On May 14, 2009, Rand Paul sat perched on a stool in front of a low-tech, orange-and-purple backdrop at a remote TV studio in southern Kentucky, waiting for his cue to launch the revolution. When it came, it was in the unlikely form of a question crackling through his earpiece from a left-wing cable news personality.
“Dr. Paul, I understand that you yourself have some political ambitions,” said MSNBC host Rachel Maddow from her studio in New York. “I was hoping you might talk about those tonight on the show.”
“Yeah I do,” Rand replied, speaking deliberately to convey the gravity of the occasion. “I’m happy tonight to announce, on The Rachel Maddow Show, that I’m forming an exploratory committee to run for the U.S. Senate.”
It was an unorthodox way to kick off a Republican Senate bid in a deep-red state—and truth be told, MSNBC had not been his first choice. Earlier that month, Rand had asked Benton to shop his big announcement around to cable news producers in New York. “We tried CNN, we tried Wolf [Blitzer], we tried Fox, but other folks weren’t interested,” Benton would later tell me.
Benton suggested that Rand consider a more conventional platform to launch his campaign, like a rally in his hometown or an appearance on local talk radio. But the candidate wasn’t having it: he insisted that it take place on national television. The political elites in Kentucky were laughing at the prospect of his candidacy—he just knew it. They thought of him as a punch line. A stooge. And he couldn’t think of a more satisfying way to wipe the doltish grins off their faces than by going on prime-time TV—precisely which show, it didn’t matter—to announce his bid to explode their monopoly of power in the state. The Maddow appearance, he told Benton, would give him “an image of legitimacy.”
If Rand was spoiling for a fight with the Republican establishment, there was no better battleground in the country at the time than the 2010 Kentucky Republican primary, where party bosses were transparently working to bypass the whims of the electorate and install their own chosen candidate. The only reason the Senate seat was even open was because Senator Jim Bunning, a retired baseball player and conservative populist, had wounded the ego of the state’s sharklike senior senator, Mitch McConnell, by defying his express orders to support the bank bailout legislation. When Bunning voted his conscience instead, McConnell, who was Senate Minority Leader, put out word to the Republican Party machine in Kentucky and DC that no one was to lift so much as a pinky in support of Bunning’s reelection bid. The ominous or else was implied, as it always was with McConnell and his gang of partisan enforcers. Bunning was compelled to bow out, and McConnell quickly anointed thirty-seven-year-old Trey Grayson, a well-bred Harvard alum and Kentucky’s secretary of state, to be his replacement.
Oh, how Rand loathed this sort of antidemocratic big-footing. He was practically jumping out of his hiking sandals at the chance to blow up the plans of McConnell and his good ol’ boys.
But with little money and few resources to start with, his initial campaign operation was cobbled together with the political equivalent of duct tape, populated by a hodgepodge of earnest, eccentric devotees of his dad. For all the family dinners he’d sat through, Rand didn’t know much about the mechanics of professional campaigns. During one early meeting, while a team of professional political consultants tried to pitch him on a communications strategy complete with media market breakdowns and potential ad buys, Rand interrupted. “What do you guys do exactly?” he asked. “Write press releases?”
What he lacked in operational expertise, however, he made up for with an unwavering confidence in himself, and in the superiority of his ideas. He was not going to squander this chance to pit his absolute rightness against the unsalvageable wrongness of GOP leaders.
Rand built early grassroots buzz by granting YouTube interviews to libertarian bloggers and drumming up support on Infowars with Alex Jones, a national radio show hosted by the infamous conspiracy theorist. But to win the primary, Rand would need to expand his appeal beyond libertarians and Tea Partiers and convince a wider cross section of Kentucky Republicans that he was Senate material. This was a tall order. Across the state, Republicans were already whispering that the libertarian eye doctor from Bowling Green might be a secret supporter of abortion rights and gay marriage, and that his opposition to Guantánamo Bay made him a soft-on-terror peacenik.
