At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson looks at the Rand Paul campaign:
The question before Senator Rand Paul is whether Republican primary voters — and voters in the general electorate, if it should come to that — are in the market for libertarianism by the bushel or measured out with coffee spoons.
For those seeking a general validation of libertarian principle as the guiding light of the Republican party and the conservative movement, there’s no improving on a man called “Rand” who launched his campaign at a hotel called “Galt.” But the fact that there is no improving on him is no guarantee that Senator Paul can count on the enthusiastic support of doctrinaire libertarians, who are a cranky bunch, extraordinarily particular and already grumbling that the gentleman from Kentucky is not ready to go the full Rothbard — or even as far as his cult-figure father did.
There are several reasons for Senator Paul’s moderation — or deviation, as the hardliners would have it, from the pure faith of his father. One is that he is not a crank; another is that he does not want to finish in third place, well behind Rick Santorum; a third is that he can tell a windmill from a marauding giant; a fourth is that he understands that in the context of a democratic republic a leader leads and is led in turn.
When my friend Ramesh Ponnuru writes that the senator seems to be “of two minds” about judicial power — and when similar, more worrisome criticisms are made of Senator Paul’s foreign-policy views — that seems to me correct, but as a purely political matter not necessarily a bad thing. The American public is of two minds about a great many things, too, and has rarely punished a candidate for lack of absolute intellectual consistency. Pandering and flip-flopping? That’s one way to put it. But only the most hopeless sort of ideologue refuses to accommodate the fact that there is a limited real range for effective political action, and that range is defined by what the electorate is willing to accept. There is much to be done, and one can hardly blame Senator Paul for fishing where they’re biting.
