RAND PAUL took to the pages of USA Today to inform us that he's no libertarian. Not that he sees anything wrong with libertarians or their ism, he is at pains to explain; he just wants readers to bear in mind that although he "share[s] many libertarian points of view," he's actually a constitutional conservative. Fair enough. In fact, I suspect that if his name were Rand Smith, or his father were Ron Paul the car salesman rather than Ron Paul the almost-libertarian presidential candidate, he would be more recognisable as the rather garden-variety Republican that he is: that is, in favour of small government and individual rights when it suits him. True, his stance on the Civil Rights Act displays some admirably libertarian leanings. He is uneasy about government intruding in private commerce, as anyone concerned with civil liberties ought to be, and there exists no evidence (at least none that I'm aware of) that Mr Paul was using this stance as a cover for racist beliefs. [It does seem worth noting, though, as a small concession to reality rather than theory that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was deployed to fight not a few small-business owners who preferred not to serve black customers, but a combination of state power and commercial capital to disenfranchise black Americans as thoroughly as possible.] In any case, Mr Paul's main sin here was Robert Bork's: trying to be nuanced and interesting in the wrong venue.

Yet in other venues, Mr Paul seems blissfully untroubled by government interference in private commerce. Between a woman willing to pay for an abortion and a doctor willing to perform one in exchange for money the government must stand firm. And between two people who love each other and wish to marry, there too the government must stand if the genders do not meet with majority approval. Mr Paul says that same-sex marriage ought to be left to the states rather than the federal government, though this seems a bizarre and equivocating position for someone with libertarian leanings to take. Either two people have the right to marry each other or they don't. On economic issues his libertarian instincts rage; on social ones they cringe: hardly an atypical pattern for a Republican (though I do wonder why so many libertarians have made their devil's bargain with the right—sacrificing social concerns for economic ones—rather than the left).

In any event, all of this is academic. Rand Paul may be a little rough around the edges, but Jack Conway, his opponent, is the John Kerry of Kentucky: worthy and dull. Barring something truly unforeseen, Mr Paul will join Mitch McConnell in the Senate next January. And those of us who really are concerned about constitutional liberties will have to hope he is as ardent a defender of the first and fourteenth amendments as he is of the tenth and second.

(Photo credit: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr)