Rand Paul Rides Tide Of Anti-Washington Sentiment.

Rand Paul rides tide of anti-Washington sentiment
By Andrew Wolfson

As a leader of the Young Conservatives of Texas in the early 1980s, Rand Paul railed against the Equal Rights Amendment and the notion of equal pay for equal work.

“Since when have any two people been equal?” he asked in a letter to the editor of Baylor University's campus newspaper.

At the same time, Paul cavorted with a Baylor secret society known as the NoZe Brotherhood, which had been kicked off campus a few years earlier for conduct the school's president called “lewd, crude and grossly sacrilegious.”

“We aspired to blasphemy,” said John Green, one of two alumni who confirmed Paul's membership, “and he flourished in it.”

The Bowling Green ophthalmologist and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Kentucky has always been somewhat of a rebel — and a staunch defender of his beliefs — friends and family say.

His mother, Carol Paul, said in an interview that when her son didn't like how he had been graded on a junior high geometry test in his home town of Lake Jackson, Texas, he walked into the principal's office and switched classes.

And although his former pastor, John Michael Klickman, said he doesn't remember it, Paul told a convention of Christian home-schoolers in June that when he was 17, he stood up in St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in his home town of Lake Jackson, Texas, where he and his four siblings were confirmed and announced that the congregation wasn't doing enough to stop abortion.

That tendency to speak his mind initially seemed as though it might jeopardize Paul’s candidacy as he sought to fill the seat opened by the retirement of Sen. Jim Bunning.

He was vilified, for example, for insisting that private business owners should have the right to discriminate, ridiculed for calling President Barack Obama's criticism of BP “un-American,” and mocked for creating his own board of ophthalmology, then appointing himself, his wife and father-in-law to run it.

“The board meets on Thanksgiving and last year they unanimously approved a motion to pass the yams,” Stephen Colbert quipped on his faux-news show, the Colbert Report.

Yet, Paul has never trailed Conway in The Courier-Journal/WHAS Bluegrass poll and now has a better than even shot of beating opponent Democrat Jack Conway, according to the most one. He also has the support of Kentucky's senior Republican senator, Mitch McConnell, who has campaigned with him in the general election, after siding with Paul's opponent, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, in the primary.

McConnell said in an interview Friday that he talks with Paul several times a week about the campaign.

“I think he is a very smart guy who is concentrating on the biggest issues — that this country is spending too much and Washington is taking over too much of society,” said McConnell, who met Paul for the first time earlier this year.

Republicans and Democrats alike say Paul has offered the right message — limited government — at an opportune time, when Washington is viewed as failing.

That anti-establishment message has resonated with voters, says University of Kentucky political science Professor Ernest Yanarella. And the message is drowning out questions about whether libertarian views on Medicare, Social Security and defense are “Too Kooky for Kentucky,” as one GOP county chairman put it on his website during the Republican primary in which Paul trounced Grayson.

When he launched his campaign for Senate last year — his first race for public office — Paul really had no expectation of winning, said Jim Waters, a friend of Paul and vice president of policy and communications for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a conservative think tank based in Bowling Green.

“I think he got in to shake things up and for his ideas to be heard,” Waters said.

But since his surprising primary win, and an initial furor over explosive comments he made about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 before The Courier-Journal editorial board and on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, Paul has grown more cautious about his public comments.

He backed out of a scheduled appearance on Meet the Press a few days after the Maddow show, joining Louis Farrakhan and a Saudi prince as the only people to have canceled on Meet the Press in its 62 years on the air, according to NBC.

He has declined interview requests from most reporters — including for this profile — and has refused to release his campaign schedule. His staff said his father, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, who was famous for never turning down an interview when he ran for president in 2008, also would not talk about him with The Courier-Journal.

And when the candidate was asked by an audience member at the home-schoolers convention in June about the age of the Earth — a question designed to elicit his view on evolution — Paul responded, “I think I'll pass on that one.”
Courting the tea party

On a rainy October night at a fundraiser in Northern Kentucky, Paul addressed about 300 people at a Holiday Inn, a few of whom were dressed in full Revolutionary regalia, including tri-cornered hats.

“Is there anybody here from the tea party?” he asked, to polite applause, before breaking into his stump speech.

Without mentioning Conway by name, or the Democratic party, he said, “Their vision is that the government is everything. Our vision is that the government isn't the answer.”

Paul talked for about five minutes before introducing his father, whose “refusal to compromise,” the son told the audience, “is legendary.” The crowd greeted the elder Paul with rousing applause.

