When Rand Paul launches his campaign for President today, in a speech in Louisville, he is unlikely to talk about serving as an Army general or, for that matter, saving the lives of Naval officers in the South Pacific. Nor will he speak of publishing a newspaper, leading one of the nation’s most prestigious universities, or directing the C.I.A. That, of course, is because he's done none of these things; these were the qualifications of candidates in previous Presidential elections. What Rand Paul actually did in the years before 2011, when he took office as the junior senator from Kentucky, was to work as an ophthalmologist and to moonlight, in the off-hours, as an anti-tax activist.
Is this enough to qualify him for the Presidency? Or is that question hopelessly beside the point to the Republican voters who are considering carrying his banner? Whatever Paul’s liabilities might be in the battle for his party’s nomination, his lack of experience does not appear to be one of them. He is, after all, hardly alone; the field is full of neophytes. Other than Jeb Bush, not one of the serious Republican contenders played a meaningful role in our national life before 2010, the year that Paul and Marco Rubio—who will announce his own candidacy next week in Miami—ran for the Senate. Scott Walker was elected governor of Wisconsin that same year. Ted Cruz has been in the Senate only since 2013—though it seems longer, because he hasn’t stopped talking since he got there.
Sifting through these candidates' speeches, one finds few indications of past experience—little use, even, of the past tense. To the extent that they have anything to say about their own lives, it concerns, in most cases, their childhoods. They stress, in practiced fashion, their modest roots. Rubio describes himself as the "son of a bartender and a woman who worked in a hotel." Walker tells audiences that he is the "son of a small-town preacher and a mom who was a part-time secretary." (In the opening passage of his budget address in February, he offered even humbler detail: "Mom was raised on a farm where they didn’t have indoor plumbing.") Cruz, meanwhile, dedicated the first six minutes of his announcement speech last month to stories about his parents’ struggles, and said more about them than he did about himself.
Paul's upbringing, by contrast, is double-edged. His father, Ron Paul, is, of course, an icon of the libertarian right, which confers, on the son, a certain kind of credibility—just not the hard-won, hardscrabble kind that candidates since Andrew Jackson have sought. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, in February, Rand Paul allowed a bit opaquely that "I was born into the America that experiences and believes in opportunity." (If you thought he was from the America that doesn’t believe in opportunity, you were wrong.) He has had little else to say about his life, or life’s work, prior to his decision that it merits his leading the free world. The aptness of ophthalmology as a metaphor for national leadership (“I see a great nation,” as F.D.R. said) remains, at this point, unexploited.
Paul is not the only Republican who appears unsure whether, or how, to talk about his work experience. Ted Cruz has spent almost all of his adult life as a litigator—in private practice and as solicitor general for the state of Texas, from 2003 to 2008. In that role, Cruz helped lead the fight to establish an individual right to bear arms and to defend the constitutionality of a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol. All in all, it is a career that would make him a strong choice for attorney general in somebody else’s Administration, a little lower on the org chart than he’s aiming. Marco Rubio could make something of his career as a state legislator (and stint as House speaker) in Florida, and probably will; it’s the only experience he’s got.
Scott Walker should have a stronger claim of executive experience than Rubio, Cruz, or Paul—governors, as a rule, are expected to decide things and do stuff (which is conduct unbecoming of a United States senator). And Walker does have a standard rap about what he’s accomplished in Wisconsin: mostly that he’s “put the power back in the hands of the hard-working taxpayers” (except the hands that hold union cards). Yet Walker’s attempts to inflate his credentials have only diminished them, comically so. His much-derided comment that battling public-sector unions is good training for fighting terrorists (“If I can take on a hundred thousand protestors, I can do the same across the world”) was a warmup, it turned out, for his also-derided claim that his tenure as a teen-age Eagle Scout led him to “be prepared” for the dispatch of soldiers into battle. There is not, alas, a badge for troop deployment, but there ought to be one for skill at self-parody.
Jeb Bush has plenty of experience, but admits it only under duress. In a Q. & A. session at CPAC, Sean Hannity pressed Bush to talk about his two terms as governor of Florida. “Here’s the record,” Bush answered a bit testily. “And it’s a record that may be hard for people to imagine, because it’s a record of accomplishment, of getting things done.” This is precisely the problem; some of the things Bush got done then or has supported since—immigration reform, Common Core standards—provoke fits in Republican primary voters. Bush’s reluctance to talk about his governorship—paired with his pained ambivalence about his family name—gives his candidacy a feeling of disconnectedness, an emptiness at its core. “It can’t be about the past, can’t be about my mom or dad or brother,” Bush told Hannity. What it can be about remains an open question.
The Republicans’ résumés—Bush’s excepted—are not notably thinner than Barack Obama’s was in 2008. For all his appeal as a candidate, plenty of Democrats did wonder whether a man who’d never run anything but the Harvard Law Review was actually prepared to be President. This was the thrust of Hillary Clinton’s campaign (“ready on Day One”) that year as well as John McCain’s (“I know how the world works”). Obama turned those opponents’ experience against them, rendering each one as a weary embodiment of the status quo. His inexperience underscored the entire rationale of his candidacy—its novelty, the break it represented with the past. Obama calculated, rightly, that he had little to gain by spending another term or two in the Senate.
But as Rand Paul and his peers hasten to point out, none of them is like Obama. The point of gaining experience is not to acquire credentials, or wear different, increasingly impressive hats, or learn how to do things like run a complex organization or operate heavy machinery, but to learn from it—to test ideas and abandon the dumb ones, to evolve, to improve. Some leaders, like Obama, gain that kind of insight by their mid-forties; others never do. The troubling thing about Rand Paul and the other Republican hopefuls is their indifference—indeed, their proud resistance—to the kind of experience that broadens one’s perspective and changes one’s mind. Paul “is exactly the same person he was 25 to 30 years ago,” a former aide to Paul’s father told a reporter on the eve of today’s announcement. “He hasn’t really changed.” Only at a high-school class reunion or in a Republican Presidential primary would that be meant as a compliment.
