View From The Ground: Rand Paul Remains An Establishment-Bucking Outsider In KY-SEN Race

KY Senate candidate Rand Paul
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It’s no secret that since Rand Paul became the Republican nominee for Senate in Kentucky, media access has been tough. And so even during my weekend trip to Kentucky’s Fancy Farm political picnic, I was forced to observe Paul from the outside rather than chat one-on-one with the Republican candidate.

Still — I learned a lot just by watching. Paul very obviously remains an outsider who does his own thing, and comes across like a regular guy who simply doesn’t look or talk like a politician. He still seems to be at odds with the local party after a brutal GOP primary. And he just doesn’t seem to be interested in running a traditional campaign — or abiding by local customs.

Let’s break it down.

Paul does his own thing. It’s been months since the non-stop weirdness of Paul’s first week on the general election campaign trail, which led to campaign shakeups in Kentucky and the dispatching of experienced consultants in D.C. to get a handle on things. Still, it’s not like Paul all of a sudden sounds like your normal fluffed-and-polished politician. He speaks in a strange, quiet cadence, sounding more like a professor than a candidate for office. It’s not that his voice gets lost in the room — when Rand Paul talks, people listen — but he comes off like a guy who doesn’t care much about the expected jokes and platitudes found in a political speech. At Fancy Farm, where pols go to fire off well-rehearsed humorous lines, Paul didn’t really play ball. He delivered a pretty standard stump speech that produced a strong response from his supporters but also suggested he didn’t care much for the Fancy Farm traditions.

The Kentucky Republican house is still divided. Republicans on the ground in Kentucky will tell you otherwise, but it’s clear as day that Paul has not healed the wounds in the establishment GOP since the primary. Paul crushed the mainline GOP choice for Senate nominee, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, back in the May primary and even though Grayson was on the trail for Paul this weekend it was clear that his old supporters among the establishment are still playing favorites. When Paul was introduced at the Republican party breakfast on the morning of Fancy Farm, he was greeted with polite but relatively tepid applause from the assembled Republican strategists. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell hinted at Grayson’s potential run for governor in his speech, the crowd went wild.

Paul is happy running a national campaign. Break down the average political stump speech from a Senate candidate and you get: platitude about local political leader hosting the Senate candidate, praise for the area, self-deprecating joke, praise for the state and some partisan red meat. But that’s not how Paul plays it. He barely mentioned Kentucky in either speech I saw him give, other than to say that the state refused to accept the policies of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, who Paul seemed much more interested in discussing.

Paul is a regular guy. He just looks regular — that’s the only way to describe it. Paul’s opponent, Democrat Jack Conway, is a politician of the standard mold — hair that appears to have had attention paid to it, speaks in complete soundbites — while Paul really just comes off as a guy down the street who decided to run for Senate. That’s not true of course: Paul has been on the political scene in Kentucky for more than a decade and has helped his father run for president more than once. But out and about this weekend, I was struck by how average he comes off — when I walked into the GOP breakfast Saturday morning, I just about walked right past Paul before noticing who he was. That was not the case for the other pols in the room, who descended with the normal entourage, along with the usual crowd pointing and waving. It’s unclear how important Paul’s, er, averageness will be in the end — his political views, a mixture of conservatism and intellectual libertarianism, certainly put him well outside the average when it comes to governing. But for voters looking for an outsider to shake things up, you can see why they’re drawn to Paul’s just-like-me feel.

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