Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.

There’s probably no easier layup in Republican politics, no bigger no-brainer to utter without fear of consequence, than criticizing Vladimir Putin for his actions in Ukraine. Yet Rand Paul couldn’t quite pull it off without taking some friendly fire.

The 52-year-old Kentucky senator, who will announce his outsider candidacy for the GOP nomination this week in Louisville, is a lifelong noninterventionist, but even he couldn’t abide Putin’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, and he joined the GOP chorus calling for retribution. “Putin must be punished,” Rand Paul wrote in a blistering March 2014 op-ed in Time—marking the start of his center-ward shuffle toward the GOP mainstream.


One problem: His 79-year-old father, Ron, didn’t agree and didn’t feel like silencing himself. The three-time presidential candidate, and original source of his son’s credibility among libertarians, has been a frequent guest on Putin-controlled Russian state television, where he has railed against almost every U.S. plan to counter Putin’s aggression—from military aid to diplomatic censure to sanctions.

“I don’t think we have any business there,” Ron Paul said of Ukraine in an interview with Moscow-run RT television at the time—and he’s kept on saying similar things ever since. In February, he said, “I am not pro-Putin, I am not pro-Russia, I am pro-facts,” before going on to say “the Ukraine coup was planned by NATO and EU,” in an echo of the Kremlin’s line and despite the well-documented scenes of thousands of ordinary Ukrainians braving the freezing cold to demand their Russian-backed president step down.

Rand Paul is a singular figure in American politics, whose selection of the Galt House Hotel as his kickoff venue and possibly his choice of nickname (shortened from “Randall”) reflect his admiration of Ayn Rand, the literary godmother of the individualism movement. But his libertarian birthright, the political bedrock of his 2016 bid, owes a lot to his father’s willingness to speak his truth—and sometimes his own version of the truth—to Big Government power. Rand’s 2016 campaign is an expansion, not a hostile takeover, of the family business, a candidacy rooted in his father’s folksy, contrarian campaigns against Washington, Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, the two-party establishment and an alphabet soup of internationalist bogeymen from the IMF to NATO to the U.N.

But Rand Paul wants to rebrand Ron Paul’s libertarianism into a more potent political force and capitalize on its popularity among younger voters. And, unlike his father, he’s willing to compromise to actually get elected president.

Meanwhile, it isn’t clear that Ron Paul, while supportive of his son’s candidacy, is entirely committed to this succession plan. As Rand maneuvers, Ron seems oblivious—or disdainful—of the realpolitik considerations of his son’s campaign and bent on expressing himself at his usual pennywhistle pitch.

“Ron is so crazy, he says all this crazy shit, and he won’t shut up, and it’s damaging his kid. … It’s a terrible situation,” says Michael Goldfarb, a veteran conservative operative and founder of the conservative Washington Free Beacon, which has been critical of the elder Paul. “What is he supposed to do, throw his father under the bus?”

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The dilemma for Rand Paul, however, isn’t merely what Ron Paul has said but also what he might say. | Getty

In a 2016 field crowded with familial entanglements—the Clintons, Bushes, Cruzes—the Pauls might be the most tangled of them all. Ana Navarro, a veteran GOP operative from Florida and a CNN contributor who supports Jeb Bush, says Rand Paul will eventually have to own up to his father’s legacy—just like everybody else in the race with a famous, lightning-rod relative.

“Sure, he’ll have to answer for some of his dad’s rants,” Navarro said. “Scott Walker had to answer for what a staffer wrote on Twitter. Jeb Bush has to deal with questions about 41 and 43 [former presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush] everywhere he goes. Rand’s going to have to respond to some of the good, bad and ugly things said and done by the man who shares his DNA, last name and base of voters.”

A top adviser to one of Paul’s likely primary opponents put the father-son relationship in blunt operational terms. “He’s got to distance himself from Ron if he wants to get out of his cul-de-sac,” the aide told me. “But he’s already underperforming his dad, and he can’t afford to lose a single libertarian vote his father got.”

“He’s in a box,” this aide said. “I feel kind of bad for him.”

The dilemma, however, isn’t merely what Ron Paul has said but also what he might say. In his world, he’s every bit as powerful and ungovernable as Bill Clinton is in his. There’s no keeping him to a script, and nobody’s really trying, not Rand and not the handful of top Rand aides who have also worked for his father—and view the former Texas congressman as a living legend. Rand’s people were exasperated when Ron prematurely predicted his son’s presidential candidacy last November (on Russian TV, of course), but there were no lectures, just Ron-being-Ron sighs of resignation.

Jesse Benton, who has worked as a top adviser for both men and married into the family a few years back, says it’s a mistake to view father and son as a twofer. “Ron is in his lane, and Rand is in his lane,” Benton, who is now working for Rand’s presidential campaign, told me. “They rarely talk about policy. Their personal relationship is much more mundane than you’d think. Mostly, they talk about their kids, and what they are going to do when they get together with their kids.”

There is no estrangement. Father and son remain personally close, aides say, but there is a clearly discernible public distance between the two. It wasn’t clear until the last minute, for example, that Ron Paul would even attend his son’s Louisville campaign kickoff. Rand’s mother, Carol Wells, was always on the guest list, but Ron wouldn’t cancel a paid speech at the University of Minnesota during the week, and the underfunded campaign scrambled to pay for an expensive charter flight to hustle him back in time for his son’s debut.

