RedState editor and radio host Erick Erickson endorsed Rand Paul’s bid for the Senate in 2010, a campaign he now says couldn’t differ more from the Kentucky senator’s presidential operation.
“The whole thing is embarrassing,” Erickson wrote Thursday in a column for the conservative news site.
“Paul’s strategic choices have been muddled and have all the hallmarks of a candidate micromanaging a campaign staff that will neither stand up to him, nor guide him, but can apparently bully him into a ‘dumb— live stream,'” he added, referring to Paul’s own description of the day-long livestream he hosted Tuesday.
Paul is now profiting off the gaffe, debuting $20 “I watched Rand Paul’s livestream and all I got was this dumb— teeshirt” tops on his campaign website Thursday.
Erikson described the livestream — which quickly evolved into an awkward presentation of Paul speaking to college students and blasting Metallica from inside an SUV — as a “desperate cry for attention” befitting a candidate whose “upward trajectory is only upward in an upside down world.”
“At this point, if Paul stays in, he is staying in as a candidate to subsidize political consultants, which is something Paul ran against in 2010,” Erickson wrote. “He is, in short, becoming the very sort of candidate he fought against in 2010. It is still not clear if he will get on stage in Boulder, CO, at the end of this month given his anemic polling.”
Polling data from RealClearPolitics shows Paul earning around 3 percent in the Republican field — a position he’s mostly maintained since the second Republican presidential debate in mid-September. Paul places tenth in the latest Washington Examiner presidential power rankings.
“About the only thing [Paul] is now doing in the race is serving as a future George Washington University campaign management class hypothetical in how not to run a Presidential campaign,” Erickson wrote.
Channeling his frustration directly at Paul, he added, “This was an interesting run and I am a fan of yours. But your campaign is a bloody embarrassment that needs to be taken out back and put out of its misery.”
“Go home to Kentucky, Senator, and save your Senate seat before Kentucky’s voters take the incompetence of your Presidential campaign as a reflection on you and your Senate campaign,” Erickson wrote.
