Ron Paul’s career in electoral politics ended exactly the way it should have: with an impressive and fiercely independent Republican primary campaign; half a year on the sidelines while everybody else talked about the general election; and then, on Wednesday, a farewell speech on the floor of Congress, which lasted forty-eight minutes and comprised about seven thousand words. Paul, who is seventy-seven, was first elected in 1976. This year, he didn’t run for reëlection, so, in January, he will be replaced by Randy Weber, a Republican, who won the seat last week. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Weber offered a perfectly noncommittal analysis of what the change would mean: “Ron Paul’s Ron Paul and Randy Weber’s Randy Weber.” True enough. But even Weber might concede that Paul is, in fact, extremely Paulish, and extremely unlike any other major politician.

On the campaign trail this year, Paul didn’t bother to disguise or downplay his various disagreements with the Republican party, which might explain why there seemed to be so little overlap between his passionate supporters and the voters the other Republican candidates were fighting over. During his farewell speech, too, he made little effort to find common ground with the party that has been his home for nearly his entire career. (In 1988, he ran for President as the Libertarian Party nominee.) Instead, Paul criticized the G.O.P. policies that have, he feels, brought the country to crisis: “Warfare and welfare, deficits, inflationism and corporatism, bailouts and authoritarianism.” He also posed thirty-three questions, addressing his many areas of concern. These were the first six topics: marijuana, raw milk, hemp, gold, gold, gold.

In the months after Romney secured the Republican nomination, the Paul campaign became increasingly surreal: his supporters vowed to stay and fight, while the candidate himself seemed happy to disappear. In May, he announced that he was suspending his campaign—sort of. He didn’t try to convince his supporters to vote for Romney, but he also declined to campaign for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate. In some ways, Johnson seems like a less quirky, more placable version of Paul: he shares Paul’s disdain for welfare and warfare, but not, for example, Paul’s abiding passion for gold. This wasn’t necessarily an advantage: Johnson’s campaign never inspired much grassroots excitement. He earned nearly one per cent of the vote last week, a strong showing for a Libertarian Party candidate, but not compared to Paul’s primary performance—Paul sometimes drew support in the double digits, and he had by far the most fervent supporters of any candidate in the field.

In Tampa, the weekend before the Republican Convention, Paul kept his distance from Paul Festival, a pro-Ron Paul rally. (The “Paul” in Paul Festival also stood for “People Awakening and Uniting for Liberty”; the big speaker this year was Johnson.) During the convention, Paul’s supporters staged an insurrection, briefly interrupting the proceedings, but the candidate himself kept a lower profile: he didn’t address the convention, although he did make a brief, unannounced appearance on the convention hall. He looked happy and relaxed, perhaps because he was one of the only politicians in town who didn’t much care about the Presidential election. During Paul’s farewell speech, he sounded an ambivalent note about the value of politics. “The number one responsibility for each of us is to change ourselves, with hope that others will follow,” he said. “This is of greater importance than working on changing the government.”

But even in retirement, Paul will continue to take an interest in politics, if only because his son, Rand, is a senator. Come January, Rand Paul will be the only Paul in Washington—although, as Weber might put it, Ron’s Ron and Rand’s Rand; their agendas aren’t identical. Unlike his father, Rand Paul was allowed to deliver a speech at the Republican Convention in Tampa. And unlike his father, Rand Paul has an easy time finding common ground with his fellow-Republicans. He began by criticizing Obamacare (“I still think it’s unconstitutional,” he said), and he ended by endorsing Romney, calling him, “Someone who will lead our party, and our nation, forward.” Somewhere in between came his lone controversial line: “Republicans must acknowledge that not every dollar spent on the military is necessary or well-spent.”

But this week, as his father says goodbye, Rand Paul is making it easier for voters to see him as his father’s son. Earlier this week, in the wake of the Democrats’ strong electoral performance, Rand Paul gave an interview to Politico, in which he voiced his support for a program to grant legal (but non-citizen) status to many or most unauthorized immigrants, a reduction in military intervention abroad, and the reform of marijuana laws. And yesterday, Roll Call reported that Rand Paul was blocking a defense authorization bill in hopes of adding an amendment requiring “a jury trial for Americans detained in terrorism investigations.” It all sounded more than a little bit Paulish.

Read Kelefa Sanneh on the Paul campaign.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.