CHAPTER 7

IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER in retrospect, but at the outset of the 2016 presidential campaign, the most fascinating Republican contender was widely considered to be none other than Rand Paul. Labeled “the most interesting man in politics” on the cover of Time magazine, Rand was thought to be a serious threat to win the GOP nomination that his father, Ron, had sought twice before. Rand, it was commonly accepted, was a much better politician than his father ever was. Why? Because the son had no problem with being opportunistic and modulating some of his views at just the right time, whereas the father would never dream of compromising his principles. Rand was running for president to win; Ron had run to make a point. Little did we know at the time that running to make a point in 2016 would turn out to be just the right blueprint for electoral success in New Hampshire, whereas playing the game the way everyone expected it to be played meant certain doom.

In spite of his political dexterity, Rand Paul didn’t merely harbor libertarian views. His every observation about life often seemed filtered through the eternal battle he saw being waged between “individual liberty and government overreach”—a perspective that his father had imbued in him since his first bedside reading of Ayn Rand. Like his dad, it seemed to me, Rand was the rare top-tier presidential contender who got into politics more to implement his worldview than to achieve power for its own sake. That didn’t mean that his estimation of his own greatness wasn’t ironclad. It was. The wrinkle was that in his heart of hearts, Rand Paul was an honest-to-God ideologue whose ambition to become president of the United States was merely an offshoot of that self-certainty.

But what Rand Paul had in conviction, he lacked in conviviality. One afternoon, when he was stumping in New Hampshire before the 2014 midterms on behalf of Republican congressional candidates in the state, I had been chatting with a couple of his staff members in a Manchester hotel lobby when the soon-to-be presidential candidate sauntered over to pass a few spare minutes with us. I had already interviewed Paul earlier in the day and had a beer in front of me, rather than a tape recorder, so it was clear that this would be an informal chat. I asked him about his recent charity trip to Guatemala, in which he had exchanged his politician’s suit for his ophthalmologist’s lab coat, in order to perform life-changing cataract surgery on dozens of patients. It had been the latest iteration of the annual medical charity trips that Paul took to the developing world—an excursion that was wholly commendable and offered an opportunity to see who Paul really was as a person. For most people, my question would have provided a chance to reflect on what it was like to give a person the gift of sight after years—and even decades—of blindness. What a powerful thing! Instead, he launched into a riff about an inexpensive piece of medical equipment that had been banned by the US government but had allowed him to perform the surgeries more economically in Central America. Somehow, Paul had taken my casual inquiry about his international charity work and immediately turned it into a diatribe against overregulation.

Fundamentally, Paul was an introvert who would rather be doing anything but talking to voters and reporters, if it weren’t for the inconvenient problem of believing so strongly in his ideology. Sure, he might show up at the Kentucky Derby to knock back a bourbon for the cameras, but anyone who spent even a little bit of time with him had to become aware that he regarded humanity with a professorial distance that made Barack Obama’s cerebral and sometimes aloof bearing seem downright gregarious in comparison. The distinct impression that I felt every time I interviewed Rand Paul was that my questions were boring him. And when he mixed with crowds on the trail, his eyes typically appeared to glaze over, while he kept his hands planted deep in his pants pockets—the picture of barely contained misanthropy. Pushed by his aides to do so, he would make an effort to shake every hand in the room, but he did it with the enthusiasm of a newly arrived prisoner greeting his cellmates.

Paul also had an unfortunate tendency to speak before he’d thought his comments through. I had witnessed this habit during one of his early New Hampshire visits, when he told a well-lubricated nighttime crowd outside the minor league baseball stadium in Manchester, “I think the first executive order that I would issue would be to repeal all previous executive orders.”

