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More Than a Flip-Flop

03.20.15

Theyve accused the senator of shape-shifting before, but now theyre positively apoplectic he signed the GOPs Iran letterand one of his biggest defenders says its the last straw.

On a Saturday afternoon in mid-January, Brett H. Pojunis, the chairman of the Nevada Libertarian Party, stood outside his office on Flamingo Road in Las Vegas, ashing a cigarette and dissing Rand Paul. Were the Libertarian Party, he told me, dramatically stretching out the word in his New York accent. Paul, a member of the Republican Party, was in town for a visit ahead of formally launching his bid for the White House, and Pojunis didnt particularly care.

Libertarian, he said, is now just a buzzword for Republicans like the Kentucky senator. If Paul was really so libertarian, Pojunis had some advice for him: Well, OK thenjoin the Libertarian Party!

Pojunis led me inside past some staffers hunched over a computer trying to select a new party logo. Is this too swastika-y? he asked, pointing to an image closely resembling the Nazi insignia. We walked past a room cluttered with memorabilia from Baywatch, the 1990s TV show featuring bikini-clad lifeguards, and Pojunis explained that it was the personal office of Michael Burke, the creator of the show and a possible Libertarian Party candidate. He literally has a key to the Playboy Mansion, Pojunis said.

Anecdotally, when Ive talked to Libertarians who identify as Paul supportersparticularly those who campaigned for his father, former congressman and two-time presidential candidate Ron Paulthey acknowledge the reality that Rand Paul may be the best ambassador to the mainstream political world they will ever get. In other words, the senator is not the ideal libertarian (an oxymoronic phrase, given the amount of infighting among libertarians about what exactly that is), but he comes close enough, and certainly closer than any other likely presidential candidate.

But Pojunis and his aides said those Paul supporters were fools. Libertarians who back Paul, he said, are getting all the downside of compromise and none of the upside.

Two months ago, there was little reason to think that Nevadas Libertarian Party, which is considered slightly off the rails even among fellow libertarians, represented anyone other than its own 12,000 members. But some of Pauls recent foreign policy pronouncements have some libertarians, especially those who gravitated to his father for his steadfast opposition to the war in Iraq and George W. Bushs hyper-hawkishness, sounding like Pojunis and his fellow Nevada radicals.

The breaking point came on March 9, when Paul was faced with one of the most challenging decisions of his political career.

Read more here:
Why Real Libertarians Hate Rand Paul - The Daily Beast