Sam Youngman is a political reporter for the Herald-Leader in Lexington, Ky.

It’s something of a miracle that Keith Richards is still around. The notoriously hard-living guitarist for the legendary Rolling Stones has spent decades spitting in the face of medical science. Some swear he’s found a way to defy death.

And so it is that we confront the equally puzzling case of Rand Paul, who has made a mockery of political science with one career resurrection after another since exploding onto the scene in 2010.


Aqua Buddha? Please. Plagiarism? You gotta do better than that. Racially controversial comments, writings or staff? You’d think so, but no.

Now, with a likely Paul presidential run mere months away, Democrats and Republicans are asking the same question and debating among themselves what will be the political silver bullet that finally brings him down.

For some, there is a die-hard belief that it will be policy inconsistencies that finally stop Kentucky’s Keith. Others, looking at the Bluegrass State’s laws, believe it will be process.

And there is a popular school of thought that the person who will beat Rand Paul is Rand Paul.

***

There are two common threads running among Democrats and Republicans who want to beat Paul. The first is a shared sense of exasperation, the kind of furious disbelief expressed by teenage protagonists after they’ve shot the machete-wielding intruder 78 times and he keeps getting up. The other is a belief that time and attention will finally bring their monster down.

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Conversations about Paul with Republican strategists and insiders follow the same pattern: (1) Paul is doing amazing things to broaden the appeal and resurrect the brand of the Republican Party; (2) he sure knows how to draw attention to the things he wants to talk about, and he’s done a great job of mending fences and establishing new relationships within the establishment; and (3) there’s no way someone with his past views and positions wins the Republican presidential nomination.

Matthew Beynon, a top adviser to former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, was eager to take a crack at the question: How do you beat Rand Paul?

“I would contend there’s not really one silver bullet, but there’s death by a thousand cuts,” Beynon says. “It’s not one issue. It’s a lot of issues.”

Beynon, like other Republicans (and Democrats) I’ve talked to in the past year, believes that, ultimately, Paul is just too far outside the Republican mainstream on foreign and social policy issues, and he is convinced it will catch up with Paul once the race actually gets underway.

As just one example, Beynon says he sees a “high-wire act,” where Paul is constantly at risk of losing his father’s isolationist base, still-powerful holdovers from Ron Paul’s 2012 run, as the son tries to assuage establishment and mainstream Republican concerns about his own foreign policy views.

The combination of increased violence in the Middle East and a debate stage crowded with traditional Republican hawks will crystallize Paul’s weaknesses on foreign policy, Beynon and others believe. Every Republican connected to a likely 2016 candidate that I've talked to identified this as Paul’s primary shortcoming.

Alice Stewart, a senior adviser to former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, says the 2016 Republican nomination fight is going to be about foreign policy, and Paul’s reputation as an isolationist is a “deal breaker.” As she says, “If he hedges anymore, he’s going to lose his base.”

For their part, Democrats are only too eager to help the rest of the Republican Party see what Beynon sees.

On Monday, the Democratic National Committee, which has been joined by American Bridge in fact-checking Paul at every turn for the past year, blasted out a statement on what it said were Paul’s inconsistencies when it comes to congressional authority for battling the Islamic State. Michael Czin, the DNC’s press secretary, told me that he believes it's “clear that he’s his own worst enemy.”

“He continually struggles to reconcile his record and rhetoric with how he wants to be perceived with voters and the media,” Czin says.

The funny thing is that it doesn’t even seem that Paul himself would dispute the characterizations of his tightrope walk; the senator doesn’t really hide or dispute that it has been the secret to his meteoric rise.

Paul can deliver the red meat with the best of butchers, but his strength comes when he is talking about issues that force members of both parties to call him a new kind of Republican.

With surprising moves like his visit to Ferguson, Missouri, Paul earns his biggest applause when he avoids traditionally divisive issues and focuses on issues that only a heartless monster would oppose.

Before he cranked up the partisanship down the homestretch of the campaign trail while stumping in Kentucky for Senator Mitch McConnell, Paul almost always included in his remarks a call for Congress and President Barack Obama to focus on the areas where they do agree.

It might not seem like much, but that’s bold talk in a state where the president is so unpopular that the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, Alison Lundergan Grimes, wouldn’t even admit to voting for him on her way to a 15-point loss to McConnell.

Paul believes that the polling proves that most voters are where he is on these issues and that the more hawkish Republicans sound, the more Paul will be embraced, especially by younger voters who have known nothing but an America at war.

Still, while many Republicans are sincere in their praise for Paul’s strategy and his outreach efforts, the people who want to beat him believe it is unsustainable.

That approach will get you on the cover of Time, the thinking goes, but it won’t go far in Sioux City.

“As Paul flips and twists his way into 2016, there’s just no way for him to square his extreme ideology into anything resembling mainstream appeal,” says American Bridge’s Gwen Rocco. “And if he keeps trying, he’ll only alienate the conservative base he needs to win the primary."

***

Last week, hours before Election Day would deliver control of Capitol Hill to Paul's party, I walked over to the doctor-turned-politician at the Lexington airport.

He was standing, somehow away from the crowd, in a small room in the terminal while McConnell, who was joined by Paul on a fly-around of the state, talked with enthused supporters.

Rand Paul was a prized surrogate on the 2014 campaign trail. | AP Images

The state’s junior senator had just finished a last-day rally with McConnell in which he blasted Obama and both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he was enjoying himself on the eve of an enormous Republican victory.

Paul saw me heading his way and nodded slightly.

“You causing any trouble?” he said.

