Try as they might, the gracious members of the Fayette County Republican Party cannot coax Rand Paul into their tent. It's a humid summer evening, and they are holding their annual picnic on the lawn of a forty-two-acre estate in the heart of Kentucky's horse country. The men sport polo shirts and khakis, the women sundresses and pearls. They sip iced teas and lemonade and circulate beneath a giant white party tent that's been pitched against the ominous gray clouds rolling in. The whole thing feels less like a political event than a Junior League benefit or some sort of luxury-real-estate open house—which it may well be, considering the picnic's hosts are currently trying to sell their place for $4.5 million.

This year, though, things are a little different from the past. The Republicans of Fayette County have been forced to go a bit down-market, not because of the lingering recession but to accommodate Paul and the band of Tea Partiers who swept him through the primaries and completely upended the way politics has been practiced here for generations. So tonight's menu features barbecue rather than filet mignon. And the silent auction includes Tea Party–friendly fare such as a DON'T TREAD ON ME T-shirt and Glenn Beck's new thriller novel, alongside the glass elephants and Callaway golf gear. And of course, there's Paul himself, tonight's headline speaker, who until very recently was dismissed by many in the GOP establishment as "too kooky for Kentucky."

It's time for dinner, and the Fayette County GOP chairwoman, Carol Rogers, approaches me. "I just wanted to point out that all of our candidates are serving the food tonight," she says. All, that is, except for Paul. He's standing apart from the crowd, his Timberlake-esque curls getting damp in the light drizzle that has started to fall. When Paul arrived an hour earlier, his aide told the ladies at the registration table that the candidate wouldn't be wearing the name tag they'd printed out for him. I noticed a little later that he'd relented and stuck the tag above his breast pocket, but now, strangely, it has somehow migrated to the back of his pant leg.

Paul has often refused to do the things expected of Kentucky politicians: the backslapping, the ring kissing, the traditional Derby picks (Paul's campaign said he was rooting for a "trifecta of a balanced budget, term limits, and a strong national defense"). "I don't think he even knows the words to 'My Old Kentucky Home,' " one prominent Republican griped to me. "I mean, I'm sure he knows the refrain, but you probably know the refrain." Until he decided to run for Senate last year, Paul wasn't even a politician but rather an ophthalmologist. If Bill Clinton is famous for looking people in the eye and making them feel like the only person in the room, Paul gives the impression he's checking for cataracts.

After a few more minutes in the rain, he comes inside the tent and waits to be introduced to the crowd. When it's finally his turn to speak, Paul, standing well under six feet, adjusts the microphone so that it's no longer pointing at his forehead and begins ticking off the litany of Republican talking points: no to cap-and-trade, yes to extending the Bush tax cuts, no to Obamacare.

But Paul, who prides himself on delivering his remarks without notes, makes plenty of departures from the GOP script. He doesn't so much give a speech as deliver a lecture, filled with digressions characterized by a slight air of condescension. He recites Emily Dickinson (Fame is a bee. / It has a song— / It has a sting— / Ah, too, it has a wing) and indulges himself in a dry tangent about the Ninth Amendment and the protection of rights not mentioned in the Constitution. The crowd is mostly silent and a little glazed for large stretches of the speech, but all that changes when Paul gears up for his big finish. "People try to paint the Tea Party and they say, 'Oh, the Tea Party is extreme.' I respond right back to them, 'What is extreme is a $2 trillion deficit!' They want to say the Tea Party is something that it's not. You see them condemning; you see what they tried to do to me after the election. They want to make us out to be something that we're not. But we're going to keep saying what we're about!" The audience comes to life, giving Paul his loudest applause of the night, but he doesn't stay around to soak it up. By the time the next speech is under way, Paul's already on the road, leaving the Tea Partiers and the country-club folk behind.