Rand Paul Is Losing His Own Flame War
It’s a bad sign when your campaign is starting to resemble a comments section flame war. Especially when you’re doing it wrong. And Rand Paul — the sort of young, sort of hip, sort of libertarian presidential candidate with a campaign that likes to think it’s sort of good at the Internet — is doing it wrong.
Paul isn’t just screwing up; he’s screwing up comprehensively. His attacks on Donald Trump this last week have been an effete shitshow. He’s drawing negative attention back on his own campaign, and he’s undermining his default brand – that of the semi-cool academic type who can’t be bothered with how wrong everyone is. He’s coming off as the thirstiest dude in a field of candidates whose thirst baseline already looks like a bunch of guys who got stranded in the desert after going to town on a salt lick.
To really get a sense of Paul’s faltering, let’s go to the tapes. Forget the one where Paul conveys the sobriety of his campaign by sawing apart the tax code with less seriousness than a Frank Black video. There’s another one, released Wednesday, titled, “Rand Paul: Telling It Like It Is” – it features ominous (and old) footage of Donald Trump saying the economy performs better under Democrats, and that he’s met Hillary Clinton and thinks she’s a nice person. The Paul campaign followed the video up with a statement: “Rand is running to fight the big business, big government establishment. Donald Trump already represents one end of that problem. Now he wants to represent the other.”
Paul’s ad and response is basically an unforced error layer cake.
1. As Mother Jones‘ David Corn points out, one of Paul’s stump refrains during both his father’s 2008 presidential campaign and his own 2010 senate campaign involved praising Jimmy Carter as a far better president than Ronald Reagan when it came to the budget. Now, leave aside that what Trump said about the economy’s performance under Democrats was true, irrespective of whether his conclusion can actually be attributed to Democrats. If what Trump said counts as conservative apostasy, then Rand’s own stump speech about Reagan being worse than Carter is akin to climbing up on a crucifix and nailing a clown mask on Republican Jesus’ dick.
2. Whatever else you think of the Trump campaign, Trump pointing out that he can buy politicians, but can’t be bought himself, is not only hilarious, but mostly true – and it exposes a deep fissure in the conservative worldview. Rand’s response to the Donald’s donating largesse for candidates on both sides of the aisle involves drawing attention to a problem he cannot possibly ideologically object to. When Trump donates to both parties, he’s investing in future influence-peddling to reduce red tape on projects he undertakes, or to advance policies to his advantage. That’s just rational-actor theory, baby. Even conceding that big-business influence-peddling in D.C. is toxic does nothing for Paul, because his worldview doesn’t permit him the intellectual consistency of decrying that at the state and local level, or in the funding of elections in a post-Citizens United era. He’s complaining about a bug in his Never Ending Pasta Bowl in an Olive Garden ankle-deep in sewage.
3. Look, if you’re going to take a swing at a dude who’s bigger than you, you can’t miss. Trump is crushing Paul in the polls, and rather than cut Trump down to Paul’s size, Paul’s just leaving his side exposed to effortless hooks: In his response to the Paul campaign’s Trump video, Trump cites Reagan as an example of a true conservative whose ideas evolved away from pro-Democratic positions, he mentions that he kicked Paul’s ass at golf, and he closes with astonishment that there’s anyone left in Paul’s campaign unindicted enough to make ads like these.
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