A key problem: He and Ted Cruz are competing for the same crowd.
You may have noticed that as the opening move of his new presidential campaign, Sen. Rand Paul seems to have made a conspicuous point of surrounding himself with Republicans that no other Republican wants to be seen with. The pastor who introduced him during Paul's announcement event wasn't even out of the building before
opining to reporters that Obama was probably not really a Christian. In New Hampshire Paul assigned the task to a state senator infamous in his state for
his various creepy shenanigans. In South Carolina the honor fell to once-disgraced, now-a-House-Republican Mark Sanford, better known as the
Appalachian Trail guy, aka the state governor who went missing for nearly a week only to be found at the airport slinking back into the country after a tryst with his secret Argentinian mistress.
So it would seem Rand Paul is making a play for voters who believe all our other political crackpots have gotten a raw deal. If nothing else, he is consistent—collecting campaign crackpots is a Paul family tradition. Catherine Thompson runs down the list, including the now-famous Southern Avenger:
As the “Southern Avenger,” [Paul aide Jack Hunter] wore a wrestling mask printed with the Confederate flag, commended John Wilkes Booth for having his “heart in the right place” in assassinating President Abraham Lincoln, and decried the prospect of a “non-white majority America.”
Paul defended Hunter for weeks, arguing that “he was put up as target practice for people to say he was a racist, and none of that's true.”
And longtime aide Jesse Benton is back in the mix, even after all that
stuff that happened:
Benton resigned from McConnell’s campaign in August, shortly after he was reportedly subpoenaed in connection with a bribery scandal involving former Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-TX) 2012 presidential campaign. Benton was a top aide to the elder Paul’s campaign when an Iowa lawmaker, state Sen. Kent Sorenson (R), switched his endorsement from former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to the Texas congressman. Sorensen later pleaded guilty to selling his allegiance to Paul's team for $73,000.
And then there's Paul's affinity for professional nutcase conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the man who taught Paul all about the Bilderberg Conspiracy
TM, because you can't slake Rand Paul's thirst for knowledge merely by telling him a cow has died in the well.
All right, so Rand Paul has determined that the best path to primary victory is to collect endorsers and advocates that even his fellow Republicans generally steer clear of. This suggests he believes the crackpot contingent to be a sizable chunk of Republican voters, certainly enough to sway the primaries. He's ... not necessarily wrong.