Rand Paul's totally conventional, government-bashing campaign for president

You ever get the feeling the whole world is colluding to perpetuate a fraud?

You can see it happening right now around the just-announced presidential candidacy of Republican Sen. Rand Paul. It seems that everyone — including the candidate himself, the narrative-hungry reporters covering his nascent campaign, and his antagonists in his own party — has a stake in portraying him as some newfangled Republican poised to move the GOP in a super-duper innovative direction.

There's just one teeny-tiny problem: It isn't true.

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For one thing, as others have pointed out, an awful lot of Paul's policy proposals are about as fresh as the just-unearthed contents of a time capsule buried in the fall of 1994. A balanced-budget amendment. Term limits. School choice. It's all very Contract with America.

But that's not the half of it.

The overriding theme of Paul's campaign-launch speech was that government has gotten too big and needs to be restrained, limited, cut back, both at home and abroad.

Now I'll give Paul this: It's refreshing to hear a Republican consistently apply skepticism about government to foreign as well as domestic policy. If only more Republicans (and their cheerleaders) were similarly consistent. (Though it's also true that candidate Paul sounds much less skeptical in this area than he once did, and certainly less so than his father, Ron Paul, who's long flirted with outright isolationism.)

But wait a minute. Hasn't Rand's overall critique of the government been pretty much the message of every Republican since Ronald Reagan? Government, bad. Less government, good. Sure, Paul would expand a bit on the anti-statism — a tad on foreign affairs and maybe a tad more when it comes to domestic surveillance. But is that really so pathbreaking?

To me it makes him look like every other Republican, only a little more so.

But here's what makes Rand Paul not only very conventional, but also very unlikely to gain much headway in his campaign for the presidency: Saying that America's biggest problem in 2015 is "too much government" is absurd, the product of an ideologically addled mind.

I know there is a faction of the Republican Party that will swoon at denunciations of government at all times and in all places — when unemployment's high and when it's low, when inflation is up and when it's down, when wages are surging and when they're stagnating, when the deficit is spiking and when it's receding. But the fact is that most people, most Americans, aren't like that. Not even close.

Most people wake up in the morning, get their kids to (public) school, and then go to work. They do what's expected of them and then go home, maybe stopping at the grocery store along the way. They collect a paycheck, buy gas, pay bills, and go about their business, with friends and family and chores and joys and drudgery. And through most of it, government never comes up, never gets in the way, never makes much of an appearance. Sure, it takes a piece of that paycheck, it makes the gas a little more expensive, it adds a few percentage points to the price of the groceries. But it also takes responsibility for the roads and the schools and the national defense and maybe a part of the health insurance and the benefits that come in the mail if you're disabled or retired. Yes, at times it can be a pain in the ass, like anything. But most of the time, it's just there in the background while you live your life.

Think about the things that bring you down, that make your life hard. A jerky boss. Making ends meet. A fight with your spouse. A kid getting into trouble. Monday doldrums. Bad weather. Illness. How much of this has to do with Washington? Who goes around grumbling about how "the government" is the source of their problems? Maybe an occasional person being audited unjustly by the IRS, or contending with a bureaucratic snafu about a benefit check, or a rare victim of a regulatory "taking." Those cases stink. But that isn't what Rand Paul is talking about. He, like every Republican in the past 35 years, means The Government in general.

(Of course African Americans getting shot in the back by lawless cops have a singularly pressing problem with The Government, and Paul has made some rhetorical gestures toward trying to appeal to them. But the trouble is that it's nearly always local authorities who are the perpetrators of these fatal abuses of power, and often the federal government that must be brought in to assure that justice is done and reforms undertaken. That places Paul's race-focused criminal justice agenda on a collision course with his anti-government stance on every other issue.)

On the one hand, Paul and his fellow Republicans want us to think the government doesn't matter at all — that what matters is the hard work, virtue, faith, and ingenuity of the American people. Just get the government off our backs and a thousand flowers will promptly bloom, each spouting petals made of dollar bills for each and every hard-working American to pluck, spend, and invest.

But on the other hand, they want us to believe that the government matters an enormous amount, messing up our lives, riding our backs, grinding us under its boot heel. In the immortal words of Reagan the Great, which Paul predictably paraphrased (without attribution) in his own campaign launch, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Actually, I don't think the government has played an especially significant part in making me who I am, in my accomplishments or setbacks — and I suspect most Americans feel the same way.

Which just might mean that government is neither the solution to nor the source of our problems.

Imagine a Republican who agreed with that sentiment — who didn't just bang on about taxes and complain about how wonderful everything would be if not for Washington, but who instead listed some things the government does well, some things it does poorly, some things it should do better, and some things it could do to make some of our lives just a little bit easier as we go about the largely non-government-related business of our lives.

The Republican Party desperately needs to move beyond anachronistic anti-government bromides and clichés — and Rand Paul's oh-so-conventional presidential campaign isn't going to do a single thing to make it happen.