For a presidential candidate, being the heir to a political legacy can be a great boon, a heavy burden, or both.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who is weighing a bid for president but has not yet made a public announcement, is already feeling these dual effects.
The son of Ron Paul, the former member of Congress and presidential candidate, Rand Paul has inherited much of his father’s enthusiastic, if niche, network of supporters — but he’s also had to work to separate himself from some of Ron Paul’s most controversial stances.
“I think over time, people will notice there are distinctions and differences” between his father and himself, Rand Paul said in an interview earlier this year.
But the senior Paul’s record still dogs his son, including Ron Paul’s isolationist approach to foreign policy. “I am not an isolationist,” Rand Paul wrote, bluntly, in a recent op-ed.
Still, if Rand Paul is going to take heat for his father, he wants to make sure that Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton gets some for her husband.
“Sometimes it’s hard to separate one from the other,” Paul said of the Clintons early this year, when asked whether he thought it appropriate to criticize Hillary Clinton for her husband’s record.
This is no new dynamic in politics, of course. George W. Bush faced the specter of his father, former President George H.W. Bush, when he ran for president, but also got crucial momentum from their shared name.
In 2012, Mitt Romney faced an outcry when he initially refused to release more than a year’s worth of tax returns. Making matters worse, his father, George Romney, had released 12 years of returns during his run for the White House.
And when Mitt suffered from a string of gaffes on the campaign trail, they were all the more harmful because his father had pioneered the modern concept of a presidential bid-ending political gaffe during his campaign.
But George Romney was not a household name in the vein of “Bush” or “Clinton,” and that made a difference.
“The harder part is dealing with the struggle a lot of voters have endorsing a monarchy, so the Bushes and the Clintons have a harder time than the Romneys would, with their names being strongly associated with past presidencies,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who worked as a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
Should former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush decide to run for president in 2016, an option he is weighing, “he has to face the challenge of relitigating so much of the past that is tied to his name and the legacies of his brother and father,” Madden said, “and he has to either accept that or chart a candidacy separately from them.”
Unless, of course, Bush faces Clinton.
“Then,” Madden said, “the question about legacy is canceled out.”
