The Rebel

Riding shotgun in a red minivan, his foot propped on the dash, the Republican Party’s man of the moment zips down the back roads of southern Kentucky. Rand Paul is on his way to a meeting with Christian leaders in Somerset, a conservative stronghold where locals couldn’t buy alcohol until last year. It’s his third event in as many hours, and he looks tired; his voice nearly gave out the day before. But social conservatives have rarely enlisted in the libertarian army, and Paul is trying to build a new coalition that can revitalize a deflated GOP.

“A new Republican Party,” he says, “will emerge over the next four years.”

Paul, 50, has won exactly one election in his life, but his sudden star power suggests it may be wise to listen to him now. After a month marked by an audacious 13-hour filibuster and his victory in a conservative straw poll, he has vaulted from quirky rabble rouser to GOP agenda setter. From Iowa to Israel, a man just three years removed from his Bowling Green, Ky., ophthalmology practice is laying the groundwork for a presidential bid, and the party can’t afford to ignore him.

One reason is that Rand Paul is not his father. The libertarian agenda of Ron Paul’s presidential bids drew a following as narrow as it was zealous. The younger Paul seems determined to broaden his father’s base of perhaps 10% to 15% of the GOP electorate and is hunting for new recruits across the political spectrum. That means freshening up his dad’s familiar message and downplaying hoary crusades like the gold standard and auditing the Federal Reserve. It means policy surprises, like his outline of a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants. And it means a stage sense and media savvy his father lacked.

But Rand Paul’s rise hasn’t come without friction. Many party elders doubt the Paul family brand is the solution to their identity crisis. GOP hawks are dismayed by his critiques of Barack Obama’s drone policies, not to mention Paul’s calls to curb foreign aid and shrink the U.S. military’s footprint overseas. His blueprint for balancing the federal budget in five years through massive spending cuts and fewer federal agencies won just 18 GOP Senate votes. When Republican colleagues John McCain and Lindsey Graham tore into Paul for showboating on the Senate floor, they said publicly what others mutter in private.

Paul shrugs off the slights. After two White House defeats in a row, he says, his party needs new blood, and his message of libertarianism and constitutional conservatism can connect with people who don’t see a GOP that speaks to them. And while his dad was never viewed as a viable standard bearer for his party, “I don’t think many people are saying that about me. I think the ideas are becoming more popular, and I think there is a large coalition out there,” he says from the front seat. “But I don’t think people can glibly write off the ideas that we’re talking about anymore.

Taking On a President

Paul’s filibuster was still an idle notion when he sat down to a dinner of lasagna and garlic bread with his former political adviser Jesse Benton at his home in Bowling Green on Feb. 23. An opponent of the Patriot Act and other government intrusions on civil liberties, Paul had asked the Obama Administration to explain its decision to target a U.S. citizen tied to al-Qaeda for assassination in Yemen last year and sought assurance that the President would not use drone strikes against Americans at home. Paul got no satisfactory response. He told Benton he was thinking of holding up Obama’s nomination of counterterrorism official John Brennan to run the CIA in order to make a stand on a constitutional principle: the right to due process.

Benton, who is married to Paul’s niece, is a senior aide to Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican. Would McConnell support the idea? Paul asked. Benton went to his boss, who gave Paul a green light. And so at 11:47 a.m. on March 6, Paul stepped onto the Senate floor for a soliloquy that would stretch past midnight. “I will not sit quietly and let him shred the Constitution,” he fumed.

The spectacle electrified Washington, where Senators often wage invisible filibusters from the comfort of their offices but rarely launch old-fashioned Jimmy Stewart–style talkathons. The hashtag #StandWithRand exploded on Twitter. By midafternoon, fellow Republicans began trickling into the chamber to spell Paul, who was subsisting on candy bars and sips of water, and join what was becoming the most cathartic assault on Obama since the 2012 election. Mark Kirk of Illinois took Paul an apple and a thermos of tea. Ted Cruz of Texas read tweets extolling the stand. (“Glad someone in the Senate has some spine,” read one.) McConnell was watching a basketball game at around 10 p.m. when he flipped to C-SPAN, saw Paul flagging and headed back to the Capitol to make his own floor appearance.

Privately, many Republicans felt that Paul had stoked paranoia over a drone campaign they consider essential to national security. McCain denounced Paul’s suggestion that a person “typing e-mails in a café” might be blasted by a drone as “ridiculous” and groused to the Huffington Post that “it’s always the wacko birds on right and left that get the media megaphone.”

