EBounding
04-05-2015, 06:13 PM
From the WSJ frontpage:
Rand Paul’s Challenge: Charting His Own Course (http://www.wsj.com/articles/rand-pauls-challenge-charting-his-own-course-1428274524?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories)
Senator seeks to present distinct profile but not jeopardize libertarian support
In baggy cargo shorts and a T-shirt, Rand Paul took the podium in Nashville to boost his father’s 2008 presidential campaign and repeated one of Ron Paul’s signature applause lines—a warning about the risks of U.S. military intervention abroad.
“Limited government also includes restraint in foreign policy,” Mr. Paul told the cheering crowd. “A big government internationally that intervenes everywhere is inconsistent with a limited government at home.”
Today, Mr. Paul addresses audiences in a sport coat, and he is striking a more mainstream tone. As he prepares his own run for the White House, Mr. Paul, now a Republican senator from Kentucky, is trying to present a profile distinct from his father’s: not so libertarian, not so antiestablishment, not so antiwar. “The Palatable Paul,” some of his supporters call him.
Executing this pivot has become a central challenge for Mr. Paul, who plans to launch his campaign on Tuesday, as he seeks to reach beyond his father’s base of libertarians and appeal to a wider audience. The adjustment requires the younger Mr. Paul to keep a distance from some elements of his father’s legacy—his opposition to U.S. military engagement abroad, his uncompromising libertarianism and his deep hostility to GOP elites.
But drawing this distance is a difficult move for a candidate who learned his politics at his father’s knee. There was little daylight between the two over the years Rand Paul spent as a campaigner-in-training during Ron Paul’s runs for the House, Senate and presidency.
From age 11, Rand Paul knocked on doors for his father’s campaigns. He made his first political appearance at age 21, when he faced off at a Senate campaign event against a sitting congressman, Phil Gramm of Texas. He was a surrogate speaker in dozens of states during his father’s 2008 and 2012 presidential bids.
Appearing in Boston in 2007, Rand Paul lambasted the Republican establishment and proclaimed, “The Ron Paul rabble is now the Ron Paul revolution.” In New Hampshire, he accused then-President George W. Bush of creating a “socialized” Medicare drug benefit. In Montana he railed against Republicans for writing a “blank check for the military-industrial complex.”
Now, Mr. Paul is supporting U.S. airstrikes on Islamic State militants, and he will stage one of his first campaign events in front of an aircraft carrier. He has forged alliances with party officials such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And he is crafting a campaign message that focuses not just on preaching to conservatives but also on building bridges to minorities, young people and others not necessarily in the GOP fold.
“He’s not Ron Paul the sequel.” said Steve Munisteri, a senior adviser who has known the senator since he was a student. Still, “Working in his dad’s campaigns was a great tutorial for him.”
Mr. Paul doesn’t like to talk about his relationship with his father. In an interview while traveling in Texas early this year, he pointed instead to his own record in the Senate.
“We’ve spent about four years really trying to create an agenda and a platform,” said Mr. Paul, who won his Senate seat in 2010. “There is plenty for people to judge based on who I am.”
Asked what he had learned working on his father’s campaigns, he joked: “Avoid houses with big dogs.”
He declined to answer further questions about his work for his father. But many of his appearances are recorded on video. They provide a window onto the political education of Rand Paul.
Politics was a family affair, with all five of Ron Paul’s children serving as foot soldiers in his many campaigns. The elder Mr. Paul first won a House seat in a 1976 and served, off and on, until he retired from Congress in 2013. He ran for president in 1988 as a libertarian, then in 2008 and 2012 as a Republican.
Early start
Born in 1963, Rand was the middle child. “Of all the Paul children, Rand clearly had the most interest in politics and government,” said Mark Elam, a longtime aide to his father. In 1976, Rand went to Kansas City for the Republican National Convention, where his father was one of only four House Republicans to back Ronald Reagan over incumbent Gerald Ford.
When his father sought a Senate seat in 1984, Mr. Paul took time off from his studies at Baylor University to work on a primary campaign against Mr. Gramm and Robert Mosbacher Jr., including standing in for his father at one candidate forum. Mr. Gramm said that he remembers the politically precocious 21-year-old performing admirably—and that he told him so.
