Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine and author of the book Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired (Broadside/HarperCollins).

To prove that Sen. Rand Paul is not his father, all you need to do is look at ethanol. Rand Paul would not be where he is without the machinery of fans and financing that his father Ron Paul built, and the libertarian ideology that excited them. That legacy is also the weight Rand Paul balances as he walks so many fine lines of policy and rhetoric. Steve Grubbs, running Paul’s Iowa operation this year, says Paul “believes that it’s important to believe the right things but it’s equally important to act on and have success with those beliefs.”

In a country that is by no means majority libertarian, that means Paul can’t be everything that his strongly anti-government fans might want. Paul has himself used the term libertarian as an adjective describing his Republicanism, as a mere one influence among many on his thought, and in an interview with me last year as more or less an albatross around his neck, as reporters will frequently try to force him to defend or explain the wildest edges of libertarian thought.


Which is why Paul, along with Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, introduced a bill this month called the Fuel Choice and Deregulation Act. On the surface, it fits with Paul’s free-market libertarian image—taken alone, it knocks down a regulatory barrier, allowing fuel blends up to 15 percent ethanol to be used where they are now prohibited. But like a lot of Paul’s recent policy proposals, foreign and domestic, it’s a little more complicated than it first appears.

One long-term libertarian policy expert and opponent of ethanol mandates complains that, since it does nothing to end the underlying mandate, it continues to allow ethanol producers to succeed with a fuel that would likely have no real traction in an unfettered market. It seems clearly introduced because he’s running for president and needs to win Iowa. It’s not the legislation of a party leader trying to reform the GOP.

But it gives a candidate who has been loudly anti-ethanol mandates and subsidies a way to say he’s trying to do something for the Iowan corn farmer—something that he can also arguably say is a free-market reform. The bill is symbolic of Paul’s difficult political position as he launches his presidential run. His deviations from Republican orthodoxy have marked him as the most-laudedly “interesting” candidate, but he needs to appeal to traditional Republican constituencies—while not seeming too radical for mass appeal.

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Everyone on the Paul team, and non-team observers on the ground in early states, agree that, despite scattered early defections, the vast majority of the “Ron Paul vote” is indeed still there for Rand Paul to build on. His campaign crows that he’s the leading Republican in one-on-one polling against likely Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton—at 41.8 percent—though he’s still losing in most states. They know the parts of Paul that distinguish him from other Republicans are what have elevated him above his Republican opponents when facing Hillary. What’s succeeding is the cool, interesting, youth appeal Paul who stands up for what one might call the nicer ends of libertarianism, the parts that involve making the government stop doing bad things, like spying, drone-killing on presidential command, and ruining, disproportionately, the lives of poor minorities with drug law enforcement and sentencing.

But the full weight of his libertarian background, his father’s legacy, and his own attempts to hew at least in principle to a consistent ideology, while appealing to a non-ideological mass of voters, will likely prove tricky to navigate. That such a dilemma even exists is something campaign advisors specializing in early states Iowa, New Hampshire and on the sensitive foreign policy beat didn’t acknowledge head-on in interviews this week.

Mike Biundo is a senior advisor to the campaign and chief strategist in Paul’s New Hampshire operation. He was Rick Santorum’s campaign manager in 2012, and, from his wide-angle perspective on varied GOP tribes, he argues that “Rand is able to grab from a cross section of the [Party] demographic and expand even beyond that” in a state where independents can vote in the Republican primary.

Biundo thinks all sorts of Republicans and non-Republicans will be attracted to the basic Paul message. “Going directly after the Washington machine, with issues like term limits and the balanced budget amendment, those resonate across the Party, and talking about the middle class and working families” goes even further.

Paul is openly running on the claim to be a “different” Republican. Biundo says that’s not meant to imply the Party is fatally flawed or that Rand has nothing in common with it. It’s “not about changing the message,” Biundo says, “but about being able to take it to different parts of the electorate and talk directly to them, and get them understanding that it’s OK to vote Republican.” Paul has offered combinations of both standard free-market thinking—tax and regulation-light enterprise zones for distressed areas, personal tax cuts—and a more distinctly libertarian vision of drug and criminal justice reform.

