He wouldn’t need much convincing.
For Rand, finding Christie’s comments in his inbox the next morning was like Christmas in July. He’d been riding high ever since his filibuster earlier that year, but the June revelations in The Guardian and the Washington Post that the NSA was secretly collecting millions of Americans’ phone records and emails had turned Rand into a political prophet of sorts. The tidal wave of national outrage that followed the exposés had only buoyed Rand’s fight against the hawks in his party, and it had solidified his status as a top tier 2016 prospect. In fact, the same day Christie launched his attack in Aspen, a highly publicized poll showed Rand surging to first place in the field of likely Republican candidates.
Now, this tough-talking oaf from New Jersey was trying to pick a fight with him over the very issue that was fueling the libertarian ascent? It was just too good to be true.
Rand green-lit the counterattack, and by 9:30 a.m. he was calling out the governor by name on Twitter:
“Christie worries about the dangers of freedom. I worry about the danger of losing that freedom. Spying without warrants is unconstitutional.”
As Rand’s inner circle brainstormed fresh quotes to feed the frenzied political press corps, Stafford suggested using lyrics from a Bruce Springsteen song to tweak Christie, who was famously obsessed with the Boss. After a bit of Googling, they landed on a perfect verse in the 2007 anti-Bush rocker “Long Walk Home.” Some on the team thought the quote should be attributed to Rand, but the senator’s Springsteen expertise was meager, and there was a concern that he might come off as a poser. In the end, Stafford, the resident E Street Band enthusiast, put his name on it. “In the words of the governor’s favorite lyricist, ‘You know that flag flying over the courthouse? Means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t,’” Stafford was quoted as saying.
According to Washington’s traditional rules of engagement for such things, this was considered a proportional response—and a more prudent, polite politician might have ended the spat there. But Rand was just getting started.
At a fund-raiser in Nashville that Sunday, Rand took another swipe at Christie and his ideological allies in the GOP. “They’re precisely the same people who are unwilling to cut the spending, and they’re, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme—give me all my money now,’” Paul said, referring to the federal funding New Jersey had received after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the state in 2012. “Those are the people who are bankrupting the government and not letting enough money be left over for national defense.” Rand was betting this line of attack would drive Christie berserk. The governor’s leadership in the storm’s aftermath had been the crowning achievement of his first term, and Rand figured that invoking the hurricane was a surefire way to get under his skin.
Rand leaned on his talent for trolling again when New York congressman Peter King tried to get in on the action by comparing Rand on CNN to “the antiwar, left-wing Democrats of the nineteen sixties that nominated George McGovern and destroyed their party for almost twenty years.” Rand’s pithy comeback on Twitter was notable for both its complete lack of context and its pitch-perfect attempt to turn the flag-waving New York neocon into a sputtering mass of outrage and hurt feelings:
“Peter King, from Dem wing of GOP, wants to send ur $ to places who burn our flag. I don’t.”
(Rand was comparing his own ideological opposition to all U.S. foreign aid spending to King’s more mainstream support for the funding. That Rand would eventually have to walk back his position didn’t matter in the heat of battle, and certainly not in the universe of 140-character rejoinders.)
Political gawkers marveled at Rand’s deliberate, almost gleeful efforts to stretch out the high-profile intraparty feud for as long as possible. Describing the political rationale later, Stafford would tell me, “We don’t look for fights, but if we are attacked, we will go in with overwhelming force, and then get out fast. Just like Rand’s foreign policy.”
But if Rand seemed especially feisty during the Christie feud, there was a reason. Earlier in the summer, Rand had attended a summit hosted by Mitt Romney for big-time Republican donors and politicos in Park City, Utah. The event was Romney’s way of staying involved in the fight over the future of the GOP, and it attracted future 2016 candidates from across the party who didn’t want to miss out on face time with Republican moneymen. Mingling for the weekend in the smoky cigar rooms and steamy saunas of the high-end Stein Eriksen Lodge, Rand had gotten one of his first sustained, up close looks at his party’s neocon elites in their natural habitat—and what he saw didn’t exactly fill him with newfound respect for the crowd.