“I went out of my way to make the point that I thought his father would be proud of him,” said Mr. Gramm, who won the primary and the Senate seat.
By the time of his father’s first bid for the Republican presidential nod, Mr. Paul had graduated from Duke Medical School like his father, become an ophthalmologist and moved with his wife, Kelley, to Bowling Green, Ky., to be closer to her family.
When he showed up at the Nashville rally in October 2007, his father told the crowd: “I’m sure he didn’t say, but I think he has plans to participate in the political system. Who knows?”
Rand began making solo appearances as a stand-in for his father, including a December 2007 Boston rally marking the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.
“The establishment, in their high-rise penthouse views, laughs at you, they laugh at us, the Ron Paul rabble,” he said, at an event that helped raise about $6 million in a day, then a one-day fundraising record. “We are sending a message that we are no longer just a motley band of protesters.”
These events drew libertarians who immersed Mr. Paul in antiestablishment theories generally dismissed by mainstream politicians, such as the notion that North American leaders were plotting to eliminate the borders among Mexico, Canada and the U.S. by establishing a unified currency akin to the euro.
Asked about that by a Montana voter in 2008, Mr. Paul sympathized with the concern. “I guarantee you, it’s one of their long-term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent,” he said.
While his father campaigned for the GOP nomination, Rand Paul was unsparing in his critique of the party’s direction—and even of its conservative icon, Mr. Reagan—for what he described as an abandonment of the commitment to small government and fiscal restraint.
He said his father was disappointed in Mr. Reagan’s fiscal record because Mr. Reagan had run up the deficit. At a 2007 rally in New Hampshire, he said that “George W. [Bush] has made Bill Clinton look like a fiscal conservative.”
His father built his campaigns on anti-interventionism abroad, and Rand Paul embraced that sentiment. At an Atlanta speech in 2008, Rand Paul recited—seemingly without notes—a long, classic passage from John Quincy Adams warning against foreign entanglements.
“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” he said, quoting Mr. Adams. “She well knows that when she becomes enlisted under banners other than her own, she will become involved beyond the powers of extrication. The maxims of her foreign policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.”
When Mr. Paul ran for the Senate in 2010, campaigning for himself for the first time, he benefited from ties to his father that gave him visibility and access to a national network of donors. His father sent an email to followers lauding his son’s service on the campaign trail.
“I am…very proud of the thoughtful, principled man Rand has become,” he wrote. More than two-thirds of donations to Mr. Paul’s Senate campaign came from out of state, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
His own man
But Mr. Paul also started defining his own profile and making distinctions with his father. In a joint interview on Kentucky television in 2010, the questioner drew out differences between the two on civilian trials for terrorist detainees. Rand Paul, who opposed such trials while Ron Paul supported them, quipped: “My dad’s only been here 20 minutes and you’re making me disagree with him.’’
In an interview the same year with Reason magazine, he said, “I’ve heard from people who love my dad who don’t like some of the positions I’ve taken. Well, I love my dad, too, but I don’t agree with him all of the time.”
Rand Paul’s libertarian values and instincts continue to surface, although in some cases he has retreated when controversy erupted.
He drew fire in his 2010 campaign when he expressed property-rights concerns—as his father had—about parts of the Civil Rights Act because it compelled private businesses to comply. After a storm of protest, he pulled back from the statement and said that the federal intervention authorized by the law was justified to end segregation, which he called “abhorrent.”
In another case, he hired one of his father’s supporters, Jack Hunter, to help him write a book and serve on his Senate staff. Mr. Hunter resigned after it was revealed he once was a neo-Confederate talk-radio host who went by the name the “Southern Avenger” and had celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. Mr. Hunter admitted having done that in the past but said his views had long since changed.
While his father’s legacy poses political risks, so too do Mr. Paul’s departures from parts of it. As he develops a more mainstream persona, he risks alienating his father’s political base.
Asked to comment on the contrast in the senator’s tone and message now versus when he was speaking on his father’s behalf, spokesman Sergio Gor said that “Sen. Rand Paul and his father each attract new people to the party in their own unique ways. Sen. Paul has worked very hard to engage new constituencies.” Campaign aides declined to say whether Mr. Paul’s father would campaign for him.
