Rand Paul Is Losing His Own Flame War

[n2doc]

It's a bad sign when your campaign is starting to resemble a comments section flame war. Especially when you're doing it wrong. And Rand Paul — the sort of young, sort of hip, sort of libertarian presidential candidate with a campaign that likes to think it's sort of good at the Internet — is doing it wrong.

Paul isn't just screwing up; he's screwing up comprehensively. His attacks on Donald Trump this last week have been an effete shitshow. He's drawing negative attention back on his own campaign, and he's undermining his default brand – that of the semi-cool academic type who can't be bothered with how wrong everyone is. He's coming off as the thirstiest dude in a field of candidates whose thirst baseline already looks like a bunch of guys who got stranded in the desert after going to town on a salt lick.

To really get a sense of Paul's faltering, let's go to the tapes. Forget the one where Paul conveys the sobriety of his campaign by sawing apart the tax code with less seriousness than a Frank Black video. There's another one, released Wednesday, titled, "Rand Paul: Telling It Like It Is" – it features ominous (and old) footage of Donald Trump saying the economy performs better under Democrats, and that he's met Hillary Clinton and thinks she's a nice person. The Paul campaign followed the video up with a statement: "Rand is running to fight the big business, big government establishment. Donald Trump already represents one end of that problem. Now he wants to represent the other."

Paul's ad and response is basically an unforced error layer cake.



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rand-paul-is-losing-his-own-flame-war-20150814#ixzz3iq7EZEzO

[Gothmog]

1. Rand Paul will not be the GOP nominee

He can not keep his daddy's base. Rand is very very weak

[FSogol]

2. astonishment that there's anyone left in Paul's campaign unindicted enough to make ads

The problem is that the academic thing is a lazy pose. Paul's political education, both practical and textual, comes from working on his father's campaigns and absorbing the elder gentlemen's erudition and favorite thinkers. It's easy to be a star pupil in a one-man schoolhouse. And as soon as he's out of it — as soon as he deviates from the curriculum or is challenged by others either not steeped in that environment or wholly indifferent to it — he starts to lose the insouciant intellectual composure of Brand Paul. He flails and becomes petulant. He goes from the Professor Candidate to Professor Ted Mosby.