With drugs, as with ethanol, he walks a line: for reform, saying boldly on Bill Maher’s HBO show last year, “I'll do everything to end the war on drugs.” But he’s settled for now on a federalist line about states’ abilities to go their own way on drug policy, and assuages evangelicals with the assurance he believes drug use is a bad thing, and isn’t moving to end the federal drug war except against pot in states that have legalized it.

On gay marriage Paul has similarly tried to appease libertarians by not calling for federal interference with the practice, while assuring evangelicals he is personally troubled by it. Like with many of his moves, it makes sense and is principled in its way, but runs the political risk of disappointing passionate voters on both sides.

Doug Wead, a Republican Party worker dating back to Reagan and former aide and writer for the Bushes, is a “friend of the candidate” who speaks on the Paul campaign’s relations with evangelicals. Wead insists that when Paul says things that might appeal to them, he’s never pandering, but speaking from “who he is.”

Younger evangelicals, he says, resonate with Paul’s constitutional federalism, the idea that trying to win values battles in D.C. isn’t the right way to go. Older evangelical leaders in Iowa and elsewhere, he claims, frequently “have kids who are Rand fans.”

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Whereas Paul told me back in 2013 that he hoped to make “audit the Pentagon” as popular a rallying cry as his father Ron Paul did “audit the Fed,” he’s now proposing $190 billion in spending increases for defense over two years, but claims fiscal conservative bonafides regardless since the proposal comes with accompanying cuts elsewhere.

Paul used to be very forceful in distinguishing his vision of American power abroad from the “neoconservative” one that tried to gin up constant war in the Middle East. Now he’s definitely for using force against ISIL and signed the Tom Cotton letter clearly intended to scotch negotiations over keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons. That decision lost Paul some prominent supporters from the anti-empire crowd that flocked to his father, but Paul said at an appearance at the SXSW festival that it was more complicated than it might seem: he was not trying to end negotiations; “The message was to President Obama that we want you to obey the law, we want you to understand the separation of powers.”

Rand’s non-interventionism has evolved into something that seems more about process than content, always strong on congressional authority in war making, but softer on when and where such force might be appropriate. Still, foreign policy advisor Elise Jordan says that Paul’s “conservative realism” is mindful of the physician’s imperative that our foreign policy moving forward should “do no harm,” takes into account the security risks of overspending ourselves into bankruptcy and sees a positive virtue in not declaring ideological pre-commitments regarding questions like: should we or should we not definitely commit to using all necessary force to keep Iran from getting a bomb? But Paul still can’t escape having a wide variety of Party activists see him as a reflexive non-interventionist.

When it comes to foreign aid, he’s walking the line the opposite way, stressing content when his libertarian fans might prefer he stick to being against the process in general. He used to be for ending all foreign aid as a matter of principle; lately his anti-foreign aid proposals are more specifically aimed at regimes that persecute Christians or, in the case of the Palestinians, attack Israelis.

Consistency of principled message is a virtue more than one Paul campaign advisor tout as among his strongest, but there is no political benefit from libertarian individualist philosophy on matters like free association (no wonder he avoided the media scrum over Indiana and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act last week). He learned his lesson from being slammed after discussing on Rachel Maddow’s show in 2010 whether consistent belief in freedom of association might make aspects of the Civil Rights Act questionable. When old video surfaced of him defending a libertarian vision of rights as inherent in individuals and not about status or specific behaviors we choose, Buzzfeed made hay of Paul not believing in “gay rights.” Campaign message discipline moving forward won’t be enough; everything Paul ever said in front of a camera or tape recorder will be made part of the campaign by his opponents on both sides.

Libertarians know what it’s like living in a world where your basic understanding of how the world should work is considered loony, and they kind of like it when they see that side of Paul. Ron Paul was loved as intensely as he was by so many fans for being that willing to let everyone else think he is crazy.

But Rand Paul and his campaign clearly see no percentage in being a heroic martyr for libertarian radicalism. The Rand Paul Show from now on will continue to be a dangerous balancing act between being different, interesting, consistent, principled and appealing to a majority of Americans. It’s dangerous because if you’ve given that majority a clue, and Rand has given many, that your principles might be too outré for them, they are not apt to trust you no matter how far you try to walk in their direction. At the same time, trust won from those who adore what they took to be your principles can be all too easily lost.