The next morning, Paul’s top political aide, Doug Stafford, took the prudent step of walking back the comment, telling a reporter that the senator’s remark “was not made to be taken literally.” OK, fine. A politician said something off-the-cuff that he didn’t really mean—it happens from time to time. The problem with Stafford’s statement? Paul hadn’t gotten the message. In an interview I conducted with him later that morning, Paul reiterated his belief that repealing every previous executive order was “a nice idea” and that “you could sunset them all and really repeal them all, and then you could start over.” All of them? Even the Emancipation Proclamation? What about President Truman’s executive order that desegregated the military? I noticed that Paul’s eyes widened a bit as he perked up for the first time since we’d begun our conversation. “Well, I mean, I think those are good points, and it was an offhand comment,” he said. “So, obviously, I don’t want to repeal the Emancipation Proclamation and things like that.” Right, it’s nice to have things like that.

Despite his shortcomings as a candidate, I have to admit that at the outset of the race, it seemed to me that Paul would be well-positioned in New Hampshire—the early voting state whose libertarian streak is codified in its motto. For all of his faults, Paul exuded the “live free or die” ethos. He and his political team knew that in order to have a shot, New Hampshire was something close to a must-win. They also knew that their best chance of winning there was to string together an oddball coalition of college stoners, dangerous-looking men with “Private Property” signs posted at the end of their long gravel driveways, and some run-of-the-mill conservatives who’d grown tired of the typical Chamber of Commerce–friendly Republican nominees of years past. The formula made sense, in theory. But a few days after my winter walk in Errol with the New Hampshire Rebellion, I happened to be the lone journalist to bear witness to a moment that, for me, summed up in one neat little ball the reason this particular Republican rebel’s candidacy probably was doomed from the get-go.

It all started with a chipped tooth. During my sophomore year of high school, my face had an unfortunate collision with the frame of a tennis racquet—an encounter that left me looking a bit like one of the mountain men from Deliverance. I had a veneer put on to cover the chip, but the problem with veneers is that they tend to break every few years when a chicken wing or a crouton connects with them at just the wrong angle. The night before Rand Paul came to New Hampshire for his latest trip there, I was at Mint Bistro—my favorite restaurant in downtown Manchester—and I’d just bitten into an Asian short-rib nacho when I heard the familiar crunching noise, which signaled that I had a couple of trips to the dentist’s office and a bill totaling several hundred dollars to look forward to later in the week. In the meantime, I would have to spend the following day reporting on a presidential candidate with a jagged hole where my left front tooth used to be.

Although he had not yet declared his candidacy officially, Paul had scheduled a full day of retail-style stops around southern New Hampshire with nary a wink and a nod about his 2016 intentions. The guy was running, and he didn’t make any effort to play it coy on this particular day. He spoke—mostly with his hands tucked into his pockets, and always in a monotone, bored-teenager murmur—about old Republican ideas such as eliminating the Department of Education and newer ones such as preventing the government from spying on citizens’ cell phones. The latter proposal was a particular hit during his visit to the Londonderry Fish and Game Club, for what was billed on as a “Second Amendment Supporter Event.” The gathering was labeled on Paul’s schedule as being “open press,” but club president Rick Olson had other ideas. I was a late arrival, and the crowd inside the aluminum structure that served as the group’s headquarters was pretty substantial. As such, I had to rely on my years of training as a campaign journalist to bend and contort my body in the manner required to board a rush-hour train in midtown Manhattan, in order to get inside.

When it came time to begin the proceedings, Olson announced that he and his fellow club members first had to take care of “some executive club business” and thus would kindly have to ask the members of the media on hand to leave the premises temporarily. After a few moments of inaction leading into some meek sighs of protest from my fellow members of the fourth estate, the several dozen journalists who had assembled near the stage began filing out of the aluminum structure. On a whim, I decided not to join them in exiting. This wasn’t a particularly brave or noble act on my part—it was just that I was already standing toward the back, and I was pretty sure that if I could keep my audio recorder partially concealed, everyone would assume that I was a card-carrying member of the gun club. I’m not saying that my missing front tooth helped to sell the idea that I was just another pistol-packing, “don’t-tread-on-me” club member, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