For his part, Ron Paul has bristled at any suggestion he’s undermining his son’s candidacy. In January, when a Washington Post reporter asked him if his public statements (he had just spoken favorably about Texas seceding from the Union) were unhelpful, the elder Paul slammed the media. “If we had decent reporters, there would never be any problems. You think you could ever meet one?” he asked. “Have a heart, buddy.”

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week, Rand’s brother Robert said the rigors of the campaign would be “a negative for my family” but that Rand is a “better politician” than his father ever was. “My daughter once said, ‘If people would just listen to Granddad, they would vote for him.’ But they don’t listen. Rand can get them to listen to the message.”

But granddad isn’t typically on message. It may not be fair to hold Rand accountable for everything his father has said, but that’s exactly what his opponents plan to do—and there’s no shortage of material. An infamous series of 1970s and 1980s newsletters that Ron Paul sponsored but has since disavowed called Martin Luther King Jr. a “pro-communist philanderer” and labeled Martin Luther King Day “Hate Whitey Day”; later, Paul claimed he needed guns to fend off “the animals” poised to invade his small Texas town. He’s defended “Party of No” Washington gridlock and once said his goal as a congressman was to starve Big Government by “not pass[ing] any new legislation.” Then there was his widely denounced 2011 assertion that the U.S. raid targeting Osama bin Laden was a violation of Pakistan’s national sovereignty and “absolutely not necessary.”

Rand Paul doesn’t overtly disavow any of this, he just tends to assert contrary opinions—and has staked out a unique position in his party on issues important to African-American and urban communities, backing drug sentencing reforms and traveling to all-black colleges and majority-minority cities like Detroit to champion restoration of voting rights to felons at a time when many in his party are pitching new ballot restrictions. And he called on Tea Party favorite Ted Nugent to apologize for calling President Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel” last year, as many in his party remained silent.

In private, Rand almost never confronts his father about the impact of his public statements, even when he disagrees, people close to both men told me, but does debate him on the merits of individual issues, especially foreign policy.

“The joke is that at the Thanksgiving dinner table they throw turkey legs at each other,” says Eric Dondero, who first worked for Ron Paul as a travel aide on his 1988 Libertarian Party presidential campaign, ferrying his boss and college-age son, then known as “Randy,” around in a rented Lincoln Continental.

“Randy is exactly the same person he was 25 to 30 years ago—he was always more of a pro-war, interventionist libertarian than his father was. He hasn’t really changed,” Dondero says. “They were arguing about it during the [1988] campaign. I can remember specifically going to North Carolina when Randy was still at Duke getting his medical degree, and he would be in the back seat, Ron would be in the front seat, and they would be arguing all the way about Reagan and nuclear policy and stuff like that.”

All of Ron Paul’s five children worked on his political campaigns, but Dondero and other aides I interviewed pointed to a paradox. They knew Rand was the one most likely to follow in his father’s political footsteps, but he was also less involved in Ron’s campaigns then his siblings.

Politically, the two men have settled on an arm’s-length relationship in public, appearing sporadically at each other’s events. Dave Adams, the first manager of Rand Paul’s upstart Kentucky Senate campaign in 2010, said he recalled Ron appearing publicly with the son only a few times during the race. The two men, he said, talked only periodically, “every couple of weeks” during the campaign.

“I think there will be a limited role for Ron in terms of Rand positioning himself for the presidency, to be the leader of the free world,” Adams said. “He is his father’s son but, you know, he is now fully into adulthood and he’s running on his own. … There was always a differentiation once we started the Senate race. He would say, ‘I couldn’t do this without my father, but I’m my own man.’”

They remain close (the extended Paul clan spends holidays together at Ron’s house in Jackson, Texas), but Paul the elder won’t be spending a lot of time with his son on the 2016 campaign trail—though aides say he could show up in must-win Iowa, where he drew 21 percent of the vote in 2012.

He might well be needed. Ron Paul’s utterances are likely to be a serious problem should his son make it to a general election—or vice-presidential shortlist. But in the near term, it works the other way around, as Paul jockeys for market position with other Tea Party-tinged candidates, especially Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Many ultra-conservative primary voters in early states like Iowa and South Carolina want him to be more like Ron, not less.

In Iowa, where Rand Paul currently polls in third place with around 10 percent of the potential caucus vote, Cruz operatives have been busy poaching Ron Paul supporters. Jason Schultz, a Republican state senator who has jumped from the Paul camp to Cruz’s campaign, told me he thinks the younger Paul is good but not quite as good as his dad. “I guess my decision is based on one thing: courage,” he said. “I didn’t agree with 100 percent of what [Ron] Paul said, but I respected that the man would stand in front of an audience that didn’t agree with him and tell you what he believed was constitutionally correct. Ted Cruz has that same ability.”

For now, though, Ron is doing his own thing. Jesse Benton and other Paul insiders told me the elder Paul’s absence should be viewed not as a strategic choice but as a reflection of his own commitments and his advancing age (he’ll be 80 on Election Day 2016). Moreover, they simply feel more comfortable talking about things other than politics when they do get together.

When his father showed up in Bowling Green on the eve of the son’s stunning November 2010 Kentucky Senate win, Rand didn’t want to talk strategy—he ushered his old man out to the garage to show him a new bicycle. Both are avid and competitive recreational bikers, and both have developed excruciating pinched-nerve pain in their necks, exacerbated by their favorite exercise. The new recumbent bike would relieve the agony of hunching over handlebars, he told his dad.

Ron, intrigued, examined the thing carefully but decided to keep on riding the way he’d always ridden—and leave the innovation to Rand.