When Sen. Rand Paul descended onto the Senate floor earlier this month to promote his legislation to end foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, he stood next to an outsize poster showing the names and faces of three Israeli teenagers who had just been killed.
"Killed," Paul emphasized, "in cold blood."
Not long after Paul stopped speaking, his political operation swung into action. His top strategist, Doug Stafford, packaged the speech into an email that landed in the in-boxes of a clutch of influential Jewish and pro-Israel Republicans across the country.
The episode—the pro-Israel bill, the impassioned speech, the rapid dissemination—is a small window into the early and aggressive Jewish-outreach campaign of the junior senator from Kentucky with his eye on the White House in 2016. As Paul lays the groundwork for a presidential bid—he's already hired two top Iowa Republicans and one veteran New Hampshire strategist—few constituencies have received more attention than Jewish Republicans and pro-Israel advocates.
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Paul has donned a yarmulke and danced to Hebrew songs. He has prayed at the Western Wall and visited a prominent New Jersey yeshiva (a religious school where a major GOP contributor served as his tour guide). He's dialed into one of the country's most popular Jewish radio programs and held off-the-record conference calls with Jewish leaders across more than 30 states. He has introduced pro-Israel legislation (title: the "Stand With Israel Act"), speechified about it in the Senate, and, relentlessly, sought a private audience with the wealthiest and most influential Jewish Republicans in the nation.
Rand Paul, who has said he knew only a single Jewish family growing up in small-town Texas, has even found his own rabbi (one he shares with Rush Limbaugh) to help him navigate the cultural divide.
"Clearly, he is making a concerted effort and a sincere effort to really build relationships," said Matt Brooks, executive director of the influential Republican Jewish Coalition, a political group that aims to represent Jewish interests within the GOP.
The charm offensive has two goals at its core. The first is to try to establish Paul in the foreign policy mainstream of Republicanism, particularly on the signal issue of Israel, which is of key importance to both Jewish voters and evangelical Christians. The second is to win over, or at the least neutralize, the moneyed class of hawkish Israel defenders—free-spending billionaires Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer chief among them—who Paul's advisers know represent among the most significant impediments to his becoming the party's next standard-bearer.
Sheldon Adelson is one of the GOP's mega-donors Paul is trying to win over. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)Paul's labors are especially critical given that he has begun the 2016 presidential sweepstakes with a deep deficit of support among pro-Israel advocates—an inheritance from his father, three-time presidential candidate and former Rep. Ron Paul, a man viewed with suspicion at best by much of the community. "Pro-Israel people have always felt that Ron Paul is beyond hostile to Israel; he's hostile to Jews as well," said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, a pro-Israel lobbying group. "So clearly this concerns Rand Paul because people assume, like father like son."
"It's unfair," Klein added, "but it's a natural human reaction."
