Rand Paul: A Politician After All

“How many people here have a cell phone?” Paul asked at the beginning of his remarks. “How many people think it’s none of the government’s damn business what you do with your cell phone?” The crowd cheered.

“I really, really worry about Anthony Weiner. Because you know he likes to take the selfies,” Paul said of the former Democratic congressman who accidentally posted lewd photos of himself on Twitter. “He’s had trouble finding a place to put them where no one can find them. So I’m thinking maybe Anthony Weiner should put his selfies in Lois Lerner’s emails.” 

The crowd loved it, but Paul quickly dropped the stand-up act and became an earnest civil libertarian. He denounced the Patriot Act, the NSA’s surveillance program, and the drug war. He warned that American citizens could be detained at Guantánamo Bay someday without a trial. It was the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, but Paul didn’t mention them. Generation Opportunity, the group hosting the event, primarily focuses on fiscal issues, but Paul devoted a single line to economics. Almost every word spoken by the likely Republican presidential candidate could have been uttered by the president of the ACLU. And that was the point.

Paul was surrounded by longtime supporters of his father Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns, including the elder Paul’s 2008 effort, which was born largely out of opposition to the Iraq war. But Rand Paul had recently announced his support for an air war against the Islamic State, despite his previous strong skepticism about airstrikes and his father’s advice to “stay out.” The message the Kentucky senator was sending to the loyalists gathered in New Hampshire was that he hadn’t really changed at all—he was still the same old different-kind-of-Republican he’s always been.

But it’s impossible to deny that on the issue of airstrikes against ISIS, Paul’s views have changed. On June 19, a week after Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, fell to ISIS, Paul took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to warn that the United States should stay out of Iraq’s civil war. He wrote that U.S. airstrikes could turn America into “Iran’s air force” and that an effort to “transform Iraq into something more amenable to our interests would likely require another decade of U.S. presence and perhaps another 4,000 American lives.” 

On August 11, after Christians had fled death or forced conversion in Mosul and Yazidis had been massacred in Sinjar, Paul indicated he was ambivalent about the airstrikes President Obama had just ordered. “I have mixed feelings about it,” Paul said. “I’m not saying I’m completely opposed to helping with arms or maybe even bombing.”

As late as August 29, Paul suggested at an event in Dallas that he hadn’t made up his mind about attacking ISIS: “I think the strategy has to be that you have an open debate in the country over whether or not ISIS is a threat to our national security. And it’s not enough just to say they are. That’s usually what you hear—you hear a conclusion. People say, ‘Well, it’s a threat to our national security.’ That’s a conclusion. The debate has to be: Are they a threat to our national security?”

But later that same day, Paul sent a statement to the Associated Press saying that if he were president, he would “seek congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily.”

“Some pundits are surprised that I support destroying the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) militarily. They shouldn’t be,” Paul wrote on September 4 in Time magazine. “If I had been in President Obama’s shoes, I would have acted more decisively and strongly against ISIS.”

Some of the pundits most surprised were Paul’s libertarian allies. “The sudden evaporation of Paul’s doubts reeks of political desperation,” wrote Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at the libertarian magazine Reason. “Paul still has not explained why the problem of ISIS is one the United States has to solve.”

In fact, the senator has taken a few different approaches to addressing the issue. First, he denied that he had changed his mind. “I still have exactly the same policy,” Paul told me on September 9 in the Capitol. “And that is that intervention militarily should be through an act of Congress.” Paul has always said any decision to go to war should be made by Congress, but that didn’t explain why he now supports war. 

Second, Paul has tried to change the subject, arguing that people shouldn’t be surprised he backs war against ISIS because he’s “not an isolationist.” Whether or not it’s ever been fair to call Paul an isolationist is debatable. Paul defines “isolationist” so narrowly—as someone who wants our military to be “nowhere any of the time,” as he put it in an interview with the New York Times—that not even Charles Lindbergh would have qualified. When Paul speaks of isolationism he really means pacifism. But the debate is largely irrelevant to Paul’s views about ISIS.

More recently, Paul has acknowledged that events have played a role in changing his mind. “Events do change your opinion. And your opinion of when a vital interest is being threatened is influenced by, you know, the beheading of two Americans,” Paul told me following an event in New Hampshire on September 12. “There’s a threat to our consulate that is very nearby, there’s a threat to our embassy potentially, and also potentially a threat to us.” But those threats existed back when Paul was warning the United States to stay out of Iraq in June and July. The beheading of two American journalists—which the world learned about on August 19 and September 2—are the only new events that Paul has cited to explain his shifting views.

So Paul wasn’t convinced that ISIS—an offshoot of al Qaeda with genocidal aims and a jihadist army that numbers 25,000 strong—merited a military response when they were merely taking over large swaths of Iraq. But he would have us believe the murder of two Americans was enough to persuade him to support a war—enough to outweigh the risk of the United States becoming “Iran’s air force.” Reason’s Jacob Sullum highlighted the problems with this case for war: “Since American journalists, students, businessmen, and diplomats live and work in nearly every country on Earth, this strikes me as a dangerously open-ended rationale for military intervention.” 

A more plausible explanation of Paul’s shifting views is that he, like President Obama, reluctantly followed public opinion, which increasingly demanded something be done about ISIS. As Jack Hunter, a former aide who coauthored Paul’s 2011 book, wrote in 2013: “Some say Rand is not Ron because he is ‘willing to play the game.’ That’s exactly right. That’s the point—to play it, influence it, and win it as much as you can. The neoconservatives certainly do, to their advantage.” 

“The philosophy hasn’t substantively changed [from Ron Paul to Rand Paul],” Hunter concluded. “The methods and style most certainly have.”

Hunter resigned from his post in Paul’s office in 2013 after a report by the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman revealed that Hunter was a neo-Confederate who celebrates the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and regrets that “whites [are] not afforded the same right to celebrate their own cultural identity” as minorities. But Hunter remains loyal to Paul, writing now that the senator has been “entirely consistent” on war against ISIS. 

It’s not clear how much of a price Rand Paul will pay among those who remain staunchly opposed to an American air war in Syria and Iraq. Libertarians and noninterventionists will have no one more dovish than Paul to turn to in the 2016 Republican primaries. But by “playing the game” on matters of war, Paul has opened himself up to potentially devastating attacks that could keep the rest of the GOP from giving him a second look.

John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.