Like his father, who has been dubbed “Dr. No” in Congress for refusing to vote for any legislation unless he believes it is expressly authorized by the Constitution, Rand Paul has said he wants to abolish the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and the Federal Reserve Board.

And like his dad, the younger Paul also opposes the Patriot Act and warrantless searches.

He seemed to also share his father's view that the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional and interferes with the property rights of business owners, until he reversed course after the unfavorable publicity in May and called the act necessary because of “an overriding problem in the South so big that it did require intervention.”

He has broken with his father on other issues — Ron Paul has said the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is abhorrent to the Constitution, but Rand Paul has said “foreign terrorists do not deserve the protections of our Constitution.”

Unlike his father, a physician who refused to accept Medicare payments because he said it was “stolen money,” Rand Paul last spring opposed reducing Medicare payments to doctors and has accepted government reimbursements for patient care in his own practice.

And unlike his father, who supports the right to build a Muslim mosque near Ground Zero in New York, Rand Paul has says it shouldn't be built, despite his support for property rights.

Friends, including Eric Dondero, a former aide to Ron Paul, say Rand's conservative stances are no act.

“He's always been more conservative than his dad,” Dondero said.

Rejecting the Libertarian label, Paul wrote in USA Today in August that he considers himself a “constitutional conservative,” which he defined as “a conservative who actually believes in smaller government and more individual freedom.”

He added, though, that the Libertarian principles “of limited government, self-reliance and respect for the Constitution are embedded within my constitutional conservatism.”

In various live and television appearances, even before his run for office, Paul has called for privatizing Social Security; denounced Medicare as socialism; defended greed as the driving force of capitalism; denounced anti-smoking laws as “Nanny-state” paternalism; and called for volunteer accommodation of the disabled, rather than enforcement of the Americans With Disability Act.

Jim Skaggs, a mainline Republican, contractor and road builder in Bowling Green who is supporting Paul in the race, said “he is a deeply concerned person who means right, but it comes out really awkward at times.”

Rebel with a cause

Who is Rand Paul?

He is serious guy who isn't a “glad-hander,” said Jim Milliman, a conservative lawyer from Louisville and former television commentator.

He is reserved, soft-spoken and calculating, which sometimes can come off as smug “because he's constantly sizing up the situation,” said Dondero.

He has always had an anti-establishment streak, friends and acquaintances say.

In 1993, shortly after Paul moved to Bowling Green to practice medicine, he was one of only two doctors who stood up at a Greenview Regional Hospital staff meeting to denounce a proposal that would have allowed doctors to anonymously report their colleagues for substance abuse and other misconduct, said Dr. Gerald Sullivan, who also opposed the measure.

“He thought it would be unfair to convict somebody without justification,” Sullivan said.

Paul also has said he was standing on principle in 1999, when he incorporated an alternative board to regulate eye doctors in response to an edict by the organization recognized by the American Medical Association. It required younger ophthalmologists like him to get recertified every 10 years, while exempting older physicians, which Paul strongly opposed.

“He doesn't like the arbitrary and unfair use of power,” his campaign director, Jesse Benton, told Politico in June. “It speaks to the kind of person Rand is.”

But Dr. Charles Wilkinson of Baltimore, former chairman of the AMA-recognized group, said in an interview that Paul's end run around it was a “bad idea” and self-serving. “Everybody with a lick of sense wants their doctor to be well informed,” he said.

'The impish ophthalmologist'

Paul stands 5-foot-8 and weighs 140 pounds, according to his driver's license; conservative Courier-Journal columnist John David Dyche has called him “the impish ophthalmologist.”

His father told Time magazine in May that Rand was athletic as a boy but had to work harder to compensate for his size, while his mother said in a recent interview that “size never entered his brain — there wasn't anything he thought he couldn't do.”

Though his father has famously championed individual rights, the son is not named after Ayn Rand — the “Atlas Shrugged” author whose beliefs are espoused by some Libertarians.

Randal Howard Paul was known as “Randy” until his wife, Kelley, shortened it — she said in an interview that she thought it “seemed a bit juvenile for his personality.”

Rand and Kelley met in 1989 at an oyster roast in Atlanta; he was talking to another woman about Dostoyevsky's “Brothers Karamazov” at the time, Kelley said.

He was a surgical intern; she was working in marketing communications. She had been raised in Russellville, Ky., by two registered Democrats, and was a self-avowed liberal, she said, until she saw how much the government was taking from her first paycheck.

