The rise and fall of Rand Paul’s candidacy
On Jan. 5, 2011, the day Rand Paul was sworn in as a United States senator, he already was a star.
Well-wishers crowded a hallway and reception room in the U.S. Capitol. Journalists were everywhere. In fact, the Kentucky Republican already had been on network television that morning, broadening his already expanding national image as a new figure in American politics.
I was the Washington correspondent for The Courier-Jour
nal of Louisville, so Paul’s arrival in the Senate that January day was the start of my regular exposure to him — and the beginning of a years-long chronicle of a man in a hurry to make his mark.
Full disclosure: Our relationship was sometimes bumpy. That’s not a journalist’s brag, just a reality every reporter deals with when he or she writes one thing and the subject of the piece thinks the story should have said something else — or should never have been written in the first place. But Paul, who on Wednesday dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, also was gracious and kind of old-school: He was one of the very few politicians I covered who sent me handwritten notes. I got the im- pression that, pleased or peeved, Paul read his clips. All of them.
No wonder. There was little doubt that the junior senator from Kentucky intended to run for the White House right away, and his unfolding travel schedule — to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, etc. — synced up perfectly with the 2016 caucus and primary calendar. Not for nothing was he traipsing through New Hampshire, me trailing him, mere months after the end of 2012 presidential campaign.
The “what’s your plan?” question became a game. At first, Paul would demur about his intentions. But as the months went on, and the travel went on, and the speeches before national audiences and countless TV hits piled up, questions about ’16 often drew a smile or a wink, even a chuckle, from the senator.
Paul had a capacity to surprise — his marathon Senate filibuster on the Patriot Act comes to mind. He had an ability to frame major issues in unique ways — for example, warning of the constitutional threats of government surveillance excesses in the war on terror. And he had an uncanny knack for embracing social media, from Snapchat to Twitter, the latter a platform for his annual Festivus “airing of grievances” that even made fun of his unruly hair. The combination of gravitas and hipster swagger earned him credibility, not just in the media, but in the broader political world. In October 2014, Time magazine put him on its cover as “the most in- teresting man in politics.”
The irony is that once Paul actually became a presidential candidate, he became less interesting, at least to a large swath of the Republican Party. He just couldn’t catch on. The Des Moines Regis
ter/ Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll just before last week’s caucuses showed 63% of likely GOP caucusgoers had no enthusiasm for Paul as the party nominee.
From an ideological standpoint, Paul was straddling a Venn diagram of three circles with minimal overlap: traditional Republicans, Tea Party Republicans and Libertarians. Paul’s calls for a more inclusive party, to “bring together different factions” of the GOP, could not bridge essential differences among such disparate groups.
Paul was also a victim of bad timing. His insistence on limits to government surveillance, a less aggressive military posture and a less interventionist foreign policy ran smack into the rise of the Islamic State. Polls before the Iowa caucuses showed terrorism was either the top or among the top concerns of Republicans. When a December survey by CNN/ORC international asked which candidate would do the best job handling ISIS, 2% of likely GOP caucusgoers named Paul.
Most important, the Kentuckian failed to find a way to engage effectively with the rampaging elephant in the room: Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump’s durability in the 2016 race in the face of his bombastic rhetoric, or maybe because of it, consumed so much space on the stage, on the tube, everywhere, that Paul never got much of a chance to reintroduce himself to voters.
Paul’s wobbling around at 5% or less in the polls for months hurt his fundraising, which in turn meant he could not make the necessary radio and television ads to raise his profile and standing in the vast GOP field.
Ultimately, getting assigned to the “kids’ table” at one of the national debates signaled it was time for Paul to switch off the lights. The undercard was a devilishly nasty way of telling a national audience, “These people are not serious candidates.”
Paul was, and is, serious. Perhaps too much so. On the debate stage and on the trail, he really did not appear to be having much fun. There were more deadpan stares on Paul’s face than smiles.
I hope I am wrong. Perhaps he was smiling inside.
I have covered a lot of presidential campaigns over the years. Voters like candidates who show a little of their humanity, some joy and a sense of humor. Those qualities are not guaranteed to bring electoral success, but they can lead to other things, like hope and inspiration. We could use more of that in this campaign, which has been so much about fear and anger.