Rand wished he could sit down every voter in the state and explain to them, one by one, why they were wrong to believe the smears. He knew that if only he had the time to walk them through the unimpeachable logic of his positions—step by step, point by point, repeating himself when necessary to make sure they truly understood—the power of rational argument would win the day. If he lost this election, he believed, it would only be because he didn’t get a chance to adequately explain why he was right and his antagonists were wrong—and he longed for a more substantive medium for persuasion than press releases and abbreviated interviews.
Enter Doug Stafford.
Rand had first met Stafford on a trip to Washington in the spring of 2009, when he was still mulling a Senate bid, and a friendship quickly formed. The candidate felt as though he had found a kindred spirit in Stafford: a genuine political nonconformist. And Stafford, meanwhile, was impressed by Rand’s command of policy and political history, and the quiet certitude with which he expressed his opinions. When Stafford, who was afflicted with a lazy eye, told Rand about a surgical procedure he was thinking of having to improve his vision, the ophthalmologist asked a series of questions and then rendered his prognosis.
“I would consider it malpractice to operate on your eyes,” Rand said matter-of-factly. Stafford didn’t need a second opinion. He never got the operation.
One day, after Rand got into the race, he was on the phone with Stafford, complaining about the mind-numbing conventions of campaign messaging, when the strategist proposed an idea. Why not make his arguments and respond to false charges with a series of long, detailed, well-argued essays and then mail them to voters across the state? Stafford, who worked in political mail advertising, made the case to the candidate that such a strategy would be relatively cheap—and much more substantive!—compared with putting up thirty-second TV spots during Seinfeld reruns.
Rand loved the idea, and soon his campaign was shipping out thousands of newsletter-style documents that were aimed at selling his libertarian platform to Kentucky’s average Republican voters. One of the mailers featured a photo of Rand admiring rows of shotguns and rifles, and it couched his pro-gun rhetoric in a broader, more libertarian-tinged argument: “It’s important that you and I send people to Washington who not only understand the Second Amendment, but who follow the entire Bill of Rights,” he wrote. For example, “how many supposedly pro-gun politicians voted for the Patriot Act, which gives the government the right to search your home without a warrant, leave listening devices, and use any and all information to prosecute you on any charge, regardless of their original reason for the search?”
Many in Rand’s orbit at the time questioned whether voters were actually reading all these long-winded opuses that the campaign was cramming into their mailboxes. But it didn’t matter. The strategy was perfectly calibrated to the candidate’s conviction that superior ideas (meaning, of course, his ideas) would always win the day as long as he had sufficient space and time to fully articulate the arguments.
Though he didn’t know it then, Rand was just a few years away from putting that assumption to the test on the biggest stage in American politics.
Shortly after Senator Rand Paul’s presidential coalition building commenced in earnest, the libertarian found himself sitting down to lunch at an upscale Washington eatery for a first date with Karl Rove. They were joined at the table by Stafford, Olson, and veteran GOP fund-raiser Ron Weiser. Everyone was bracing for a disaster—and there was good reason why.
Rove privately regarded Rand as a political flash in the pan whose career in Republican politics was incurably burdened by wacky libertarian ideas and a cu
ckoo-bird father. Rove didn’t care how many columnists and magazine covers were breathlessly touting a supposed “libertarian moment” in their party: he firmly believed the junior senator from Kentucky was headed for a crash and burn. Rand, meanwhile, saw Rove as an avatar of the corrupt old-guard GOP—the George W. Bush spinmeister who’d hawked the Iraq War to the sleepy American masses like a late-night infomercial pitchman and then left the White House to enrich himself with his connections. Rarely had a Washington power lunch featured two diners more predisposed to disliking each other.
But Olson, who did consulting work for Rove’s American Crossroads in addition to advising Rand, had taken the risk and set up the meeting anyway. Whatever animus Rand harbored toward Rove, the fact remained that he was one of the most influential gatekeepers and opinion makers in the GOP’s moneyed set. He was a regular columnist for the rich-guy paper of record, the Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News pundit who routinely appointed political winners, losers, and rising stars from his perch in prime time. Any ambitious Republican hoping to raise enough money for a serious presidential bid knew that Rove’s stamp of approval was enormously important, and Rand was no exception.
