked Paul about Cruzs claims. I wasnt at that lunch, Paul said, executing a rather inelegant pivot. But what I can tell you is that theres a disconnectconservatives want to vote on defunding Planned Parenthood. Paul often wants to talk about defunding Planned Parenthood, these days, and while primary voters surely agree with his position, it doesnt much distinguish him from the rest of his Republican competitors. (Bush, Rubio, and Walker also support defunding.)
So what makes Paul stand out? For a time, one of his signature issues was opposition to the National Security Agencys bulk data-collection practices, but the issue grew muddier in June, with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which ruled that data would be collected by telecommunications companies, instead of by the government; Paul considered this a very partial victory, and he delivered a long and equivocal speech expressing his mixed feelings. Pauls interest in criminal-justice reform once marked him as an unorthodox Republican, but an increasing number of Republicans are now talking about changing the way we fight crime. On national security, Paul used to be skeptical about the need to confront regimes deemed hostilelast fall, he parted company with many Republicans by calling for an effective diplomatic solution for limiting the Iranian enrichment program. But when the Obama Administration announced its nuclear deal with Iran, Paul joined his Republican rivals in calling it unacceptable. Finally, Paul has failed to establish himself as the candidate of Silicon Valley, which is often described as a libertarian-friendly community. The Politico story explained how Paul has failed, so far, to cultivate fruitful relationships there. And when Hillary Clinton suggested we ask hard questions about the gig economy typified by companies such as Uber, Paul responded with acerbic tweetsonly to be upstaged by Bush, a few days later, who used Uber to visit a start-up in San Francisco.
Some of the people who should be most enthusiastic about Pauls Presidential campaign have found themselves disheartened by it. Last week, Nick Gillespie, the editor-in-chief of the libertarian site reason.com, laid out the many un-libertarian things Paul has done and said. He called his campaign doubly frustratingthat is, neither principled nor successful. Maybe Paul would always have struggled to win over Republican primary voters. And maybe, during the gruelling months to come, he will rebound and, like a number of candidates in 2012, have a moment near the front of the pack.
But whatever happens, potential supporters like Gillespie shouldnt be so disappointed. Even as his campaign struggles, many of his issues are doing surprisingly wellin fact, thats a big part of the reason why Paul has struggled to define himself. The formerly indomitable Ex-Im bank has been vanquished, though perhaps it will return in another form; the N.S.A. has been reformed, though lightly; a diplomatic solution seems imminent in Iran, though of course people disagree about its effectiveness; criminal-justice reform has bipartisan momentum, though it may yet meet with resistance; politicians wishing to hamper companies like Uber are meeting stiff resistance, though they will keep trying. These are all tentative, partial, and temporary victoriesbut then, politics rarely offers any other kind. Rand Paul is struggling in the polls, but Paulism looks pretty healthy. Thats not good news for the Presidential candidate, but its also not such bad news for the guy who may still be, come 2017, a Senator from Kentucky.
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Why Is Rand Paul Winning on the Issues But Losing the ...