When Sen. Rand Paul announced his candidacy for president in Louisville, Ky., on Tuesday, he did so with a freshly minted motto: “Defeat the Washington machine, unleash the American Dream,” a sign on his lectern read.
“The Washington machine that gobbles up our freedoms and invades every nook and cranny of our lives must be stopped,” Paul said.
As Paul unwound his introductory campaign speech, he touted his experience as an eye surgeon — but not once did he mention the Senate, where he currently works. “I’ve been to Washington,” Paul said vaguely, as if he’d once passed through on his way to Baltimore. In fact, Paul and his family now live mostly in Washington, not in Kentucky, and Paul’s youngest son is enrolled in school in D.C. And he is the son of a former member of Congress, Ron Paul, who ran for president three times.
Running for federal office as a Washington outsider is not a novel strategy. But Rand Paul’s challenge will be to convincingly run an anti-Washington campaign for president at the same time he is serving in the Senate and running for re-election. Neither is the puzzle unique to the Kentucky senator: Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are also poised to run anti-Washington campaigns, to some extent, even as they serve in the Senate.
Doug Stafford, a senior aide to Paul, argued that it is perfectly credible for Paul to strike an outsider tone.
“If you only elect people who want to be part of the machine, you will never change it,” Stafford said.
The theme of a broken Washington has long been popular in presidential campaigns, and many of the current or former governors jockeying for the Republican nomination have embraced that time-tested motif by stressing their state experience. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has dissed Washington as “68 square miles surrounded by reality”; New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie used his most recent state of the state address to blast federal lawmakers for sowing a “culture of divisiveness and distrust.”
“I’m not an expert on the ways of Washington,” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said in response to a question at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, although Bush is the son and brother of former presidents.
But the sell is tougher for a sitting senator. President Obama knows the balancing act well.
In February 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for president after two years in the Senate — not disowning his Washington experience, but not praising the federal system either.
“I know that I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington,” Obama said. “But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.”
By 2012, however, Obama had reached the conclusion that “you can’t change Washington from the inside.”
“You can only change it from the outside,” he said.
The senators running for president hope voters will believe the opposite to be true.
