The first step in Wead’s plan required Rand to learn a new religious vocabulary. “Everyone has their own language,” Wead later told me in an unexpectedly candid interview. “Catholics speak a language. Mormons speak a language… and so do evangelicals. So, part of this was to learn the language.” Rand’s own religious experience was limited to moderate, mainline Protestant denominations—baptized Episcopalian, practicing Presbyterian—and the distinct dialect of right-wing born-agains was as foreign to him as Swahili. To fix this, Wead assembled a list of creedal buzzwords that would signal to evangelical voters that Rand was one of them—a sort of Rosetta Stone for Evangelicalese. Soon, with some tutoring, Rand was conversational.
As evidence of Rand’s progress, Wead would later point me to a 2014 interview the senator had given in which he recounted his teenage conversion to Christianity. “When [Rand] said, ‘I accepted Christ as my savior,’ an evangelical was hearing that he was born again,” Wead explained. “But that’s not what he’s actually saying… In fact, he didn’t even say Jesus is divine. He didn’t say any of that! But that’s what is heard.”
To Wead, the question of whether Rand had misrepresented his beliefs in the interview seemed beside the point. The senator’s answer, he told me, was “terrific, very powerful.”
The truth was that within Rand’s circle of Christian-courting advisers, nobody was quite sure what he believed when it came to matters of faith. To some of them, he seemed spiritually detached from religion altogether. It wasn’t that he was biblically illiterate; it was that he seemed to treat doctrinal teachings as a source of intellectual stimulation—on par with Dostoyevsky or Ludwig von Mises—rather than as the key to salvation. When I put the question of Rand’s religiosity to Wead, he paused for a long time and then launched into a lengthy meditation on the many presidents he had either studied as a historian or gotten to know personally over the course of his life. “What I’ve found is that very few of them get all the way to the White House with their provincial faith intact,” he told me, adding that based on his conversations with George H. W. Bush, the former president’s faith was a “Pan-Christian-Buddhist-Muslim sort of thing—and yet he was smart enough not to articulate that publicly.”
And what about Rand? Was he, in fact, a believing Christian?
“My point is, I don’t know,” Wead finally said. “I don’t think we can know. I don’t know if he knows.”
Still, Wead had worked in politics long enough to know that a lack of Christian devotion didn’t necessarily doom a candidate to a lack of Christian votes: it was all about the messaging. And so, as they marched through 2014, Rand and his team continued to follow the strategy laid out in Wead’s memo. They compiled an expansive directory of evangelical power brokers and then methodically worked their way down the list with Jacobs’s help, meeting with more than two dozen Christian leaders across the country by the end of the year. The senator also granted a number of sit-down interviews to evangelical media outlets, and attended numerous pastor luncheons in Iowa.
Rand’s mission to the religious Right also extracted a personal sacrifice when he and his family had to leave the Presbyterian church in Bowling Green that he and Kelley had been attending since they got married. Kelley had been a deacon at the church for eighteen years, and their kids had grown up going there on Sundays. But the congregation was part of the national Presbyterian Church (USA), a denomination that had recently begun ordaining gay clergy and embracing same-sex marriage—two stances diametrically opposed to the orthodoxy of the Christian Right. Rand’s advisers warned that his church could become a major liability in the 2016 primaries, and so one Sunday the family said goodbye to their longtime pastor and quietly transferred to a Methodist church in town. When I later asked an adviser for the senator why the Pauls had changed churches, he said simply, “Their old church had gotten too liberal and they felt more comfortable somewhere else.”
As he traveled the country speaking to religious conservatives, Rand sought to reframe his libertarian platform as an extension of the Christian gospel. He pitched loosening drug regulations, softening criminal sentences, and curbing aggressive police tactics in minority communities, arguing that such positions were rooted in Christlike forgiveness and compassion. He routinely reminded his audiences that “‘libertarian’ doesn’t mean ‘libertine,’” and insisted that radically reducing the government’s reach would better enable Christian morality to govern the country. And he made the case that his anti-interventionist foreign policy came closer to passing the “What Would Jesus Do?” test than the hawkish neoconservatism that permeated his party. “I do think it is unacceptable not to hate war,” he said, adding, “I don’t believe Jesus would’ve killed anyone, or condoned killing.”
The success of these offbeat arguments sometimes galled his fellow 2016-bound Republicans. One morning, at a large conservative political conference in DC, Marco Rubio sat backstage and watched as Rand drew fervent applause from the crowd with calls to stop sending American tax dollars overseas to countries that systematically persecute Christians.
Rubio was in awe at the audacity of the argument. He leaned over to Stafford, who was also in the greenroom, and said, “You guys just made foreign aid anti-Christian, didn’t you?”
The strategist smirked. “Yeah, I think we did.”
