Actual campaign video
I'm going to pin about half of this on Donald Trump's status as Republican presidential frontrunner. Trump has taken the race to a brand-new level of pointlessly mean vapidity, leaving all the other candidates struggling to come up with ways to endear themselves to a Republican base that's apparently getting stupider by the day. So what the hell, Rand Paul thinks—you want a circus,
I'll give you a circus.
This might sound like a joke. It’s not – or at least, it’s not intended to be. The Paul campaign actually released this 51-second video today in which the Kentucky Republican is seen setting fire to large stacks of paper, putting the paper through a wood-chipper, and literally using the chainsaw. [...]
Sounding very much like a used-car salesman making a low-budget commercial, the senator tells viewers, “Hey I’m Rand Paul and I’m trying to kill the tax code – all 70,000 pages of it.”
So we've now got one of the nation's supposed greatest and bestest leaders, a man who is bidding for leadership of the free world, as we like to dub the presidential office,
demonstrating his plans for the nation by donning a T-shirt and safety goggles and performing what in Las Vegas would be the prelude to a middlingly successful magic trick. Does the person vying to become president have an actual plan for "killing" the tax code? Not one that's given credence by any sensible or semi-sensible policy wonk. Does the stunt show any skill either necessary or desirable for leading the most powerful military on earth? No, there is no conceivable scenario in which the president of the United States will be required to fire up the ol' chainsaw in the Oval Office in order to defend the free world against a half-pallet of office supplies.
At the end of the clip you almost expect Rand Paul to turn off the chainsaw, take off the safety glasses, stare into the camera and intone:
"The aristocrats."
I said Donald Trump's race-to-the-bottom could be at least half-blamed for the new need of Republican candidates to dumb down their rhetoric to new levels of sub-literacy. The other half can be pinned squarely on Rand Paul. Rand Paul's preferred method of governance is the Publicity Stunt. From faux-filibusters to chainsaw stunts, he flits from stunt to stunt with precious little policy or lawmaking between. The Rand Paul method of leadership is to mount a stunt for the cameras, fundraise off the stunt, do a round of interviews based on the stunt, then wander off to plan the next stunt.
From a policy-and-governance standpoint he has not fared much better than his direct competitor, Ted Cruz, and both of the party newcomers find themselves flummoxed by a self-financed upstart in the Republican race who can do "publicity stunt" in his sleep and can generate the necessary spasms of conspiratorial rage in the party base with every off-the-cuff remark.