He had been dragged to the gathering by Trygve Olson, a Republican operative who straddled the gap between the party’s establishment and its right wing. The two men had first gotten to know each other in 2010, when Olson was dispatched by GOP officials in Washington to make sure Rand—the surprise Tea Party victor in Kentucky’s hotly contested U.S. Senate primary that year—didn’t blow it in the general election. Republicans in DC were, then as now, deeply wary of the libertarian newcomer, and it was easy to see why. He was an ophthalmologist by trade who spoke in a creaky voice, and exhibited all the charisma of a parking lot attendant. He was in possession of perhaps the least statesmanlike patch of hair in modern political history—an unruly nest of golden curls that seemed existentially resistant to the taming powers of hair product—and his wardrobe was proudly defiant of regulatory overreach by the fashion-industrial complex. Most damningly, he shared a surname with the kookiest gadfly in the Republican Party. At the time, his campaign was being run by two outsiders that few in the GOP establishment knew or trusted: Jesse Benton, a young Paul family loyalist who was married to the candidate’s niece, and Stafford, a former jewelry salesman who worked at a conservative antiunion group. Olson’s assignment was to provide some adult supervision to the operation—but he soon hit it off with Rand. Olson, a foul-mouthed hockey player and CrossFit enthusiast, admired the candidate’s pugnacious streak, and ever since the 2010 race he had been a friend and informal adviser to the senator, acting as a sort of ambassador to the GOP gentry that Rand so disdained.
Rand knew that if he was serious about 2016, he would have to spend some unpleasant time hobnobbing with the party pooh-bahs, and so he begrudgingly followed Olson to the retreat in the Wasatch mountains. But by the time the weekend was over, Rand was more convinced than ever that these people—many of them architects of the most costly wars in American history—were, among other things, prissy little wimps. For him, the summit’s most telling moment came when Dan Senor, who had once served as the Bush administration’s chief spokesman for the Iraq War, went skeet shooting with Paul Ryan, and word got around that it was Senor’s first time ever using a gun. Afterward, Rand morbidly joked with aides about the namby-pamby neocons who had never before handled a firearm or bruised their knuckles but had no problem sending planeloads of teenagers into Middle Eastern war zones.
“So many of the neocons in our party, they think they’re the great defenders of the military,” Rand would later complain to me in an interview. “They think, ‘Oh, the soldiers must love me because I want to be involved in war.’” The truth, Rand firmly believed, was that most members of the military were not eager to fight. “They will. They volunteered, and they’re the most patriotic of our young people. But they’re not excited about war. They want to go to war if it’s the thing they have to do to defend our country… We could sit in a room with ten GIs and their young wives, or vice versa, and their young husbands, and ask them about it. It’s not a chess game to them. It’s like, ‘My husband’s been four times, and still has his arms and legs. I don’t want him to go a fifth time’… I think the people eager for war in my party, and the people eager to send troops in to feed people in the Democratic Party, they don’t know exactly what it’s like because only a very small sliver of our society are fighting these wars. And I think, really, more politicians
ought to sit down at the dining room table with our soldiers and just ask them about it.”
Beneath all the trolling and the back-of-the-napkin political calculation, this was really what drove Rand to keep hitting Christie. It was one thing for John McCain to publicly ridicule him—the old guy had earned the right to be wrong during his five and a half years of torture and abuse in a North Vietnamese prison camp. But when Rand looked at Christie, he saw an entire class of well-fed, self-satisfied GOP elites who had never seen combat, but still shamelessly wrapped themselves in the flag and used grieving widows and dead soldiers to assert moral superiority. If one of those hypocrites wanted to start a fight with him, he wasn’t going to pull his punches.