When I asked the same of him, the senator offered a slight smile and a shrug.

Paul was happy to talk about McConnell and his role in what he thought, correctly, was a coming Republican wave. And when I asked him how long it would be after Tuesday’s election before his enemies started coming after him in earnest, Paul smiled again.

“Everybody in the media has been so nice to me lately,” he said. “I can’t imagine anybody’s going to be mean to me.”

Again, it might not seem like much, but Paul’s joke might serve as evidence that he’s learning to laugh at himself, a necessity at that level in this business.

His critics, though, are betting that his temperament will trip him up if his record doesn’t.

The senator has a habit, maddening to his supporters and allies, of refusing to admit when he is wrong, and Paul’s detractors believe that trait will come out when he is pressed on his policy positions. That, they believe, is what will lead to Paul’s undoing.

Most point to the example of Paul's handling of the controversy that swirled around his former staffer, Jack Hunter, who spoke admiringly of the Confederacy. Paul initially dug in and fought back against the public relations nightmare that threatened to engulf him before ultimately relenting.

But the plagiarism scandal might be the better example.

What started with a segment on Rachel Maddow’s show might have been a two-day story. But Paul went to war, refusing to concede that he had borrowed some language from a Wikipedia description of a science-fiction movie, baiting other reporters who caught the scent and went to work.

Two weeks later, Paul went on Meet the Press and suggested, with a smile, that if dueling weren’t illegal in Kentucky (the state’s constitutional officers promise in their oaths of office never to fight in a duel), he might just be willing to challenge his critics to pistols at dawn.

What followed was more exasperation by supporters and opponents alike.

He had been caught by something that had derailed presidential campaigns before (see Biden, Joe, 1988) and broken every rule of crisis management. Yet he still came away smiling.

But Republicans and Democrats eyeing 2016 saw a greater lesson: Push Paul on his record and hope he unravels as the lights get brighter and the elbows get sharper.

Create some quicksand and watch Paul try to struggle his way to freedom.

“There is thus far no reason to believe he’s going to handle it well,” Beynon says.

***

Kentucky State Auditor Adam Edelen talks about Rand Paul more than any other Democrat in the Bluegrass State. And he’s pretty optimistic about one particularly complicated set of plates Paul has to keep spinning in the next two years.

Over the past year, while Democrats have taken turns teeing off on McConnell, Edelen included both of the state’s senators in his stump speeches as he warmed up the crowd for Democratic Senate candidate Grimes, referring to them as “Senator Out-of-Touch and Senator Out-of-Town.”

Edelen said this week he is not planning to challenge Paul in 2016 (“Unlike Senator Paul, I only run for one job at a time”), but throughout 2014, Democrats watched Grimes run neck and neck with McConnell in the polls. It’s made many believe that Paul’s hold on his Senate seat might be vulnerable in 2016—and might grow more so with every step he takes out on the presidential ledge.

Paul has been adamant about making reelection to the Senate his top priority. Democrats, though, are licking their chops at the two-front war Paul would have to undertake with a presidential campaign. Mixed with a Kentucky state law that prevents a candidate from appearing on the same ballot twice, Paul’s reelection and national ambitions might create a perfect storm that could see him lose not only the Republican presidential nomination but his Senate seat as well.

Edelen acknowledged the day after McConnell routed Grimes that Democrats might be forced to reevaluate the state’s electorate when it comes to federal elections, but he didn’t back off his belief that Paul can be beat.

“I think Rand has a problem,” Edelen says. “I think Mitch McConnell was the big winner [on election night]. I think Rand Paul was the big loser.”

Edelen’s reasoning was rooted in the fact that, despite McConnell’s landslide win, state Democrats managed to keep control of the statehouse, the same Democratically controlled body where legislation that would allow Paul to run for both offices went to die last year after passing the Republican-controlled state senate.

“There’s not going to be legislation that permits him to run for both offices,” Edelen says with a degree of finality.

Paul’s call to move up the state’s primary—running it as a caucus that wouldn’t require his name on a ballot—came out of nowhere last week.

Paul’s challenge is finding that magic route around the Kentucky law without home-state voters getting annoyed and seeing the senator’s efforts as selfish or “too cute by half.”

***

Not long after I moved back to Kentucky in late 2013, I interviewed state Attorney General Jack Conway in his capital office about what lessons he had learned in his loss to Paul in 2010 that might prepare him for a 2015 gubernatorial run.

The conversation quickly turned to the “Aqua Buddha” ad.

The ad, which seized on national news reports about Paul’s college days, questioned why Paul would join a club that allegedly mocked Baylor University’s Christian heritage, kidnapped a woman and forced her to worship a false idol (the Aqua Buddha), and closed by asking: “Why are there so many questions about Rand Paul?”

It blew up spectacularly. Paul denied the accusations, voters perceived the ad as an attack on Paul's faith, Conway’s favorable ratings plummeted and Paul pushed that narrative to a landslide win.

“There was one bad ad,” Conway recalled in the interview, more than two years after his loss to Paul. “Other than the bad ad, I ran a good campaign.”

It was one of many hits meant to wound Paul politically that he turned to his advantage and weathered on his way to a win and the national spotlight.

No doubt that Republicans and Democrats looking to 2016 will have their own ads that are as strong as mule’s breath. They’ll face the same questions about whether or not those approaches will backfire.

The smart money, though, still seems like it should belong on the bet that eventually there’s an ad, a debate or something that Paul has said or done in the past that will knock him off the rails and back down to Earth.

But smart money doesn’t bet against Rand Paul. Not anymore. Not until someone finds the magic formula to bring him down.