Rubio sighed, shaking his head in exasperation. “You guys…”
As unorthodox as some of these appeals were, Rand felt he was beginning to find his footing with the evangelicals. At the Values Voter Summit on September 26, 2014, he strode onstage in front of thousands of conservative Christians while images of a fetal ultrasound filled giant TV screens and the thrum of a baby’s heartbeat echoed through the ballroom. He touted his record as a lifelong opponent of abortion, and concluded his speech with a verse from 2 Corinthians: “Where there is the spirit of the Lord, there is liberty.”
His performance won a rave review from Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council and host of the summit. “He put forward a very strong foot here,” Perkins told reporters. “He clearly knew who his crowd was.”
Rand also knew who his crowd was a week later, when he turned up at the College of Charleston—wearing blue jeans and a rumpled white oxford shirt—attempting to court yet another distinct constituency he considered vital to his 2016 coalition: liberal college kids.
He had watched in the last two presidential elections as his dad marshaled an amped-up army of libertarian students across the country. And now that he was taking command of that army, Rand planned to expand its numbers by seizing on millennials’ widespread generational disillusionment with President Obama. “We need to have people with ties and without ties; with tattoos and without tattoos; with earrings, without earrings,” Rand liked to say when describing his vision for the new Republican Party. And so he had gone in search of them—at Howard and Berkeley, at Harvard and Bowie State.
For a libertarian like himself, there was a simple formula to devising a message that would resonate with students. Obama had spent two terms in office sending their friends and classmates into foreign wars, so Rand would preach anti-interventionism; Obama had unleashed a massive surveillance state, so Rand would promise to crack down on the NSA. Any talk of decriminalizing pot was always a winner with the campus tokers, and his general penchant for bashing the leaders of his own party made him seem, to many students, honest and even a bit subversive.
His one rule for college visits was to steer clear of the two culture war issues that most alienated the millennial generation from the GOP: gay rights and abortion. In Charleston, though, he broke this rule—and the ensuing fallout would highlight just how tenuous his unique campaign of coalition building really was.
The question that started it all came during a student Q & A, from a young woman sporting a seersucker baseball cap. “If life starts at conception, should medicine that prevents conception like Plan B be legal?” she asked.
“I am not opposed to birth control,
” Rand replied reluctantly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “That’s basically what Plan B is.” He cast his eyes down. “Plan B is taking two birth control pills in the morning and two in the evening, and I am not opposed to that.”
The video of his response was online within hours, and it immediately set off a backlash from the religious Right. To pro-life conservatives, emergency contraceptives like Plan B—more commonly known as the morning-after pill—were considered tantamount to surgical abortion, and Rand had just endorsed them. All of a sudden, the same conservative Christians who had been exalting him just days before were now ready to burn him at the political stake. Right-wing radio host Bryan Fischer declared that the senator had “jeopardized his pro-life credentials and his 2016 chances.” Pro-life bloggers suggested that the quote should “disqualify” Rand from the presidency. Perkins even took to Twitter to needle the senator, writing, “W/ due respect to @SenRandPaul, Plan B isn’t ‘basically’ birth control. Its function is to create conditions hostile to human life in utero.”
When Rand saw Perkins’s tweet, he was infuriated. It was bad enough having a mob of self-righteous flat-earthers who hadn’t cracked a science textbook since twelfth grade question his medical expertise. But for a high-profile Christian power broker to deliberately fan the flames just a week after Rand had done him the courtesy of speaking at his conference—well, he wasn’t going to stand for it.
He instructed his staff to fire back, and soon Stafford was on the record accusing the senator’s conservative critics of relying on “outdated science” and doing “harm to the pro-life cause.” Though Rand himself didn’t voice the words, the quotes were shaded with his signature self-certainty. “Contraception does not cause an abortion,” Stafford told the Daily Beast. “There is ample, current science to back this up… Senator Paul will take a backseat to no one in his defense of human life, but also, as a medical doctor, won’t allow bad information to force people to discuss something that should not even be an issue.”
Some of Rand’s evangelical outreach advisers had encouraged him not to inflame the situation, to just let the whole thing go. But Rand refused to let Perkins get the last word. For more than a year, he had been bending over backward to get in the good graces of the religious Right, and now after one perceived transgression they were ready to condemn him to hell. This was no way to conduct business, he thought—and it wasn’t very Christian either.
Rand’s feud with the pro-lifers only increased his drive to widen the Republican tent—to build a party big enough that its aspiring leaders weren’t held hostage by the dogmas and demands of just one religious sect. So, a few days after his clash with Perkins, the senator continued on his coalition-building quest by parachuting into a place that had recently become ground zero for racial tensions in America: Ferguson, Missouri.
By the time Rand arrived in Ferguson on October 10, 2014, the city had already been gripped with demonstrations and riots for two months, ever since a white police officer had shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown. Witnesses on the scene said Brown was trying to raise his arms in surrender when the bullets began flying, and his death soon became a national flash point in the long-simmering tensions between police and people of color. The day Rand got to Ferguson, organizers were launching a “weekend of resistance.” Hundreds of protesters marched through the streets chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot!” and lined up outside the police headquarters, standing toe-to-toe with stone-faced officers while an official with a megaphone warned, “If you touch a police officer, you will be charged with assault.”
