Rich Lowry
Politico
6/19/2013
…On Wednesday, a Paul aide told me that another aide in the office came to him with a printout of a news article and asked, “Can anything else break that plays into Rand’s core issues?” It had just been revealed that, unbeknownst to anyone, the FBI had been using drones for surveillance. The sound you hear is TV producers falling over themselves to book the Kentucky senator who rocketed to conservative celebrity on the strength of his filibuster of the administration’s drone policy.
It is a Rand Paul moment in the Republican Party not just because the headlines almost every day seem to reinforce his core critique of leviathan as too big, too unaccountable, and too threatening, but because he is smart and imaginative enough to capitalize on those headlines.
Paul has that quality that can’t be learned or bought: He’s interesting. How many potential Republican presidential candidates have helped shepherd a new verb into the English language. The hoopla around Paul’s filibuster gave us, “to drone,” in the sense of “don’t drone me, bro,” as an attendee yelled when Paul took the stage at CPAC.
Other conservatives in the Senate like to brag that they joined Paul’s filibuster, but it was Paul who came up with the idea and executed it, in an inspired bit of political theater.
He taps into an American tradition of dissent not usually invoked by Republicans. At the Time magazine gala this year honoring the 100 most influential people in the world (he was one), he raised a glass to Henry David Thoreau. In his inaugural Senate address, he contrasted his Kentucky hero, the irascible abolitionist Cassius Clay with the more conventional Kentucky political legend, the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay.
His cultural affect is different, too, a little more Utne Reader than National Review. At a packed event at the Reagan Library he explained, “I’m a libertarian conservative who spends most of my free time outdoors. I bike and hike and kayak, and I compost.” It might be the first positive reference to composting in the history of that fine institution…
Read the complete article at Politico.