Ron Paul consistently opposed military intervention and foreign aid, even sanctions on Iran. Rand Paul has always been more open to limited military action, an inclination that has become more pronounced as his presidential ambitions matured and as the public grew more hawkish following attacks such as those by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The senator has opposed foreign aid in the past but now makes an exception for Israel. He has supported sanctions against Iran, provided it is clear these don’t amount to an authorization of war.
Mr. Paul was among 47 Senate Republicans who signed a letter to Iranian leaders a few weeks ago warning that Congress had the power to overturn any deal on their nuclear program. He has so far declined any comment on last week’s preliminary nuclear agreement with Iran.
Adil Khan, executive director of a libertarian group called Liberty Iowa, said the senator is at risk of losing some of his father’s supporters because of his foreign-policy views. “Rand does not have the same ideology of strict non-interventionism that Ron does,” said Mr. Khan. “People are beginning to see that and they are a little shocked by it.”
Mr. Khan said some Ron Paul supporters may also have a hard time forgiving Rand Paul for endorsing Mr. McConnell over a tea-party primary challenger last year.
Other Ron Paul supporters welcome the chance to back a Paul who is more electable. “Rand is clearly drawing a broader group of people,” said Andy Sanborn, a state senator in New Hampshire who was Ron Paul’s state co-chairman in 2012.
Unlike his father, Rand Paul isn’t campaigning chiefly to advance libertarian ideas, said Mr. Elam, the longtime Ron Paul aide: “His dad was primarily an educator. He never expected to get elected. I think Rand is just a lot more motivated in terms of actually getting elected to higher office.”
Mr. Paul’s younger brother Robert thinks the senator’s greatest distinction lies in his ability to deliver their father’s political message effectively.
“This will be a negative in my family, but he’s a better politician,” said Robert Paul. “My daughter once said, ‘If people would just listen to Granddad, they would vote for him.’ But they don’t listen. Rand can get them to listen to the message.”
Write to Janet Hook at janet.hook@wsj.com
Rand Paul’s Challenge: Charting His Own Course (http://www.wsj.com/articles/rand-pauls-challenge-charting-his-own-course-1428274524?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories)
Senator seeks to present distinct profile but not jeopardize libertarian support
In baggy cargo shorts and a T-shirt, Rand Paul took the podium in Nashville to boost his father’s 2008 presidential campaign and repeated one of Ron Paul’s signature applause lines—a warning about the risks of U.S. military intervention abroad.
“Limited government also includes restraint in foreign policy,” Mr. Paul told the cheering crowd. “A big government internationally that intervenes everywhere is inconsistent with a limited government at home.”
Today, Mr. Paul addresses audiences in a sport coat, and he is striking a more mainstream tone. As he prepares his own run for the White House, Mr. Paul, now a Republican senator from Kentucky, is trying to present a profile distinct from his father’s: not so libertarian, not so antiestablishment, not so antiwar. “The Palatable Paul,” some of his supporters call him.
Executing this pivot has become a central challenge for Mr. Paul, who plans to launch his campaign on Tuesday, as he seeks to reach beyond his father’s base of libertarians and appeal to a wider audience. The adjustment requires the younger Mr. Paul to keep a distance from some elements of his father’s legacy—his opposition to U.S. military engagement abroad, his uncompromising libertarianism and his deep hostility to GOP elites.
But drawing this distance is a difficult move for a candidate who learned his politics at his father’s knee. There was little daylight between the two over the years Rand Paul spent as a campaigner-in-training during Ron Paul’s runs for the House, Senate and presidency.
From age 11, Rand Paul knocked on doors for his father’s campaigns. He made his first political appearance at age 21, when he faced off at a Senate campaign event against a sitting congressman, Phil Gramm of Texas. He was a surrogate speaker in dozens of states during his father’s 2008 and 2012 presidential bids.
Appearing in Boston in 2007, Rand Paul lambasted the Republican establishment and proclaimed, “The Ron Paul rabble is now the Ron Paul revolution.” In New Hampshire, he accused then-President George W. Bush of creating a “socialized” Medicare drug benefit. In Montana he railed against Republicans for writing a “blank check for the military-industrial complex.”
