You know what America needs? A candidate who will change the way they do business in Washington, bring an outsider's perspective, stand up to all those politicians, and make Washington work for America and not the other way around! I know we need that, because that's what Barack Obama told us we needed before he got elected. So did George W. Bush. So did Bill Clinton. And so does pretty much everybody running for any federal office. Why do we hear this over and over again? Mostly because it's what Americans want to hear. After all, in many ways Washington really is a cesspool of legalized corruption and misplaced priorities. But more importantly, because voters are dumb enough to believe that the candidate making these promises can actually carry them out in a meaningful way.
That isn't to say reform is impossible. But it's always going to be slow and incremental, and the idea that a charismatic leader will just come in and sweep away a whole system is absurd. It's particularly ridiculous when you hear some House candidate saying he wants to change the way they do business in Washington, as though some freshman congressman is going to have a meaningful impact on the way the entire federal government and all the businesses and pressure groups that surround it operate.
But apparently this message still polls well, and Rand Paul is about to announce his outsider presidential campaign to bring change to Washington, under the slogan, "Defeat the Washington machine. Unleash the American dream." And what is his bold and innovative program? "Advisers say Paul's top issues will include a flat tax, IRS reform, term limits, privacy and justice reform." Ooo, a flat tax! You don't say. Let's take a look at Paul's inspiring video:
"Send the career politicians packing!" says the U.S. senator who won his seat almost solely on the basis of being the son of a man who spent 23 years in Congress.
Paul's essential problem is that he's built his political brand on being, as his video says, "a different kind of Republican," yet Republican primary voters don't really want a different kind of Republican. Karen Tumulty and Robert Costa of the Washington Post explore that dilemma in today's paper, noting that as the presidential race approaches Paul has changed some of his more libertarian views to line up with Republican orthodoxy. I wrote that story last August, as it happens. Paul can be the candidate of his father's libertarian acolytes, in which case he'll stick around but won't win the nomination. Or he can be a more traditional Republican, in which case there's nothing much to distinguish him and he probably won't win the nomination.
Perhaps he thinks that a broad anti-Washington message is the way to bring the libertarian and traditional conservative strands together into an appealing synthesis. It might be-if all the other candidates weren't going to be saying exactly the same thing.