Once all of the other journalists had finished filing out of the room, Olson quickly dispensed with any pretense that the line about “club business” was sincere and handed the microphone over to Paul, who no doubt took the stage harboring the reasonable assumption that no one from the outside world was listening. In his remarks, Paul wowed the crowd by telling them the story about how he had launched his 2010 Senate campaign at a “machine-gun festival.” Apparently, there were no surface-to-air missile festivals in town that weekend. He talked about his support for demilitarizing local police forces and arming commercial pilots (“a no-brainer”) and his opposition to no-knock warrants and limiting magazines. “From a practical point of view, I’m not that great a shot, so I need a few more chances,” Paul joked.

His rhetoric was jarring, though not especially surprising, considering the speaker and his venue. It wasn’t until the Q-and-A session that followed his speech that Paul really let his guard down and went full-on true-believer to an extent that I considered to be beyond the pale for someone who deigned to harbor realistic hopes of becoming president. The question that Paul received was about the United Nations, and he took it as an opportunity to tee off on some of the “highly objectionable” UN treaties that he said threatened to encroach on American sovereignty. That part of his answer was all well and good and in keeping with statements that he had made previously. But when someone in the crowd followed up with a suggestion to “get the UN out of the US,” Paul responded with a buoyant “Hear, hear” and proceeded to escalate his rhetoric into the domain of isolationist radicalism.

“The concept of having a body where we discuss diplomacy and discuss things isn’t a bad one necessarily,” he began. At that point, I sensed that a big, bright-red “However” was on the way, and Paul didn’t disappoint. “There’s a lot of reasons why I don’t like the UN,” he continued. “And I think I’d be happy to dissolve it.”

Rand Paul would be “happy” to dissolve the United Nations? There, in an instant, the vocal critic of the UN had gone on the record as a proponent of discontinuing the international body entirely, like it was an out-of-date toaster. This was John Birch Society stuff. And even worse, when the words came out of Paul’s mouth, it sounded as if he was coming up with the idea on the fly. “I think I’d be happy to dissolve it.” Sure, that sounds cool. Why not? It was a line that Paul—-who had long been taking pains to say that he was merely a “noninterventionist” and not an isolationist—would never have conceived of uttering in a foreign policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations or during an appearance on Meet the Press. But here in small-town New Hampshire, during what he believed to be a closed-door gathering of like-minded souls, it was a surefire applause line, and he couldn’t resist indulging just this one time. And that, ultimately, was the problem: that it was just one time. This was not a year when the Republican rank and file wanted its candidates to wink knowingly every now and then in private settings. No, they wanted their zealotry wide out in the open where everyone could see it. With Donald Trump’s anti-NATO screeds still far off on the horizon, Paul was trying to play the cute political game within the established norms. It was the way the nomination had always been won before—the way his dad could never bring himself to engage, as he built his own formidable movement within the party. As it turned out, Rand Paul proved to be neither the most interesting man in politics nor the most interesting man in his own family.

At the time, however, I merely assumed that by saying aloud what he actually thought, Paul had really screwed up. Surely the mainline conservative Republicans and moderate independent voters who had long composed the majority of the New Hampshire GOP primary electorate would never stand for this kind of extreme rhetoric. You couldn’t just come up to New Hampshire and say whatever you wanted, even in private, just because it stoked the basest impulses in the most hard-line voters, right? As it turned out, you could indeed do just that—and a whole lot more—but only if you were a candidate who possessed two traits that Paul lacked: sparkling charisma and utter shamelessness. As future events would demonstrate, it wasn’t Rand Paul’s occasionally extreme rhetoric that prevented his campaign from getting off the ground. It was rather his inability to match his jarring words with the kind of self-aggrandizing populism that only a certain billionaire with an unhealthy TV ratings obsession could provide.