Now, Mr. Paul is supporting U.S. airstrikes on Islamic State militants, and he will stage one of his first campaign events in front of an aircraft carrier. He has forged alliances with party officials such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And he is crafting a campaign message that focuses not just on preaching to conservatives but also on building bridges to minorities, young people and others not necessarily in the GOP fold.
“He’s not Ron Paul the sequel.” said Steve Munisteri, a senior adviser who has known the senator since he was a student. Still, “Working in his dad’s campaigns was a great tutorial for him.”
Mr. Paul doesn’t like to talk about his relationship with his father. In an interview while traveling in Texas early this year, he pointed instead to his own record in the Senate.
“We’ve spent about four years really trying to create an agenda and a platform,” said Mr. Paul, who won his Senate seat in 2010. “There is plenty for people to judge based on who I am.”
Asked what he had learned working on his father’s campaigns, he joked: “Avoid houses with big dogs.”
He declined to answer further questions about his work for his father. But many of his appearances are recorded on video. They provide a window onto the political education of Rand Paul.
Politics was a family affair, with all five of Ron Paul’s children serving as foot soldiers in his many campaigns. The elder Mr. Paul first won a House seat in a 1976 and served, off and on, until he retired from Congress in 2013. He ran for president in 1988 as a libertarian, then in 2008 and 2012 as a Republican.
Early start
Born in 1963, Rand was the middle child. “Of all the Paul children, Rand clearly had the most interest in politics and government,” said Mark Elam, a longtime aide to his father. In 1976, Rand went to Kansas City for the Republican National Convention, where his father was one of only four House Republicans to back Ronald Reagan over incumbent Gerald Ford.
When his father sought a Senate seat in 1984, Mr. Paul took time off from his studies at Baylor University to work on a primary campaign against Mr. Gramm and Robert Mosbacher Jr., including standing in for his father at one candidate forum. Mr. Gramm said that he remembers the politically precocious 21-year-old performing admirably—and that he told him so.
“I went out of my way to make the point that I thought his father would be proud of him,” said Mr. Gramm, who won the primary and the Senate seat.
By the time of his father’s first bid for the Republican presidential nod, Mr. Paul had graduated from Duke Medical School like his father, become an ophthalmologist and moved with his wife, Kelley, to Bowling Green, Ky., to be closer to her family.
When he showed up at the Nashville rally in October 2007, his father told the crowd: “I’m sure he didn’t say, but I think he has plans to participate in the political system. Who knows?”
Rand began making solo appearances as a stand-in for his father, including a December 2007 Boston rally marking the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.
“The establishment, in their high-rise penthouse views, laughs at you, they laugh at us, the Ron Paul rabble,” he said, at an event that helped raise about $6 million in a day, then a one-day fundraising record. “We are sending a message that we are no longer just a motley band of protesters.”
These events drew libertarians who immersed Mr. Paul in antiestablishment theories generally dismissed by mainstream politicians, such as the notion that North American leaders were plotting to eliminate the borders among Mexico, Canada and the U.S. by establishing a unified currency akin to the euro.
Asked about that by a Montana voter in 2008, Mr. Paul sympathized with the concern. “I guarantee you, it’s one of their long-term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent,” he said.
While his father campaigned for the GOP nomination, Rand Paul was unsparing in his critique of the party’s direction—and even of its conservative icon, Mr. Reagan—for what he described as an abandonment of the commitment to small government and fiscal restraint.
He said his father was disappointed in Mr. Reagan’s fiscal record because Mr. Reagan had run up the deficit. At a 2007 rally in New Hampshire, he said that “George W. [Bush] has made Bill Clinton look like a fiscal conservative.”
His father built his campaigns on anti-interventionism abroad, and Rand Paul embraced that sentiment. At an Atlanta speech in 2008, Rand Paul recited—seemingly without notes—a long, classic passage from John Quincy Adams warning against foreign entanglements.
“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” he said, quoting Mr. Adams. “She well knows that when she becomes enlisted under banners other than her own, she will become involved beyond the powers of extrication. The maxims of her foreign policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.”