By the Monday following Christie’s remarks in Aspen, Rand could feel the momentum gathering behind him, and he was having a blast. He soaked up every withering word of an editorial in the right-leaning New Hampshire Union Leader—an influential force in presidential primaries given its state’s first-in-the-nation status—that was going viral in the political world. “If Christie is saying, as he seems to be, that the state should be empowered to take any measures it deems necessary to protect against terror attacks—without any concern for the ‘esoteric, intellectual debates’ over civil liberties—then he is the radical extremist, not Rand Paul,” the editors hissed.
While Rand giddily plotted his next move, Olson worried that the whole thing was getting out of hand. If the barrage didn’t stop soon, Rand would risk squandering any credibility he had built up with GOP brass by coming off like an immature, overzealous board game player who keeps obnoxiously gloating as he piles tiny plastic houses on Park Place. They were still two and a half years out from the presidential primaries, after all: didn’t Rand know that they were only playing for Monopoly money at this point?
Olson had worked in the past with Christie’s chief political adviser, Mike DuHaime, and he was confident that the two could broker a cease-fire. But when he brought the idea to Rand’s team, Stafford and Benton replied that the senator was having way too much fun to call a truce now.
You can try, they told Olson. But there’s no point. Rand isn’t going to stop.
That night, Rand went on Fox News to continue the Christie pile-on. “It’s really, I think, kind of sad and cheap that he would use the cloak of 9/11 victims to say, ‘Oh, I’m the only one who cares about these victims,’” he told Sean Hannity. “Hogwash!” Rand went on to repeat his “gimme, gimme, gimme” line—slipping into a faint New Jersey accent as he delivered it—and made sure not to get off the air without some more custom-tailored goading. “[Christie] may have heard that, you know, the Republican Party is on life support in the Northeast,” he said. “Republicans are in danger of becoming an endangered species. So, it’s not real smart for Republicans to be attacking Republicans.”
The next day, Christie finally took the bait. At a news conference announcing homeowner grants for New Jersey residents affected by Sandy, the governor said he had nothing personal against Rand, but added that if the senator had a problem with his blunt style, “he can just get in line.” Christie went on to note that New Jersey taxpayers sent more money to Washington than the state got back, and suggested, “If Senator Paul wants to start looking at where he’s going to cut spending to afford defense, maybe he should start looking at the pork barrel spending he brings home to Kentucky… But I doubt he would. Because most Washington politicians only care about bringing home the bacon so that they can get reelected.”
Success!
Rand was elated. After hammering away at Christie for four straight days, he had finally lulled his target back into the fracas. As he mulled how to swat back, Rand had an idea. Some of his more weak-stomached aides might not like it, but it was just too good to pass up.
That afternoon, he went on CNN, and Wolf Blitzer asked him about Christie’s accusation of pork barrel spending.
Not even bothering to contain a smirk, Rand quipped, “This is the king of bacon talking about bacon.”
Chris Christie.
The king of bacon.
How could anyone pass that up?
The CNN clip went viral instantly, as bloggers and tweeters feverishly spread the news that the junior senator from Kentucky just went there. In his ongoing high-wire act of political provocation, Rand Paul had just shown the world that he did not consider fat jokes to be off-limits.
But while Rand was quite pleased with his little act of mischief, it was clear to his inner circle that things had gone too far. “It’s time to move on,” Olson insisted in an email to the senator. Rand relented with a shrug, and Olson was finally sent to negotiate a truce with the Christie team. But he found them much less interested in the olive branch than they might have been twenty-four hours earlier.
Christie, who had quietly undergone lap band surgery earlier in the year and was steadily losing weight, thought the joke was outrageous, and deemed Rand to be an even bigger joke than he had realized. What started out as a substantive, life-and-death debate over America’s national security had devolved, thanks to Rand, into a puerile crack about his weight that any dull-witted third grader could have come up with.
The next day, Rand went on Fox News and invited Christie to have a beer with him. “It’s gotten a little too personal,” Rand said, in a maddeningly phony tone of reconciliation. “So let’s kiss and make up.”