The lunch began as a study in contrasts, with the lean libertarian meekly nibbling his way through the meal while the carnivorous superconsultant greedily gorged himself. But then somebody mentioned that the two men had both been raised in Texas, and before long they were reminiscing, and roistering, and reveling in the unparalleled greatness of their native state—a beloved tradition for Texas supremacists everywhere.
By the time the check arrived, Rove was impressed with Rand’s palpable self-confidence and his ability to play nice with other Republicans—two attributes the batty elder Paul had never possessed.
“Man, he’s the only politician I’ve ever met that’s as comfortable with himself as Dubya,” Rove marveled to associates after he left the meeting. “I mean, he’s really confident. I don’t agree with him on some stuff, but boy, he certainly isn’t his old man, is he?”
Mission accomplished, thought Olson.
Soon, the doughy-cheeked talking head was mentioning Rand in his punditry alongside other top presidential prospects, and holding him up as a model for the sort of movement conservative the GOP should get behind. During one appearance on Fox News Sunday, Rove even declared that the party needed “more Rand Pauls.”
With the Republican Party’s most influential billionaire whisperer singing the senator’s praises, Rand’s team moved to take advantage. In the months that followed, they trotted out Rand at countless well-appointed boardrooms, VIP retreats, and extravagant penthouses, where he flattered and pitched to every deep-pocketed donor who would listen—regardless of what he or she believed. He met privately with the Omaha-based founder of TD Ameritrade, and genuflected before Wyoming’s richest conservative Christian. He trekked to Boston’s Newbury Street, where Mitt Romney’s former fund-raising chief, Spencer Zwick, assembled a small gathering of curious millionaires to hear out the senator. And when summer came, Rand dutifully trudged to another one of Romney’s loathsome Park City summits, where he stayed on his best behavior all weekend. He even got a hearing from the board of the staunchly pro-Israel Republican Jewish Coalition, telling stories about his trip to the Holy Land and subjecting himself to an aggressive grilling from the party’s most prominent hawks and Zionists. After the meeting, Ari Fleischer told the New York Times that he appreciated Rand’s efforts, regardless of their disagreements. “He’s thinking about these issues,” Fleischer said. “He’s trying to learn.”
The senator’s mad cash dash was generating glowing reviews from donors and party elites across the country. Olson often found himself on the other end of a phone call with one multimillionaire or another who had just met Rand, and wanted to gush about how compelling the senator’s unique 2016 pitch was. Team Rand’s establishment charm offensive was going better than they could have possibly expected.
There was, however, one glaring obstacle: Doug Stafford. The strategist had never been fully on board with the campaign to win over the party pooh-bahs, and now he was proving to be disastrously ill suited for the task.
Washington bigwigs and political benefactors expect a certain degree of poise and polish from the operators who come to schmooze them—and Stafford, with his ill-fitting blazers and off-putting personal quirks, didn’t fit the ticket. His background as a Beltway outsider was what had first endeared him to Rand, but now his lack of experience with the modes and manners of the 1 percent was proving disruptive.
In one emblematic mishap, Stafford bailed at the last minute from accompanying Rand to an elite fund-raiser held at the Manhattan penthouse of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson. While the other presidential aspirants in attendance, like Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, spent the night promenading around the premises with their well-connected strategists at their sides to make introductions, Rand was left to wander aimlessly through the crowd and strike up conversations on his own with major party donors. The senator managed to salvage the evening and hit it off with several of the attendees—but when Olson heard what had happened, he grumbled that it was “bush league.”
It often got worse, though, when Stafford did show up for donor pitches. The strategist spent so much time grandiloquently prattling on that Rand had to fight to get a word in edgewise. Once, after suffering through such a performance by Stafford, a megadonor remarked, “That guy needs to shut up.”
Olson, Benton, and others tried to broach the subject with Stafford, but when they did he seemed to grow paranoid that they were plotting against him. He jealously guarded his status as Rand’s political Svengali, and he was determined to prove he was up to the task of running a presidential campaign. He took to sending unprompted emails to the senator in which he touted his abilities and tallied his recent successes, sometimes cc’ing other advisers so they would appreciate his talents. He often compared himself to legendary campaign operatives like James Carville and David Axelrod, whose humble career beginnings, he claimed, were just like his. He began boasting that he was “the Karl Rove of Rand World.”
