 |  | | April 29, 2015 |  | No. 169 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | | If you went only by the media, you'd think that Rand Paul was a legitimate contender to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Time magazine put him on its cover, calling him "The Most Interesting Man in Politics." Politico magazine said_literally_the same thing. Top Obama aides agree. In fact, huge swaths of the media concur that Sen. Paul is "interesting." But it's not clear why, as an electoral proposition, there's anything interesting about him at all. Here are four reasons Paul is likely to underperform in 2016 and almost certainly won't win the GOP nomination. (1) Rand Paul is a conventional political dynasty candidate. People seem bothered by having Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton as dynasty candidates, but for some reason Paul gets a pass on this-no one complains that he'd never be a senator running for president if his name was "Rand Johnson." But unlike Bush and Clinton, who are trying to forge new political identities distinct from their names, Paul is not. Paul is trying to modify, but only slightly, his political identity from his father's-he wants to be thought of as "libertarian-ish." But this amounts to merely a tweak to his father's brand. The essentials of the Paul electoral proposition-withdrawal from foreign entanglements, state' rights, criminal justice reform-are virtually identical for both father and son. For all intents and purposes, Rand Paul is running the third iteration of the Paul presidential campaign. (2) Paul 1.0 was a niche product. At this point in the 2008 cycle, Ron Paul did not exist as a political commodity. Rudy Giuliani led in the polls with support in the high-20s to the low-30s. John McCain was a comfortable second, in the mid- to low-20s. Mike Huckabee, who would be the last man standing when McCain clinched the nomination, barely registered. When Paul made the polls, he was at 1 percent. Paul didn't take off until October of 2007, when he began polling around 3 percent nationally. By the eve of the January Iowa caucuses, Paul was polling between 7 percent and 9 percent in Iowa. He finished the actual caucus just shy of 10 percent. It was good enough for fifth place and it would be his best showing in a contested race for the duration of the campaign. After Iowa, the Ron Paul Revolution was polling around 9 percent in New Hampshire before the primary vote; in the primary he took home 7.8 percent. And that's pretty much how it went for Paul for the rest of 2008. Polling around 5 percent in South Carolina, he finished the primary there with 3.6 percent. He was able to make decent showings in a handful of small-state caucuses after the race was mostly decided, but that was largely an effort to amass delegates for the sake of having some say at the convention. He was never a threat to win any primary vote in which there was substantial opposition. In the RealClear Politics polling average, Paul never went above 7.4 percent. Historically, fringe candidates sometimes come out of nowhere to briefly shock the field before fading into obscurity-think Pat Robertson in '88, or Pat Buchanan in '92. Ron Paul's 2008 campaign was not even as formidable as either of those instances. He was a boutique operation who never presented even a momentary challenge to the top tier of candidates. We'll get to reasons #3 and #4 down below. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | | "Jayson Williams, the center for the New Jersey Nets of the National Basketball Association, noticed Gov. Christine Todd Whitman in the stands during a home game last fall that the Nets lost. "Maybe if we'd have won, she'd have fixed I-287 South," he told reporters, referring to the crumbling interstate highway in northern Jersey. Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas says there are two ways to get a massage in his state: "One is to go to a masseuse. The other is to drive I-40 from Little Rock to Memphis. You don't drink a cup of coffee while driving on that road." In Oklahoma City, I-40 caused a different problem. A state trooper got out of his patrol car to check a stalled vehicle and suddenly dropped to his waist in a hole in the road.
In one sense, these tales are the good news. Yes, America's interstate highway system _ 42,700 miles of it, once the envy of the world _ is visibly deteriorating. But it's endured far longer than the 20 years it was built to last, and help is on the way. The bad news is that even if the entire $ 217 billion in the seemingly lavish Shuster highway bill or its Senate variant were spent on repairing interstates, it wouldn't be enough to restore, upgrade, and maintain them."
_Fred Barnes, "In Praise of Highways," from our April 27, 1998, issue. Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | | | | | THE READING LIST | | | | | Theodore Dalrymple on the awfulness of the new Whitney Museum.
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An oral history of Airplane!