They married the next year, and now have three sons, 11, 14 and 17. The Pauls live in an upscale gated community outside of Bowling Green that has its own filtered lake and beach.

Their 3,700-square-foot home, smaller than many in the neighborhood, is assessed at $509,900, and they also own part of a $198,000 condo in Destin, Fla., according to local property assessment records.

Two of their sons attend Bowling Green High School, and the youngest attends a Catholic school.

Rand Paul drives a GMC Yukon XL and also owns a PT Cruiser. He hates shopping for clothes and getting his hair cut, and his curls “are the real thing,” not a perm, she said.

He supports the Second Amendment's right to bear arms, but doesn't have a hunting license or a permit to carry a concealed weapon, according to commercial databases.

Paul, who has said he became a Christian as a teenager, attends The Presbyterian Church in downtown Bowling Green, where Kelley, who was raised a Baptist, is a deacon.

He has been honored by the Bowling Green's Lions Club for running a clinic he founded in 1995 that provides free eye care for the poor; he also gives free eye exams to children at the start of each school year.

But before he jumped into the Senate race, Paul wasn't well known even in Bowling Green — outside Lions Club and medical circles — said Warren County Sheriff Jerry “Peanut” Gaines, who has held that office for 29 years.

“I'm sure he's a good citizen — I just never have seen him,” Gaines said.

Brian Strow, an economics professor at Western Kentucky University, said Paul helped him get elected to the city commission in 2004 after Paul found out he favored “smaller government.”

But Warren County Republican chair Scott Lasley, who also teaches in Western's department of political science, said he didn't know Paul before he launched his Senate race.

Learning at his father's knee

The middle of five children, Paul grew up about 60 miles south of Houston and 12 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico in a planned community built in the 1940s for Dow Chemical Co. workers.

It was designed with meandering streets — with names such as “This Way” and “That Way” — so there would be something of a surprise around each turn.

His oldest brother, Ronnie, now a retired Dow engineer, said the Pauls were a “boring, normal” family where the three boys and two girls were expected to mow the lawn, set the table and feed their succession of pet collies.

Carol Paul said the family ate dinner together every night — with the TV turned off –— and the children were not given an allowance.

“We wanted them to have more than we had, but we didn't want to ruin them,” she said.

Ron Paul told The New York Times in June that he set no rules, befitting a Libertarian — other than “behave yourself and be polite.” Carol Paul said there were no curfews for the children because “we didn't want them racing home and getting in an accident.”

Rand swam on his high school team but wasn't a class officer or involved in any clubs, according to his senior Brazoswood High School yearbook.

Student class president David Oelfke, who now lives in Houston, said Paul was “always smarter than everybody else” but a “pretty humble guy and a really good dude.”

Carol Paul said Rand learned his political philosophy, including his respect for “sound money,” at his father's side. “Ron likes to say, ‘What will money be to us if they ruin it?' and Rand feels the same way,” she said.

Ronnie said it was no surprise that Rand was the first and so far, only child to follow Ron into politics.

In 1974, when he was 11, Rand Paul went door to door for his father's first Congressional race, and 10 years later, when his father unsuccessfully ran against Phil Gramm for the U.S. Senate, Rand stood in and debated Gramm when his father had to fly back to Washington for a vote.

He worked on his father's first presidential campaign in 1988, when Ron Paul ran as a Libertarian, but told WHAS-TV in a joint interview with his father last January that “I've always been a Republican. I registered as a Republican when I was 18” and “went to the Republican convention with my family when I was 13, and we were supporting Ronald Reagan.”

His view that government should play no role in policing bigotry is also nothing new.

At Baylor, in Waco, Texas, he wrote in the campus paper, The Lariat, that while “all must agree that bigoted discrimination is detrimental to the peaceful interaction of different sexes and races in the marketplace,” he went on to ask: “Should we enact laws that say ‘thou shall not be prejudiced?”

“Should we preach in order to bring about change,” he asked, “or should we compel?”

Skaggs said he's worried that Paul may never recover from his comments on civil rights.

“He was trying to express his respect for private property, but it didn't come out right,” he said. “That is not the way Americans think now.”

But David Adams, of Lexington, Paul's former campaign manager, said he emerged stronger after surviving “a firestorm unlike any that a modern political candidate has faced.”

“This race is about making government smaller and stopping Barack Obama,” Adams said. “The strength of that message is overwhelming everything else.”

Editor's note: Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jack Conway was profiled Oct. 10. Read the story here.

Editor's comment: Rand Paul is the REAL thing, and I shall soon be voting for him. I urge you to do the same.