Over at the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza suggests that Rand Paul picked a fight with defense-minded conservatives today:
Paul scolded conservatives who “believe a government inept at home will somehow succeed in building nations abroad.” He insisted: “We need a foreign policy that protects American interests and encourages stability, not chaos.”
None of that rhetoric will send the Republican establishment headed for their fainting couches. (Are those still a thing?) But the ideas Paul has espoused that comprise the framework on which that not-all-that-controversial rhetoric sits both: a) do represent a real change in approach for a party who, since at least Reagan, has championed a very muscular foreign policy and b) will become a major point of attack for Paul’s rivals.
I don’t think that Cillizza is necessarily wrong. But I do think that this has more to do with how Paul is perceived than what he has actually been saying of late. We are talking here about a man, remember, who has just suggested that the federal government should increase its defense budget by 16 percent. We are talking here about a man who has confirmed that he is quite happy for the United States to send ground troops to fight ISIS, providing that Congress gets to decide when. We are talking here about a man who also said this today:
“I envision an America with a national defense unparalleled, undefeatable, and unencumbered by overseas nation building.”
It is difficult to effectively compare geopolitical eras, and it is even more difficult to imagine what different presidents would have done in different circumstances. But if you were stop an average person on the street and tell them that a Republican candidate for president hoped a) to increase defense spending, b) to ensure that the United States continued to enjoy a “national defense” that was “unparalleled” and “undefeatable,” and c) to send ground troops to fight an enemy that has not yet directly threatened the U.S., I doubt that person would say, “is that the anti-war libertarian?” In fact, I doubt that he would say “wow, that sounds completely different from Ronald Reagan,” either.
So why does Cillizza continue to cast Paul as the odd one out? And why are hawkish groups lining up to try and destroy Paul before he can gain any traction? Well, because nobody really believes that this is what Rand Paul actually stands for. Like Barack Obama before him, much of Paul’s support is coming coming from people who suspect that their man is playing a long game: First, say what needs to be said; second, get into power; third, make some necessary changes. In a Machiavellian sense, who can blame them? On gay marriage, on taxes, and on foreign affairs, this worked out pretty well for the progressive movement.
Can it work for Paul, too? That seems unlikely to me. For a start, the country seems to be moving in the opposite direction on foreign policy, which means 1) that there will probably not be enough secret non-interventionists to help Paul in the primaries, and 2) that those people who really do want a strong voice on foreign affairs will be more likely to go for a trusted hawk.
More to the point, Paul almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to be a successful Rorschach test candidate. The genius of Barack Obama’s campaign was that he managed to both suit the ideological moment (his foreign policy was vague, but his voting and public record lined up with contemporary public sentiment; Paul’s does not) and to sell himself as a practical moderate. Rand Paul’s whole appeal, by contrast, is that he’s “something different”: a libertarian conservative* of the sort we haven’t really seen before. Alas, as the New York Times points out today, there are just not very many of these people in circulation at the moment. That Paul has had to move rhetorically into the hawk camp so early on is a sign of weakness, not of strength.
*Nope, he’s not really a “conservatarian,” at least not of the type I outline in my book.