Paul left the Senate floor just before 1 a.m. Brennan was confirmed in a bipartisan vote later that day, but only after Attorney General Eric Holder sent Paul a letter assuring him the President would not kill noncombatant Americans on U.S. soil–a “victory,” as Paul put it, that burnished his sudden celebrity. Even Republicans who don’t share his broader views feted his feistiness. “Nobody in the Republican Party has dared take this President on,” Rush Limbaugh told him. “You did last night, and you’re alive today to talk about it.” Back in Kentucky, Paul milked his new reputation, warming up crowds by quipping that he planned to speak only for 10 or 11 hours. Former McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt declared on Meet the Press that Paul had “arrived as a national figure.”

Riding his momentum, Paul stole the show at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, drawing a standing ovation with a speech blistering the modern GOP as “stale and moss-covered.” Two days later, he won the confab’s closely watched straw poll, edging GOP heartthrob Marco Rubio.

Even as he wows the party’s activist base, Paul is working its Establishment wing. During the 2010 Senate race, the state’s GOP machine rallied behind his primary rival, Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson. But Paul harnessed the Tea Party’s anti-incumbent energy and his father’s fundraising network, steamrolling McConnell’s handpicked candidate by 23 points. Since arriving in Washington, the self-styled outsider has learned to play the inside game. Though in 2010 he hinted he might not even support McConnell as Senate Republican leader, in Washington he has formed an unlikely alliance with the canny cloakroom operator. “You’ve got one who needs to keep the trains running on time and the other whose identity in large part is to make sure the trains don’t run,” says a senior Republican Senate aide. Their symbiotic partnership grants Paul stature and access while conferring Tea Party cred on McConnell, who faces re-election next year.

Some of Paul’s tactical moves have raised hackles in a movement that obsessively patrols for breaches of ideological purity. When he endorsed Mitt Romney, libertarian websites lit up with rage. “Is he able to move more toward the middle and keep the libertarian base?” asks Grayson, now the director of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. “Can he massage some positions or make them more marketable in a way that doesn’t make him seem like a pandering politician?”

Paul’s admirers think so. “The father was a bit of a provocateur. The son is much more political,” says Doug Wead, a family ally and longtime conservative political consultant. “He will know when to be quiet and when to speak up about his views.”

Besides, Paul has new fights up his sleeve. His drone filibuster pleased some liberals, who worry about Big Brother at home. But his next talkathon will not delight them. As Democrats readied a new gun-control package, he–along with fellow Tea Party–aligned Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee–vowed another filibuster that would force Democrats to find 60 votes to pass the legislation when it reaches the floor in a few weeks.

Standing With Rand

Inside the Paddock room at a hotel in Kentucky’s horse country, a pearls-and-blazers crowd is crammed around tables with American-flag centerpieces, waiting to hear its junior Senator. This was the kind of audience that might once have considered Paul kooky, but on a sunny March afternoon they wore STAND WITH RAND buttons and lined up for autographed copies of his political treatise, Government Bullies: How Everyday Americans Are Being Harassed, Abused and Imprisoned by the Feds. Paul entered the room to a hero’s reception. “That historic filibuster encouraged everyone that there’s still a chance to save America,” gushed the woman introducing him.

Though more telegenic than his father, he is still not quite a magnetic figure. At 5 ft. 7 in., clad in light baggy jeans, he cracks corny jokes (“Just a little debt-and- deficit humor”) and shows little interest in small talk, sometimes staring at the floor as a constituent buttonholes him.

Whereas his dad played the outside scold castigating the GOP, Rand assuages fears that his positions clash with party doctrine. To explain his stand on foreign aid, he asks why the U.S. builds bridges in Egypt or Pakistan when our own infrastructure is crumbling. Unlike his father, he backs Iran sanctions and says a robust defense requires some military bases abroad.

He’s certainly marking the stations of the GOP cross: he recently toured Israel with evangelical leaders and party bosses from South Carolina and Iowa. He boasts a new super PAC, an entrenched network in key primary states and an e-mail list more than 2 million strong. And his publicity burst has caught the eye of GOP fundraisers. “Doors are open that weren’t before,” says a strategist close to Paul. “But them flirting isn’t a date to the prom.”

And the faithful seem ready. In rural Kentucky, he was meeting with local business leaders on a factory floor when a property assessor named T.W. Todd remarked on Paul’s improbably quick ascent from underdog to likely presidential candidate. “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet,” Paul replied.

“It’s almost providential,” Todd says later of Paul’s rise. But, he adds, in a sputtering economy, after two wars, it’s time for the rest of the Republican Party to take a fresh look at Paul’s ideas. “Maybe they’re not so crazy after all.”