Katrina Trinko at National Review profiles former Ron and Rand Paul campaign bigwig Jesse Benton, now working for Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, and speculates about what it means for cross-GOP unity.
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Now, McConnell has made some stands that will make it easier for Rand Paul people to love him--voting for Rand's super-budget-cutting plan (five-year path to balanced, $2.3 trillion in tax cuts), joining him on hemp legalization, and audit the Fed (after being against it in 2010), some pet causes for Paul folk. This has given Paul cover for being on McConnell's side against his Tea Party primary challenger Matt Bevin.
But as this old thread from Daily Paul (Internet home of many of the hardest of Paul hardcore) reminds us, McConnell's been grim in his career on issues of Patriot Act and domestic civil liberties and hawkishness in the war on terror, bank bailouts, No Child Left Behind and Medicare expansion, and semi-automatic weapon bans.
McConnell did give support to Paul's drone filibuster, and voted this week for Paul's end-Egypt-aid bill, despite his usual rep, as Foreign Policy puts it, of being a "typically orthodox voter on foreign policy issues." He's been willing to at least say he'd consider some defense cuts.
Benton's power to create any Paul-McConnell activist alliance is questionable--he was never a favorite of the more hardcore and Internet-noisy of Ron Paul fans. In fact, many saw him as a sellout traitor, a burden Benton bore, in my experience covering the Paul campaign for my book Ron Paul's Revolution, with a decent amount of public grace but a lot of (understandable) private annoyance, which sometimes became public.
So it's going to be down to Mitch to convince them he's on their side. And it will be difficult for them to be convinced his instincts are true-blue and reliable on liberty issues--especially if he ends up majority leader again and becomes enmeshed in the ol' political art of the possible. (For example, the switch on "audit the Fed" is easy to read as just a "who the hell cares?" gesture of "no reason to make these Paul people mad at me for something I don't think is that important anyway.")
In this read, Rand Paul's very public ascendance will make a politician like McConnell more willing to go along with him, something that could be very important indeed for Rand's future career if McConnell is again majority leader of the Senate--it's good for a senator to have good relations with someone in that position. But again, it's likely that such leverage will come not from turning McConnell into a true believer, but turning Rand into a political force hard to ignore or oppose.
