It is beyond me how a “libertarian” can be so beloved of the Tea Party. Their hostility to biggummint is real, I’m sure, but it is not the kind of libertarianism I am familiar with from talking to self-ID’d libertarians, who see state and local government as just as potentially tyrannical as national/federal. Practically all libertarians are pro-choice on abortion, and I doubt many Tea Partiers are. Many libertarians want an open-borders policy on immigration, and nothing is surer to raise TP hackles.
Tea partiers would vote for a wet dog turd if it was red and formed the shape of an “R”. They all pay lip service to limited government but all show up at rallies in their Medicare wheelchairs and Medicare oxygen tanks. What will doom Paul isn’t that he’s a libertarian, it’s that he’s not a war hawk. In the end, libertarianism is entirely irrelevant, it’s just a fringe element of the Republican Party. So one of their own is seeking the nomination. Big deal- he isn’t going to get it.
Maybe it’s the Reform Party all over again. Ross Perot got it started and received 8 million votes (for President) in 1996, and qualified for federal election funds in the next cycle. Pat Buchanan got the nomination in 2000, and it’s been downhill ever since. You think it’s a bunch of kindred spirits just waiting to hear your message and start a popular juggernaut; in reality, you wind up co-opting the message and pissing off the people who did the real work in the first place. 481 votes in 2008, according to Wikipedia.
Rand Paul’s father was an early icon of the Tea Party movement.
You need to distinguish Tea Party organizers (one key event in the evolution of the Tea Party was a complaint against Obama for helping “loser” homeowners with the TARP program despite that reality was just the opposite: ordinary Americnas were sacrificed on the altar of Wall St.) from the Tea Party hoi polloi, whose main unifying idealogy is a strong belief that Obama is a Black man.
Rand Paul will strike a few notes with the Tea Party movement.
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He’s the farthest “outside” the Republican mainstream. This will appeal to the Tea Party people who are also outside the mainstream.
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He’s anti-tax and anti-regulation. The Tea Party people agree with him on that.
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Paul’s the dog whistler in this campaign. The Tea Party is not made up of racists. But let’s face facts - there are some racists in the movement. And Paul is the candidate for this crowd.
That said, I don’t see his candidacy going very far. Right now Paul’s just an icon to a lot of people. But his campaign is going to call attention to his actual platform and I think that will alienate most of the people who’ve jumped on his wagon. Paul’s going to end up with one or two million true believers.
Not sure where you’re getting that. He did visit Howard U. to tell the students the remarkable news that Lincoln was a Republican.
The short answer is that he’s not really libertarian, just claims to be so with a few major points like the no tax stuff and the hate against the Civil Rights Act. Long answer is that the Republican brand is right now about anything that Obama’s against. As long as you’re R and say bad stuff about Obama, you have a chance to lead the pack in the upcoming elections.
And before anyone says it, its perfectly fine to have been an anti-Busher back in the day. Bush was wrong, repeatedly, about most everything. Its ok to be against the man that represents being wrong about a presidency in almost every way. Obama has generally been on the right side of history on everything. Its simply illogical to be anti-Obama
I was never against anything Bush did just because Bush did it. I applaud his initiative against AIDS in Africa. The Medicare drug benefit was a step in the right direction, but of course it would have helped had he decided to pay for it. In general, he’s hated for what he did wrong, not who he is.
he has seen the error of his ways and now wants to increase military spending.
He’ll be as successful as his father before, in other words never president.
This is true, unlike Obama who is hated by many not for his actions per se, but for who is regardless of what action he takes.
Of course, he also draws a lot of criticism from the left for his actions and inactions. But leftists don’t hate him for who he is.
I agree that **Paul **doesn’t have a real shot at the nomination but, the more I think about it, the more I wonder who in the 2016 Republican clown car, of those who have and have not announced, does?
[ul]
Sarah Palin Is any explanation necessary? Not a chance on Earth. [/ul]
[ul]Ted Cruz Too scary, even for the base of the party. He’ll do or say something embarrassing and self-immolate.[/ul]
[ul]Rick Santorum It is to laugh. I don’t know why he even bothers.[/ul]
[ul]Rick Perry The very definition of “stupid”, and everyone but him knows it[/ul]
[ul]Bobby Jindal Bachmann-level cuckoo, just more circumspect. Plus he’s brown. No chance.[/ul]
[ul]Scott Walker A college drop-out, which probably works in his favor with the base. I will place him in the maybe column.[/ul]
[ul]Ben Carson No matter how wacky his views are and regardless how much red meat he throws to the base of the party, he’s still black, so no chance.[/ul]
[ul]Chris Christie I think he is too much of a RINO to get broad backing from the base, but possibly.
[/ul][ul]Marco Rubio Another dummy. Nope.[/ul]
[ul]Mike Pence His tone-deaf response to the Indiana RFRA uproar sunk any chance he had. I doubt he will even run at this point.[/ul]
[ul]Mike Huckabee The only thing he has going for him is religion, and that is not enough, even for the party of god. Another one who makes me wonder why he even bothers. No chance at the nomination.[/ul]
So that leaves us with Scott Walker and Chris Christie, and I just don’t believe Walker is smart enough to remain in the thick of things too long before getting knocked out, which really leaves Christie.
What about Jeb Bush?
Very well laid out indeed, with the glaring omission of Jeb Bush.
I’m less optimistic for Scott Walker than you are. Besides the whole college dropout thing, the guy’s too much of a dufus. He has no gravitas or presidential demeanor, and he has a habit of saying some bone-chillingly stupid things. Like that the most consequential foreign policy decision by a president in his lifetime was Reagan’s decision to fire the air traffic controllers. Or standing up to the unions shows he can stand up to ISIS.
If the reporting in Mark Halperin’s Double Down is to be believed, when the Romney campaign started vetting Chris Christie as a potential VP, they were aghast at how much truly shady stuff lay just beneath the epidermis of his candidacy. They viewed him as totally non-viable and my guess is they were right. I don’t think Christie will survive national vetting, and that may even be why he and his surrogates have been fairly mum in stoking interest in a Christie presidential bid of late.
My money is on Jeb Bush. I just don’t see a path for any other candidate, and the more idiosyncratic folks like Huckabee, Paul, Cruz, Carson etc. get in, the more they dilute the non-Bush vote.
Oops. Glaring omission indeed. 
I don’t know. I think folks are tired of the name Bush. Then again, I have to admit **Jeb **is a tier above the rest I mentioned, so you may be right.
Paul has three strategic options, as I see it:
- Run as a conventional GOP candidate.
- Go all-in on being an authentic libertarian candidate, along the lines of his father
- Try to be both conventional GOPer and authentic libertarian all at once
If Paul runs as a conventional GOPer, he loses to one of the better credentialed people on the stage, eg Bush.
If he goes all-in on libertarianism, he fares no better than his father–possibly even worse, because Ron Paul was so much more charismatic and authentic.
Unfortunately for Paul, I think he’ll end up spending the campaign talking out of both sides of his mouth. But no matter how hard he tries, he will never be hawkish enough to satisfy the base, and meanwhile he’ll alienate libertarians by taking all sorts of positions on domestic and foreign policy that they dislike. The fundamental problem for Paul is that there just isn’t a critical base of support for his views within today’s GOP, so his candidacy is terminally flawed right out of the gate.
…well that, and the toupée.