Monday, October 5, 2015

GOP Clown Car Part 6: Rand Paul

  In writing about the 2016 Rand Paul Presidential Campaign I feel like I am in a race against time, because we are all just waiting on Rand to announce he is suspending his campaign and will change his focus to the Senate reelection. In 2010 when Paul was elected to the Senate, it was clear that this was just a stepping stone for a run at the big chair. The campaign started off promising but stalled with mediocre debate performances, anemic fund raising, and like other campaigns,  it had a hard time getting noticed in a very crowded field. Now that he is fighting off those pesky your campaign is dead in the water rumors and with his poll numbers barely above the one percenter, another Paul presidential campaign appears to be going down in flames.

  I think if you look at the campaigns that both of the Pauls have run, you also see a fundamental difference between the attitudes of the Republicans and the Libertarians. Republicans like to borrow from the Libertarians the idea of small government. The problem with that is if you look at the George W. Bush years, he oversaw the government getting much larger, which points to Republicans don't mind large government as long as it their Military Industrial version instead of the progressive New Deal version. Also Republicans seem to like their leaders to have an authoritarian streak. The goes against the Libertarian goal of smaller, decentralized government. Ron and to lesser degree Rand have both supported some version of Libertarian ideals and it only goes so far with the more mainstream Republicans. I know the conventional wisdom was that Rand Paul was going to be able to bridge the gap between the mainstream Republicans and the Libertarians. There was a lot of hype for Ron Paul 2008 and 2012, but even with all even with all the energy and enthusiasm the Ron Paul Revolution just never seemed to happen. I thought Rand actually had less of a chance than his father did.

  Foreign policy is one of the major stumbling blocks for the Republican Party and the Libertarians truly uniting. Even after eight years of living through the mostly terrible foreign policy of the George W. Bush presidency, Rand's father Ron Paul could not gain any traction with a more hands off foreign policy. Rand worked as a spokesman on his father's campaigns, and his approach to foreign policy at that time and early in the time he was in the Senate sounds a lot more like a traditional Libertarian. Rand Paul understood that the hawks would not buy the Libertarian approach to defense spending or the isolationist nonintervention foreign policy. When he decided to run for president one of the first things Rand did was move to the right on foreign policy. He not only said that spending more money on defense is not a bad thing, but also floated bombing some of the really bad guys. In trying to split the difference between the camps, he only managed to piss off both sides. The hawks didn't buy his new stance on foreign policy, because for so long he had been saying the exact opposite. Also the change just made him sound like your stand issue conservative Republican, and the Libertarians thought he sold out and couldn't be trusted. In fact one of the reasons the Rand Paul campaign is over rumors are flying around is the news that a Libertarian Super Pac has stopped raising money for him because they don't like the direction his campaign has taken. It hasn't helped Rand's campaign that the rise of Isis, violence in Syria, and what is seen as a horrible Iran deal has moved foreign policy up the chain of what is important to the Republicans this cycle.

  Rand has to be disappointed that his campaign did not go better. Just looking from outside, it looks like he was trying to tweak his father's formula and go farther than he did. It appears that the Republican party is not ready for a Libertarian Republican, at least on a presidential level. If, as it seems clear, that Rand will drop out at some point, then then question becomes will he be able to get reelected to his Senate seat? Will a bad presidential run sour the people of Kentucky on keeping him in the Senate? Another problem Rand might have is what he had to do get around a Kentucky law that said he could not for president and senate on the same ballot. Rand managed to get Kentucky to have a separate caucus so he could do both. While his campaign will cover the $250,000 cost of the caucus, it still rubbed some people the wrong way. My guess would be that has a good chance of staying in the Senate, but his long term future seems unclear. Does he want to be in the Senate for a long time or does want to serve a couple of terms in Senate and then cash out head to a think tank or some consulting job or corporate gig? He seems to like having that outsider status, but the longer you stay in the Senate the more of an insider you become.


1 comment:

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