What’s Rand Paul doing? Well, he’s drawing headlines with his plan to take on the tax code – complete with a meme-worthy publicity stunt: guiding a chainsaw through the reams and reams of regulations stacked up, as Republicans long have agreed, against the American people.

But the bigger picture for the Paul campaign has observers wondering what happened. As BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray noted, everyone from conservative tastemaker Erick Erickson to NBC News has begun to frame Paul’s bid in unflattering terms.

Now the question is whether Paul can recover – and, if he can’t, why not. And the answers ought to change the way Republicans think about the presidency.

The prospect of a flameout among conservatives is especially unsettling – and not just for libertarians, who make up the bulk of his support. “Rand Paul should be doing much better,” wrote Erickson. “He actually has a good story. He actually has positions that set him apart from the GOP field. He has a built in base of support from his father.”

But there’s an ironic problem: money. Republicans rightly argued in the wake of the Citizens United ruling that the Supreme Court’s permissive approach to campaign finance would not hand American politics over to whomever spent the most money. Sure enough, big spenders in 2012 found themselves unable to get more leverage than they’d managed in years before the court’s supposedly dramatic holding.

Yet the first big sign of trouble for Paul was his unexpected unpopularity among big donors. Peter Thiel, who he’d been courting, quietly declined to throw his financial support behind Paul. It soon became clear that Thiel’s hands-off attitude wasn’t a one-off affair.

“Fundraising for Paul has been lackluster,” as the Los Angeles Times reported, “especially because his team has not lassoed a big-dollar donor like the billionaires bankrolling other candidates.”

That, noted the Times, left Paul with $7 million for the quarter that ended on June 30 – versus some $14 million for Cruz and a couple fewer millions for top-tier Floridians Rubio and Bush.

Paul has done fairly well scrambling for grass-roots cash. But he’s had to rely on outside sources to put him within fighting range of the competition. Even there, however, Paul’s fortunes have fallen in the absence of big-donor support. One so-called Super PAC, the Times pointed out, “hoped that his marathon Patriot Act speech would produce a high-value Silicon Valley donor, but one has failed to materialize.”

It’s simple, really. With his mix of libertarian and conservative policy preferences, Paul is too much of a political hybrid to make for a clear bet – even if, on balance, he might seem like an otherwise good bet. There’s too much uncertainty around exactly what the stakes are for a Paul candidacy. Donors know exactly what they’re getting into with Cruz, Rubio, or Bush. Not so with Paul.

That’s not necessarily good or bad. It is what it is. But it is a sharp reminder that the best way to produce a nominee – no matter how he or she might fare in the general election – is by ensuring a competition among candidates with the most crisply discernible ideologies. That’s bad news for Paul (though indicative of why he’s now pivoting back toward his libertarian base). And it’s bad news for those who like nuance and subtlety in their presidential candidates.

But it’s only really bad news for Republicans if they become wrongly convinced that ideologically “pure” presidents must, or should, throw their ideological weight around once in office. Republicans ought to instinctively support a recalibration of American politics wherein presidents become less all-powerful, less domineering, and less of “Dear Leaders.” No president should be a pushover or a cipher. But especially Republican presidents should restore a better balanced separation of powers by growing more deferential toward Congress, state legislatures, and governors.

In this more dispositionally conservative world, the lack of “hybrid” presidents of Paul’s ilk would be considerably offset by an increase in the number and influence of hybrids in the country’s legislatures and statehouses.

In that sense, perhaps it’s wrong to view Paul’s summer “struggles” as a sign that something’s wrong with the GOP. Perhaps Paul’s candidacy is actually doing better than what the current system tends to allow. And perhaps that relatively high performance is best used to keep Paul in Congress – and to draw more like him into its ranks.

Turns out, the GOP might be able to have its idealistic cake and eat it, too, reconciling the return to principle that Paul often channels with the more practical imperative to care more about putting a Republican in the White House than which kind of Republican that happens to be.