But the lofty comparisons were slow to catch on in some quarters of Washington. One evening, at a reception following an American Crossroads board meeting, Stafford cornered the actual Karl Rove and proceeded to talk his ear off about campaign strategy and the 2016 electoral landscape. He held forth at great length, barely bothering to mask his self-regard and missing several social cues from his eager-to-escape captive.
When Rove did finally manage to extricate himself from Stafford’s conversational maw, the baffled consultant waved down Olson.
“Who was that?” Rove asked, apparently having forgotten the strategist.
Olson would later joke to colleagues that it took everything within his power not to respond, “You don’t know? He’s the next Karl Rove!”
At the same time that Rand was crisscrossing the country in a frenzied game of millionaire matchmaker, he was also working to court another key component of every Republican primary coalition: God. That mission led him, one afternoon in February 2014, to a downtown Dallas hotel suite, where he met with Pastor Brian Jacobs, a plugged-in player in national conservative Christian politics. Rand’s goal was to recruit Jacobs to join his fledgling team of evangelical outreach advisers—but before he could even begin his pitch, the pastor issued an ultimatum.
“Listen, Senator Paul, I don’t want to waste your time,” he said, “but I just want to say now: if you have a Karl Rove on your team, then there’s no reason to continue this conversation.”
The pastor had served on the 2004 Bush campaign, and he had come away convinced that Rove was a cynical, win-at-all-costs mercenary who cared about people of faith only when they could help him win elections. Jacobs wanted to make absolutely sure he wasn’t dealing now with the kind of politician who surrounded himself with a hive of corrupt, godless mini-Roves.
Rand smiled at the pastor’s demand. “I assure you, there’s not
gonna be any Karl Roves around me,” he said.
With that settled, the senator went on to solicit help in getting to know some of the key figures in the evangelical movement.
Have you met with Dr. Moore yet? Jacobs asked, trying to get a sense of how much progress Rand had made.
His question was met with blank-faced silence.
Dr. Russell Moore, Jacobs clarified. From the Southern Baptist Convention?
Nothing.
What about Bishop T. D. Jakes? the pastor tried.
Not even a flicker of recognition.
Franklin Graham? Gary Bauer?
Jacobs continued to rattle off the names of some of America’s most prominent Christian leaders until finally it dawned on him: the senator sitting before him had no idea who any of these people were. Jacobs was shocked. He had spent a lot of time with politicians, but he had never seen a serious Republican with national ambitions exhibit this level of ignorance. “I had to pick my jaw up off the table,” Jacobs later recalled to me.
Rand, realizing his faux pas, became contrite. “I’ve lived in the Washington bubble for years, and I apologize that I don’t know who these people are,” he said. “But that’s why I need your help. Number one, I want to understand who these people are. And number two, I want to understand what they do.”
Jacobs sized up the senator, and decided his humility was authentic. “Wow,” the pastor said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
He didn’t know the half of it.
Inside the tight-knit coterie of evangelical ambassadors that Stafford had already assembled on Rand’s behalf, a quiet but urgent effort was under way to give the libertarian contender a crash course in conservative Christianity. The man leading this endeavor was Doug Wead, a Christian historian and longtime GOP strategist who had been a key player in building the Bush family’s winning alliance with the religious Right in the eighties and nineties. A former multilevel marketing magnate with an easy smile and grandfatherly charm, Wead had a keen talent for tailoring a pitch to a target audience. So, shortly after he was recruited to join Rand’s team, he wrote an eighty-page memo that outlined in blunt, clinical detail exactly what the senator would need to do to win over evangelical voters in 2016. The memo was circulated only among Rand’s most trusted advisers, with strict instructions to keep it far away from the press. (It is being described here for the first time publicly.) But it quickly became the central playbook in Rand’s campaign to woo conservative Christians.
The Wilderness Page 23