When Mr. Paul ran for the Senate in 2010, campaigning for himself for the first time, he benefited from ties to his father that gave him visibility and access to a national network of donors. His father sent an email to followers lauding his son’s service on the campaign trail.
“I am…very proud of the thoughtful, principled man Rand has become,” he wrote. More than two-thirds of donations to Mr. Paul’s Senate campaign came from out of state, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
His own man
But Mr. Paul also started defining his own profile and making distinctions with his father. In a joint interview on Kentucky television in 2010, the questioner drew out differences between the two on civilian trials for terrorist detainees. Rand Paul, who opposed such trials while Ron Paul supported them, quipped: “My dad’s only been here 20 minutes and you’re making me disagree with him.’’
In an interview the same year with Reason magazine, he said, “I’ve heard from people who love my dad who don’t like some of the positions I’ve taken. Well, I love my dad, too, but I don’t agree with him all of the time.”
Rand Paul’s libertarian values and instincts continue to surface, although in some cases he has retreated when controversy erupted.
He drew fire in his 2010 campaign when he expressed property-rights concerns—as his father had—about parts of the Civil Rights Act because it compelled private businesses to comply. After a storm of protest, he pulled back from the statement and said that the federal intervention authorized by the law was justified to end segregation, which he called “abhorrent.”
In another case, he hired one of his father’s supporters, Jack Hunter, to help him write a book and serve on his Senate staff. Mr. Hunter resigned after it was revealed he once was a neo-Confederate talk-radio host who went by the name the “Southern Avenger” and had celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. Mr. Hunter admitted having done that in the past but said his views had long since changed.
While his father’s legacy poses political risks, so too do Mr. Paul’s departures from parts of it. As he develops a more mainstream persona, he risks alienating his father’s political base.
Asked to comment on the contrast in the senator’s tone and message now versus when he was speaking on his father’s behalf, spokesman Sergio Gor said that “Sen. Rand Paul and his father each attract new people to the party in their own unique ways. Sen. Paul has worked very hard to engage new constituencies.” Campaign aides declined to say whether Mr. Paul’s father would campaign for him.
Ron Paul consistently opposed military intervention and foreign aid, even sanctions on Iran. Rand Paul has always been more open to limited military action, an inclination that has become more pronounced as his presidential ambitions matured and as the public grew more hawkish following attacks such as those by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The senator has opposed foreign aid in the past but now makes an exception for Israel. He has supported sanctions against Iran, provided it is clear these don’t amount to an authorization of war.
Mr. Paul was among 47 Senate Republicans who signed a letter to Iranian leaders a few weeks ago warning that Congress had the power to overturn any deal on their nuclear program. He has so far declined any comment on last week’s preliminary nuclear agreement with Iran.
Adil Khan, executive director of a libertarian group called Liberty Iowa, said the senator is at risk of losing some of his father’s supporters because of his foreign-policy views. “Rand does not have the same ideology of strict non-interventionism that Ron does,” said Mr. Khan. “People are beginning to see that and they are a little shocked by it.”
Mr. Khan said some Ron Paul supporters may also have a hard time forgiving Rand Paul for endorsing Mr. McConnell over a tea-party primary challenger last year.
Other Ron Paul supporters welcome the chance to back a Paul who is more electable. “Rand is clearly drawing a broader group of people,” said Andy Sanborn, a state senator in New Hampshire who was Ron Paul’s state co-chairman in 2012.
Unlike his father, Rand Paul isn’t campaigning chiefly to advance libertarian ideas, said Mr. Elam, the longtime Ron Paul aide: “His dad was primarily an educator. He never expected to get elected. I think Rand is just a lot more motivated in terms of actually getting elected to higher office.”
Mr. Paul’s younger brother Robert thinks the senator’s greatest distinction lies in his ability to deliver their father’s political message effectively.
“This will be a negative in my family, but he’s a better politician,” said Robert Paul. “My daughter once said, ‘If people would just listen to Granddad, they would vote for him.’ But they don’t listen. Rand can get them to listen to the message.”
Write to Janet Hook at janet.hook@wsj.com