As Rand Paul lays groundwork for 2016 as a man in the mainstream of Republicanism, he keeps getting pulled back toward the libertarian roots that first catapulted him to political stardom.
His schedule Wednesday casts this central conundrum of his likely candidacy into sharp relief.
For months, Paul has carefully calibrated his public and private efforts to appeal to the Republican Party's foreign policy elite. He's pushed back aggressively when opponents slight him ("Rick Perry is dead wrong") and he's taken to Time magazine to declare, "I am not an isolationist."
Yet he is headed to Greenville, N.C., to campaign Wednesday alongside Rep. Walter Jones, one of the most isolationist voices in the GOP, an outspoken antiwar lawmaker and a close friend of his father, Ron Paul. (Last year, Jones suggested that former Vice President Dick Cheney would end up "rotting in hell" for the Iraq war.) It is a political detour that carries some risk. The same hawkish wing of the GOP that Paul has been methodically courting, or at least trying to assuage, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars earlier this year trying to depose Jones from office.
"He's trying to dance at two weddings, and I just don't think it's working," said Noah Pollak, executive director for the Emergency Committee for Israel, which spent more than $300,000 against Jones. "Rand is really caught in the middle."
Paul, it seems, has adopted California Gov. Jerry Brown's long-standing "canoe theory" of politics (paddle a little left, paddle a little right, and chart a course down the political center) and refreshed it for the modern GOP era (paddle a little on the libertarian or tea-party side, paddle a little on the establishmentarian side, and steer down the center-right).
This has been true on policies both foreign and domestic. Paul supports social-conservative stances, for instance, but then says his party is best off not talking about bedroom matters. He likes to speak in aggressive, muscular rhetoric about international matters, but mostly to sell the use of softer power. He talks about slashing the budget. And then he focuses on reaching out to African-American voters.
Often, Paul is most at ease trying to redefine the existing parties, especially on issues of privacy and surveillance. As Paul said on Meet the Press recently, "If you wanna see a transformational election in our country, let the Democrats put forward a war hawk like Hillary Clinton, and you'll see a transformation like you've never seen."
For the hawks who have long dominated the Republican presidential nominating process, the appearance with Jones is a reminder of Paul's libertarian pedigree. "Rand Paul and Walter Jones (and his good friend Ron Paul) are in fundamental agreement on foreign policy, and (thankfully) are in a small minority in the Republican Party and the conservative movement," said William Kristol, editor of the influential Weekly Standard and a board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel, in an email.
Kristol expected the joint appearance wouldn't undercut Paul's foreign-policy outreach to GOP influencers, though only because "I don't think those attempts were working anyway."
Jones is a bit player in the national political picture. ("Who is Walter Jones?" replied Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, when I first asked him about Paul's decision to campaign with him.) But he is known among some of the political figures and financiers Paul has sought to reassure about his foreign policy views, including billionaire Paul Singer, who contributed to another super PAC that sought to oust Jones.
Jones certainly appreciates Paul's support. "I think that he, like his father, appreciates people that are willing to stand on principle and not be part of the club, so to speak," Jones said.
More significantly, the decision of whether to embrace Jones and his libertarian point of view (and when to do so—Paul notably didn't appear with him during his primary against a former Bush administration official) is the kind of question that shadows Paul everywhere.
"Here's the real risk," said Mallory Factor, a Republican based in South Carolina who has helped introduce Paul to some donors. "The real risk is not supporting [Jones] because then you're not standing for anything, and Rand Paul will take stands. That's why he's such an attractive candidate. He doesn't back off."
Of course, Paul has backed off on some issues. Early in his Senate tenure, he introduced a budget that slashed all foreign aid, including to Israel. Now, he has disavowed (and even denied authorship of) that plan.
Paul has topped some early 2016 polls in large part because of the political enthusiasm and machinery he inherited from his father's two presidential runs in 2008 and 2012. These libertarian and tea-party activists are central to his presidential ambitions—but he and his advisers also know they alone are not enough to win. Paul's team did not return requests for comment for this story.
The lone other stop on Paul's North Carolina itinerary also speaks to his balancing act. Back in May, he had come to the state to campaign for Republican Senate candidate Greg Brannon, a tea partier who the GOP establishment believed could have denied the party a shot at the seat, if nominated.
Brannon lost. The establishment's pick, Thom Tillis, won. Paul endorsed Tillis within hours. And on Wednesday, Paul will be at Tillis's side for an event in Raleigh.
Hours later, he'll paddle off to Greenville to see Walter Jones.
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Originally Posted by Justin Amash (R) MI-3rd
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