Rand Paul Credits Tea Party for GOP Senate Nomination in Kentucky

Introducing her husband, Rand Paul, at the final rally of his insurgent primary campaign for the Kentucky GOP Senate nomination, Kelley Paul declared: "When Rand said last year that he wanted to run, I wasn't too enthusiastic at first. And one of the ways he talked me into it was telling me that he had less than a 10 percent chance of actually winning."

Her reminiscence prompted a burst of laughter from the hometown crowd in Bowling Green. But, actually, the tote board among Kentucky political insiders would have put the odds even lower that the 47-year-old eye surgeon (and the son of 2008 Republican antiwar presidential candidate Ron Paul) could possibly knock off Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson in a primary. As campaign manager David Adams admits, "Rand didn't really know anybody in statewide politics." An article in Politico last August flatly stated, reflecting the political conventional wisdom, "Trey Grayson now looks like the overwhelming favorite to win the GOP nomination against Rand Paul."

But such glib and dismissive assessments did not factor in what the candidate himself calls "the perfect storm." After declaring his candidacy in August on Fox News (an honor given to few long-shot GOP Senate contenders), Paul harnessed his father's national list of campaign donors to out-raise Grayson -- the candidate of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the national Republican establishment -- in 2009. Both candidates ended up spending about $3 million each on the primary.

But Rand Paul had the Tea Party movement. "I couldn't have done this in 2006," Paul told me in an interview as he sat unnoticed Saturday in a Subway sandwich shop. "But 2010 is a unique time because there is an uprising. This Tea Party that I'm part of is big, it's huge. Even with the name recognition and the money I've raised, I still couldn't beat the establishment were it not for the momentum of this movement."

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The fervor of Rand Paul's libertarian views (which are muted compared to those of his father) has sometimes left him politically vulnerable. Instead of beginning his TV campaign with a gauzy biographical spot, Paul's first commercial in February was a defensive ad insisting that he favored trying accused terrorists in military courts. The reason for this peculiar strategy: Paul was trying to counter a video clip that showed him saying some Guantánamo prisoners could be sent back to the battlefields of Afghanistan. Democrats are also certain to pounce on Paul's advocacy of raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 and his opposition to the Bush-era Medicare prescription drug bill.

The sandy-haired Paul, who favors wildly colored dress shirts ("My wife says I'm a mad dresser," he confesses), boasts some beguiling characteristics of a political amateur, such as driving his own SUV to campaign events, accompanied by a lone aide. But he is not a political naïf, as he demonstrated by snagging the endorsements of Sarah Palin and James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, who had originally backed Grayson. In fact, during our interview, Paul recalled with pleasure meeting national political columnists, like Mike Royko and Tom Wicker, when his father was the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 1988. Now that he has won the Kentucky Senate nomination and girds for a high-voltage campaign in the fall, Rand Paul (the eye doctor with big dreams about a downsized federal government) will be blessed with new and better opportunities to meet the national political press corps.