It was the first time in recent memory that the Iowa GOP Lincoln Day Dinner sold out nearly two weeks in advance, and it was on the strength of its headliner, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who, in turn, was invited on the strength of his 13-hour filibuster against the Obama administration’s use of drones. During the happy hour at a small Cedar Rapids hotel, local donors stood in line to have their pictures taken with Paul, almost completely ignoring their own congressmen, Representative Steve King and Senator Chuck Grassley. They had come to see Paul, and he got a standing ovation before he even started talking.

Paul began in stand-up mode, describing a recent trip to New York in which he had driven by the Federal Reserve—the crowd booed on cue—to find it blocked by police cars. “We go up to the police, and we ask what’s going on, and they say the Federal Reserve has been robbed. And we said, really?!” Paul said, his voice nearly cracking in mock disbelief. “They said, ‘Yeah, but we caught the thieves. They got in front of the safe, they had the big safe open, but they were perplexed. They were flummoxed. They didn’t know what to do with minus sixteen trillion dollars!’ ”





The audience roared—which was to be expected, since they were, as Paul himself joked, “an easy crowd.” His father, Ron Paul, the libertarian Quixote, who famously preached a return to the gold standard and wrote a book called End the Fed, had come in third in the state’s presidential caucuses last year. Rand’s timing, too, was fortuitous: That day, the attendees were buzzing about the news that the IRS had apologized for picking on the kinds of conservative grassroots groups that make up the Paul family base.

In fact, in the months since Rand Paul’s blockbuster filibuster, the news cycle has handed him gift after gift after gift. Not long after the IRS revelations came the Department of Justice’s aggressive pursuit of national security leaks to the Associated Press. Then news broke that the National Security Agency was dredging up massive amounts of telephone data from millions of Americans on a daily basis. Paul quickly threatened to bring a class action lawsuit against the agency. This is a moment tailored for Rand Paul, more than for Marco Rubio or Chris Christie, or anyone else in the potential Republican 2016 lineup.





And yet, in Iowa, Paul wasn’t completely content with easy applause. He didn’t even mention the IRS. What he really wanted to talk about, he told the crowd, “is immigration.” Earlier, King and Grassley had sounded defiant, nativist tones, condemning the moderate legislation suggested by the Senate’s Gang of Eight. Paul, however, voiced his disagreement and laid out his own proposals to reform work visas, secure the border, and legalize the migrants that are already here. The room grew noticeably quieter. “I also think that, as a party, we need to grow bigger,” he said to an audience that was entirely white, save for a lone Sudanese immigrant. “We’re an increasingly diverse nation, and I think we do need to reach out to other people that don’t look like us, don’t wear the same clothes, that aren’t exactly who we are.” The GOP, he said, needed to be more respectful. By this point, the crowd was silent.