Has Trump knocked out his first contender?
Rand Paul's 2016 hopes appear to be heading straight down the tubes as he grapples with an underfunded campaign and infighting among his staff. Alex Isenstadt
breaks it down after doing interviews with more than a dozen staff members.
They described an operation that pitted a cerebral chief strategist against an intense campaign manager who once got into a physical altercation with the candidate’s bodyguard. And they portrayed an undisciplined politician who wasn’t willing to do what it took to win — a man who obsessed over trivial matters like flight times, peppered aides with demands for more time off from campaigning, and once chose to go on a spring-break jaunt rather than woo a powerful donor.
They sketched a portrait of a candidate who, as he fell further behind in polls, no longer seemed able to break through. Paul, lionized as “the most interesting man in politics” in a TIME magazine cover last year, was supposed to reinvent the Republican Party with his message of free-market libertarianism, his vision of a restrained foreign policy, and his outreach to minorities.
Whatever Rand's shortcomings are as a candidate, there's no escaping that he might also be the first 2016 casualty of Trump's candidacy. Ted Cruz
is facing a similar dilemma. Then again, maybe it was just
those pants, Rand.