The Rand Paul Test
Clues to the future of the GOP
RAND Paul, the Kentucky senator who declared himself a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday, is the most important candidate in the race. Not the best, not the most interesting, not the one who is most likely to win.
No, he is merely the most important, because we will learn the most important things from his candidacy about the Republican Party, its future and the American future.
Paul challenges Republican Party orthodoxies from a perspective he calls “libertarianish.” He opposes the existence of the Federal Reserve System. He stands in opposition to what he believes is the overreach of the nationalsecurity apparatus when it comes to homeland security and the war on terror.
An opthamologist by profession, Paul was elected to the Senate in 2010 as part of the antiestablishment Tea Party. He shares the Tea Party’s general hatred of Washington and its desire to shrink the size of government.
Like fellow candidate Ted Cruz, Paul has made his mark not as a legislator or as a party activist but as an internal critic of his own party. But while Cruz has made his mark attacking Republican leaders for being soft, Paul has made his by cleverly questioning Republican orthodoxy without staging an outright assault on it.
He dances around domestic issues, sending out libertarian dog whistles but trying to ( as Bill Clinton once said) “maintain his political viability within the system.”
For example, he doesn’t come right out and say he supports drug legalization; he says it should be decided state-by-state. But he says flatly he wants to “end the war on drugs.”
Paul rose quickly to prominence for two reasons: He was a darling of the crew of antigovernment radicals, isolationists and cranks who loved his father, 2008 gadfly presidential candidate Ron Paul. And he thrilled liberals who loved his anti-interventionist attacks on classic Republican foreignpolicy ideas.
He told a college crowd in 2009 that the Iraq war came about because Dick Cheney wanted to enrich Halliburton, the company he ran before he became vice president.
And in April 2014, he declared himself a target of dangerous hawks: “The knives are out for conservatives who dare question unlimited involvement in foreign wars,” he said.
He was so opposed to American involvement of any kind in foreign wars that he has gone so far as to say perhaps Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was framed when it came to his use of chemical weapons — lest that impel America to act in any way to help Syrian rebel groups.
And he effectively defended Vladimir Putin when it came to Russia gobbling up part of Ukraine— again, largely to forestall any American aid going to Ukranian rebels.
“Rand Paul: The Most Interesting Man in Politics,” read the cover of Time Magazine in the summer of 2014, which isn’t in the habit of running enthusiastic pieces about Republican politicians. The author of the article, Michael Scherer, made his reputation at Salon. com and Mother Jones, two unambiguously leftwing publications.
Paul was so interesting precisely because the presidential candidacy for which he had been preparing was clearly going to be driven by his neo-isolationism. “The GOP has definitely taken a turn toward noninterventionism,” in the words of the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake.
But then something happened: The world melted down. ISIS rose. Iran and Afghanistan began to collapse. Putin ate Crimea.
Polling over the past year has seen a reassertion of Republican hawkishness among the party’s base. And Paul has responded. The man who called for absolute cuts in the defense budget is now calling for a $ 190 billion increase, and says we should attack ISIS.
“Rand Paul wants it both ways,” writes libertarian analyst Brian Doherty. It’s still the case, though, that Paul’s only true distinction as a candidate is his noninterventionist beliefs.
So that is why he is the most important candidate. If he does not catch fire, it will put an end to the idea that the GOP has turned its back on its Reaganite foreignpolicy roots.
If he does catch fire, the party will be making a revolutionary, and suicidal, shift.