But Christie was finished dealing with this ridiculous person. He was never going to be buddies with Rand, and he had no interest in engaging in the Kabuki theater of party unity. “I’m not offended by Senator Paul calling me names. I think it’s juvenile, but I’m not offended by it,” he told a radio station that same day. Asked whether he would take up Rand on the beer, Christie replied sharply, “I really don’t have time for that at the moment.”
For Rand, the fight with Christie had been thrilling and, he believed, important. Sure, the Washington handwringers would fret about the trivialization of American politics and express longing for a Great Debate worthy of a Great Nation. But Rand wasn’t interested in dryly outlining his arguments on C-SPAN and letting history decide whether he was right. To him, this was more than a mild-mannered contest of policy positions; it was a revolution. In the race toward 2016, Rand would employ every tactic necessary to triumph in this high-stakes battle of ideas, no matter how unorthodox or unsavory or mean. Fat baiting, Twitter trolling, thirteen-hour filibusters—all of it was fair game, and he would return to the methods again and again in the coming years.
Rand wasn’t playing for Monopoly money. For the first time in his life, it looked as if the fates might actually be conspiring to create a true libertarian movement in the Republican Party—and Rand was standing at the head of the line, poised to usher in the new order.
Chapter Seven
“It’s Not You, It’s Me”
One Republican conspicuously missing from the big, headline-grabbing, intraparty battles was Bobby Jindal. And it was driving him a little nuts.
The Louisiana governor had been so certain this was his moment. With the failure of Mitt Romney’s inane campaign causing the Republican Party to cast about in search of a new leader with fresh ideas, Jindal had methodically positioned himself to take advantage. After spending the 2012 presidential primaries stumping for Texas governor Rick Perry and stockpiling goodwill among his grassroots conservative admirers, Jindal became the chairman of the Republican Governors Association at the start of 2013—a perch that would allow him to hobnob with GOP donors, travel the country, and bank favors in key battleground states.
With those pieces in place, Jindal had set about reintroducing himself as the party’s “ideas man.” He gave an interview to Politico in which he raged against “dumbed down conservatism,” called on the GOP to “stop being the stupid party,” and urged its leaders to “talk to Americans like adults.” He then proceeded to repeat this advice on every TV show that would let him within fifteen feet of a camera.
Jindal’s diagnosis of the GO
P’s woes was largely a self-serving strategy to recapture the momentum he had back in 2007, when he was first elected governor and christened a rising Republican star in short order. On paper, Jindal had possessed many of the same qualities that were just then helping Barack Obama capture the country’s imagination with his historic presidential campaign. Jindal was young and idealistic and not white—frequently referred to in the press as the GOP’s “great beige hope.” Like Obama, he was a second-generation American who had zipped up the meritocratic ladder from humble middle-class roots, on the strength of hard work and diligent résumé building. In one stump speech after another, he had presented himself as a star-spangled manifestation of the American dream (and, implicitly, a walking antidote to the perception that the Republican Party was overrun by old white men).
But Jindal had something else that was even more important to GOP elites circa 2007: he was an Ivy-laureled policy wonk in a party where senior officials and opinion leaders were sick of being stereotyped as drawling dimwits. After nearly a decade of George W. Bush contaminating the party’s brand, Acela-riding Republicans in the country’s northeastern corridor were eager to show the nation that the new Republican Party would be defined by a fresh generation of sharp-minded leaders with big ideas, not Texas cowboys with stunted vocabularies. They wanted America to know that conservatives could be smart, too—and the “GOP wunderkind” in Baton Rouge was a balm for their neurosis. Every political column about Jindal back then contained a requisite description of his intelligence, often in terms so colorful and extravagant that it seemed as though the journalists were all engaging in the same creative writing exercise. Conservative commentator Kathleen Parker, for example, leaned on Star Trek to capture Jindal’s otherworldly brainpower, writing that he had “the kind of intellect that makes Vulcans uneasy.” And former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson gushed in a column that Jindal’s rise meant that “the hall-monitoring, library-inhabiting, science-fair-winning class president has seized control of the Big Easy. And his coup has been an inspiration to policy geeks everywhere.”
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