'He’s not really a libertarian economically,' Cuccinelli says of the Libertarian candidate. Libertarian divide on display in Va.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Rand Paul spent Monday touting Ken Cuccinelli’s libertarian bona fides across Virginia.

The Republican candidate for governor brought in the Kentucky senator for three joint appearances aimed both at firing up the base and stopping the bleeding of support to a Libertarian Party candidate ahead of the Nov. 5 election.


Robert Sarvis, persistently pulling around 10 percent in polls, could be a spoiler.

Paul delivered the convocation at the Liberty University convocation Monday morning in Lynchburg, flew here to the coast for an afternoon rally at a Filipino Cultural Center and finished the tour with a get-out-the-vote event in the D.C. suburb of Fairfax.

( PHOTOS: Ken Cuccinelli’s career)

The likely 2016 presidential candidate avoided directly attacking Sarvis in his public speeches, instead praising Cuccinelli for opposing intrusive government surveillance programs and new forms of gun control.

He also highlighted the current Virginia attorney general’s success at exonerating a wrongfully-convicted man and freeing him from jail.

“There’s only one candidate that will defend the Fourth Amendment, that will defend the Sixth Amendment, and it’s Ken Cuccinelli,” said Paul.

Asked after his speech why Cuccinelli is better than the third-party challenger, Paul said he has heard Sarvis wants to create forms of taxation – “which is not a very libertarian idea.”

“I don’t know a lot about his platform,” said Paul. “I like a lot of the things Ken Cuccinelli stands for.”

Cuccinelli essentially ignored Sarvis for months, but trailing Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the high single digits in poll after poll, he’s become more willing to attack directly.

“I am indisputably the strongest liberty candidate ever elected statewide in Virginia in my lifetime,” he now says at almost every event. “It’s not even close.”

He lit into Sarvis after George Will wrote a column last week praising the third-party candidate and suggesting Virginians should vote for him to register dissatisfaction with both parties.

Cuccinelli read a quote to reporters in Richmond Saturday from an interview Sarvis gave Reason Magazine in which he said, “I’m not into the whole Austrian-type strongly libertarian economics.”

“He’s not really a libertarian economically,” Cuccinelli said. “That kind of defines a libertarian to me.”

Sarvis, a 37-year-old former lawyer, ran for state Senate in 2011 as a Republican but has since left the party.

He criticized Paul for not being more outspoken on “the drug war” and has suggested that the senator is helping Cuccinelli to advance Paul’s presidential ambitions.

Sarvis said he is a libertarian much more in the mold of former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, who ran for president last year, than either Paul or his father. Johnson spent two-and-a-half-hours mingling with Sarvis backers at a small-dollar fundraiser in Clarendon Saturday night.

Sarvis has been driving all around the state in his minivan, talking to anyone who will listen.

“There’s still a lot of resentment within the party kind of on the assumption that I prefer the Republican to win, but I don’t,” he said in an interview. “As McAuliffe has opened up a lead, I get emails asking me to drop out. Some of them are conservatives who assume libertarians are closer to conservatives.”

Sarvis said Republicans have been unreliable on economic and social issues, and he sees each of his rivals as fatally flawed.

“There’s very little libertarian influence in the Virginia GOP,” he said. “A lot of moderates have left the party … When moderates leave the party, there’s a tendency to have kind of a runaway effect.”

Indeed, Paul does not necessarily appeal to the sorts of libertarians backing Sarvis.

A major element of the Sarvis pitch is that Cuccinelli is too extreme and outspoken on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, an impression that McAuliffe has helped foster with millions in attack ads.

Sarvis believes government should not restrict abortion.

“We disagree at the metaphysical level,” he said at a governor’s candidate forum over the weekend. “Because we are in such disagreement, it’s not an appropriate role to use state coercive power to settle the matter. So, as governor, I would not seek to change the law.”

Paul proposed a Constitutional amendment this March to define human life as beginning at the moment of conception. He supports exceptions when the life of the mother is at risk.

“I believe in a very limited government, but government does have a role in protecting individuals from violence against other individuals,” he said here. “Once life begins, I think everybody believes that the state has a role in protecting you from committing violence against another individual.”

Cuccinelli’s support for another “personhood” proposal gives McAuliffe fodder to claim in his ads that the Republican wants to outlaw common forms of birth control.

The Democratic Governors Association bracketed Paul’s visit by calling him a “partner for personhood” with Cuccinelli. The Democratic Party of Virginia piled on.

“The fact that any of y’all let the other side get away with saying we want to ban birth control is just ridiculous,” Paul told reporters. “And the fact that that can run on TV, and that can influence elections, really disturbs me.”