Rand was the first presidential hopeful from either party to visit the volatile scene, and some of his allies and advisers thought the trip was too risky. But Rand was uniquely positioned to contribute to the combustible debate surrounding Ferguson. Back in August—when white police in riot gear first started clashing with black protesters, firing tear gas and turning an American suburb into something that looked like a war zone—the senator had written a bold op-ed for Time titled “We Must Demilitarize the Police.” Citing an array of libertarian scholars and writers, he blamed the federal government for helping local police precincts “build what are essentially small armies” elaborately equipped with “military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.” He wrote that the trend was particularly dangerous for people of color: “Anyone who thinks that race does not still… skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention.”
The op-ed drew some criticism from some law-and-order conservatives who looked at Ferguson and saw little more than looters and thugs. But Rand saw it as a perfect instance where his libertarianism intersected with the interests of a constituency—in this case, African Americans—that hadn’t supported the GOP since its most prominent leader was wearing a stovepipe hat. His op-ed was impressive and surprising enough to open doors with some of Ferguson’s black preachers and civil rights leaders. But not all of his attempts to connect with minorities had gone so smoothly.
A year earlier, during a visit to the historically black Howard University, Rand had slipped into his hard-to-shake habit of lecturing those who disagreed with him. At one point, he asked the students in the lecture hall if they were aware that the NAACP had been founded by Republicans, and the all-black audience burst into laughter at the condescension of the question.
“I don’t mean to be insulting,” Rand tried to clarify. “I don’t know what you know. I mean, I’m trying to find out what the connection is.”
But after another twenty minutes of explaining various chapters of the civil rights movement to the audience, his sermonizing was given a name: “Randsplaining.”
As with every other outreach effort he had undertaken, these attempts at courting the black community were the subject of disagreement and division within Rand’s team. Elroy Sailor, an influential black Republican lobbyist in Washington, was responsible for arranging many of the senator’s meetings with key black leaders across the country, and he said they were making an authentic, good-faith effort to win black voters. “If he runs in 2016, you might not see a lot of African Americans switching over to becoming Republicans,” Sailor told me. “But I think what you’re going to see is a lot of Paul Democrats.”
Benton, on the other hand, saw a more realistic political rationale for Rand’s black outreach efforts: it gave him a veneer of national electability that helped raise money and impress party elites. “All that stuff is really a play for the establishment Republicans,” he told me flatly.
But even as his advisers debated the political pros and cons, Rand found himself sincerely learning as he spent more time listening to black leaders. When right-wing rock star Ted Nugent drew national ire for calling President Obama a “subhuman mongrel,” some prominent conservatives like Rick Perry initially came to his defense, while others dodged media questions about the racially charged insult. But after months of “listening sessions” with African American civic leaders, students, and government officials, Rand had come to appreciate how hurtful comments like those could be, even when coming from unserious celebrity provocateurs. One night after Nugent made the comment, Rand emailed Stafford saying he wanted to denounce the remark.
Stafford was sympathetic, but he cautioned that, politically, it could cause problems on the right.
As a father, doesn’t it offend you? Rand wrote back.
Stafford glanced up from his phone at his adopted daughter, who was black, and then at his wife, who had been fuming about Nugent’s comment ever since she heard it. “You’re right,” he told Rand.
That night the senator tweeted, “Ted Nugent’s derogatory description of President Obama is offensive and has no place in politics. He should apologize.”
The trouble for Rand—and, more broadly, the Republican Party—was that after a year of competing for new votes and showing up in new communities, there was little evidence of a broad new na
tional coalition emerging in support of the GOP.
In fact, if Rand’s grand experiment had shown anything, it was that no matter who the party nominated in 2016, it would take a herculean effort to cobble together enough disparate demographic groups and ideological tribes to win a national election. The GOP had let its pool of partisan supporters stagnate for so long that any attempt to lure new voters—whether they were white, liberal college students or black, low-income Southerners—would take a huge investment of time and an enormous amount of effort. In the meantime, the constituencies that had long made up the foundation of the Republican Party—from the religious Right to the wealthy business wing—seemed dead set on clinging to their influence within the party and keeping their candidates in line with strict demands and acid litmus tests.
For Rand, these tensions began to come into focus one week in the summer of 2014, when all his coalition-building compromises and competing promises collided in one hectic, three-day swing through Iowa. He was in the state to stump for Representative Steve King’s reelection bid, but his main objective was to get face time in the all-important, first-in-the-nation caucus state. Amid a year of venturing into unexplored political terrain, the Iowa trip should have been a familiar jaunt in friendly territory. King was a right-wing congressman whose supporters included the sort of rank-and-file Tea Partiers that had first gotten Rand into office.
The Wilderness Page 24