The REAL Reason Rand Paul's Campaign Is Imploding

by JASmius



Supposedly, he's not the kind of guy given to putting out over-the-top bombast like this video:



And I can believe it, at least when he's on camera.  I get the point of it, but Rand's performance  is pretty thin gruel.  To be honest, it looks like outtakes from those "switch for half the price" Sprint commercials where people are doing grisly things to their other-carrier cell phone bills - which was probably the inspiration for Senator Paul's vid.

However, this is the "fun" kind of ad that augments an already-top-tier campaign, not vaults a third-rate campaign into the top tier.  Maybe if Rand had done the ad stark naked, and made "peeing on the tax code" one of multiple-choice options, it might have served its assumed attention-grabbing purpose.

So the question is being asked - particularly by Erik Erickson at Red State - how it is that Rand Paul can be in the GOP primary cellar instead of leading the pack:

Paul only raised $6.9 million. Ben Carson raised $10.6. And that is money raised by the candidate, not the Super PAC. The fact that a guy like Rand Paul, Mister Individualist, is having to depend on two outside Super PACs to raise money for him — and neither have released totals yet — is really surprising. I suspect it was a strategic miscalculation for Paul to enter the race when he did because it meant he could no longer coordinate with his Super PAC. Perhaps Ted Cruz’s strategy of jumping in early stroked Paul’s ego in a way that forced a strategic mistake. As long as Paul did not formally declare, he could fundraise with the Super PACs. But the moment Cruz got in, Paul felt compelled to jump in too…

When he jumped in has nothing to do with it, much less anything Ted Cruz has done.  Rand Paul's fundraising cupboards are bare because he followed Senator Cruz's fratricidal bad example and declared war on his own party back during the NSA/Patriot Act fight - or have you forgotten, Erick?

Let me give you a refresher:

Which begs the rhetorical question of whether Senator Paul believed that he could hide his congenital umbilical to his father's loopy ideas as a Ronulan trojan horse within the GOP long enough to actually make it all the way to Cleveland next summer, and the bona fide question of why he thought that possible when he has now conclusively proven that he doesn't possess anywhere near that level of discretion. Rand Paul is a libertarian ideologue and he wears it proudly, like a hairlip. Which is fine for him, but not when you need the open wallets of the party in which you're concealing yourself in order to vicariously fulfill your progenitor's lifelong dream.

Senator Paul is spouting the usual line of cash-strapped, long-shot candidates - he's "counting on small-dollar donations raised primarily online" from "outside the usual Republican circles, particularly from college-aged voters with a distaste for military engagement and others who put civil liberties at the forefront of their concerns" - or, in other words, people without very much, if any, disposable income. Or, instead of tapping proven gushers, Rand is trying to squeeze a whole bunch of little dry wells. Running an "unconventional" campaign without cash but on a highly energized "live wire" shoe string. Well, good luck with that, Senator, because you're going to need as much good fortune as you lack in your campaign bank account. Remember how Barack Obama also had such a campaign in 2008? He also had a billion dollars in which for it to wallow naked.

You simply cannot piss in the face of your entire party on a critical issue - national security - embrace the Middle East foreign policy of Barack Obama, smear your ostensibly fellow Republicans as "creators of the Islamic State," and expect deep-pocketed GOP donors to line up outside your door.  If Rand Paul thought otherwise, that doesn't say much about his political judgment.  If that was always his plan, then his was never a serious candidacy in the first place.

Rand Paul should be doing much better. He actually has a good story. He actually has positions that set him apart from the GOP field. He has a built in base of support from his father. But remarkably it appears Rand Paul will be less a factor on 2016 than his dad was in 2012. I really never expected that. And not only that, if you pay attention to the campaign schedule, Paul is marching to the beat of his own drummer in ways that suggest the drummer isn’t really headed toward the White House. Michigan? Really?

Really, Erick?  You're surprised that Rand Paul's campaign, such as it is and ever was, is imploding?  You didn't see that coming?

Then, not to put too fine a point on it, but you're an idiot, because I did from the day he officially entered the race:

Rand is his father's son. He's Ron with a perm and a modicum of PR discretion. And like his dad, he has zero chance at the 2016 GOP nomination, which I think he knows, since according to Kentucky election law, he can't run for POTUS and re-election to his Senate seat at the same time, and I don't think he'd sacrifice the latter on a doomed presidential run.

As I've said many times, Senator Paul is running in the wrong party.  His non-fiscal domestic policies are Libertarian (i.e. moral/social issues like abortion and sodomarriage on which he's squishy at best, and border control, at least until a year or so ago), and his neoisolationist foreign policy is Democrat.  Neither makes him any kind of fit for the Republican presidential nomination, to say nothing of his lack of a resume, but those two respective policy bents are fundamentally incompatible, so he had no choice but to infiltrate the GOP under deep cover and try to put them over here.  He failed, doubled down on that failure, and now he's got empty campaign coffers and, for all intents and purposes, the same narrow base his dad did, which never got him anywhere.  The result is a mid-single-digit polling ceiling and effective irrelevancy, with no practical way to change it.

Which is why he's producing homemade Sprint commercials.

I'd say "I told you so," but since Paulnuts never listen to truths they don't want to hear - any more than Tea Partiers do - what would be the point?  You'll have to come terms with that inevitability yourselves.

And I'll be there to enjoy every delectable moment of it.


UPDATE: A word of advice to Senator Paul in his campaign crisis: Please tell your dad to shut up.