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The New Atlantis on liberty in the age of access. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | | "Casuistry aside, I find it very hard to understand how some Christians, perhaps most, fail to see the fundamental threat same-sex marriage poses to the biblical view of marriage. Divorce wounds marriage. Cohabitation and a contraceptive mentality reflect a private indifference to the goods of marriage. But same-sex marriage does something much more fundamental: It asserts public control over marriage, detaches it from the reality of our bodies as male and female, and remakes it into a purely affective union for the sake of ... affective union. "Only the blind can fail to see the difference. Using pornography, a contraceptive mentality, premarital sex, divorce, adultery_all these transgressions ignore divine law, sometimes with a haughty disdain that says 'To hell with traditional morality; I'll do as I please.' Same-sex marriage is different. It insists on claiming the public sanction of the marital bond. Nobody is calling for a blessing of the condoms. Meanwhile, wedding photographers are being taken to court for failing to join same-sex celebrations. "Let me put this a different way. Onan reminds us that human beings have always sought sex without consequences_the contraceptive impulse. The Old Testament allows for divorce as a concession to human weakness, as have other religious systems. Prostitution, adultery, fornication: These are perennial. All reflect our failure to live in accord with the biblical view of sex and marriage. But same-sex marriage? It's not an all-too-human failure. Instead it's an assertion of human will, the conscription of a sacred institution to serve a contemporary ideology ... "I'm glad Markham raises the question of whether First Things welcomes articles arguing for the validity of 'lifelong, monogamous gay relationships.' I appreciate the delicacy with which he cordons off the question of gay marriage. But, no, we won't. In the present climate, it is for all intents and purposes impossible for a person who publically dissents from gay rights orthodoxies to get a job teaching in higher education. It's increasingly impossible to be the leader of a major corporation or to get a job at a major law firm. The New York Times certainly won't publish the most modest demurrals from these orthodoxies. And I dare say one cannot find preferment in the Episcopal Church unless one subscribes to the same orthodoxies. Pretending that there is an honest public debate about the gay rights agenda is an act of dishonesty. "And not just dishonesty. There are many courageous people who have refused to capitulate to the ruthless Jacobin suppression of all dissent. Many have paid a heavy price, including gay writers who defend Christian teaching in our pages. Were we to play the idle game of "dialogue" on this issue, the implication would be clear: These people foolishly sacrificed their livelihoods and reputations for the sake of an ambiguity, not a truth." _R. R. Reno taking a courageous stand against gay marriage in First Things, May 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | | Picking back up on the reality of Rand Paul's electoral prospects: (3) Paul 2.0 largely underperformed. At this point in the 2012 cycle, Ron Paul was already around 7.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, and expectations for his campaign were reasonably high: Just before Iowa held its caucus, Paul had surged to second place in the final Des Moines Register poll, with 22 percent. He finished the actual caucus in third with 21.4 percent. This raised expectations further for New Hampshire, where he was polling in the high teens before the primary. When the votes were counted, Paul actually exceeded his polling, finishing with 23 percent of the vote, his best showing ever in a major, contested primary. This would be the high-water mark of his 2012 effort. After New Hampshire, Paul shrank back to scale: 13 percent in South Carolina, 7 percent in Florida, and 19 percent in Nevada. Even within a historically weak field, as other candidates dropped out of the race, Paul's support remained stagnant. As in 2008, he did well in a handful of non-binding, small-state caucuses. But also as with 2008, this effort was not made in an attempt to win the nomination, but merely to nab some delegates for the convention. Nationally, his support never topped 15 percent, and he consistently underperformed his poll numbers. In South Carolina, for example, he polled between 15 percent and 18 percent before finishing with 13 percent. In Florida, he polled around 10 percent, but finished with 7 percent. Overall, Paul could say that he'd grown his movement. He went from 1.2 million votes in 2008 to 2.1 million in 2012. And his percentage of the total vote moved from 6 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2012. But both times he finished fourth in the field. And in neither effort did his candidacy break out, or over-perform with voters. Even judged on its own modest terms, Paul's support was hollow. (4) Paul 3.0 is the last elections for the Paul dynasty before Naderism sets in. So how does Rand Paul compare with his father? At this point in 2012, Ron Paul was around 7.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, and no one thought he had the slightest chance to win the nomination. Today Rand Paul sits in nearly the same place-9 percent-despite inheriting a campaign infrastructure, organization, and message that's had 12 years to grow. It's a mystery as to why he's being treated as a serious contender. Any rational reading of Paul's numbers suggests that he has the smallest upside of any Republican in the field. Which, contra the media, makes him the least interesting candidate running-because his chances of being the nominee are roughly equivalent to those of Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina. Which is to say that while it's possible that neither of those candidates will reach even 5 percent in a contested vote and it's likely that both will finish behind Paul-at least neither or them have already proven the ceiling of their electoral appeal in two consecutive presidential campaigns. If anything, when it comes to Rand Paul, the smart money should probably take the under on his father's 2012 results in Iowa and New Hampshire: In this cycle, 21 percent and 23 percent of the vote will be much harder to come by in a field crowded with quality, well-funded candidates. And after New Hampshire, Paul has very little to build on, suggesting that his candidacy will likely wane the way both of his father's efforts did. Rand Paul will be a threat in Maine's caucuses and not much else. The question, then, is what happens after Paul fails to win the nomination this time around. If Hillary Clinton is president in 2020, would Paul run again? At that point, his libertarian crusade would look less like a serious political challenge and more like an ideological vanity project. If a movement built around one family's libertarianism can't break out after three presidential cycles, it's probably not going to on the fourth go-around. Or the fifth. No matter how convincingly the media pretends otherwise. Best,
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