TROY SENIK: Rand Paul must walk tightrope to White House

Buttons in support of the presidential candidacy of Sen. Rand Paul are shown at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Ky., where Paul spoke Tuesday.

WILLIAM DESHAZER, NEW YORK TIMES

What a difference a decade makes. In 2005, only the most obsessive political junkies knew the name of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, a somewhat eccentric figure who had been the Libertarian Partys presidential nominee in 1988.

His son Rand was even more obscure, known mainly to the clients of his ophthalmology practice in Bowling Green, Ky.

On Tuesday, that small-town eye doctor stood on a stage in Louisville and declared to the world that he intends to become the 45th president of the United States.

You cant fully grasp Rands rise to prominence unless you understand how dramatically the Republican Party has changed in the intervening decade. In 2005, George W. Bush, fresh off re-election, was seeing the last positive poll numbers of his presidency (he hit 50 percent approval in the Gallup poll for the final time in May 2005) and writers like The Weekly Standards Fred Barnes were touting the presidents penchant for big government conservatism. Under this theory, it was no big deal to increase federal spending or add a costly new entitlement, like the Medicare prescription drug benefit, as long as those liberal means were being directed toward conservative ends.

Then the bottom fell out. While the broader publics second-term distaste for Bush owed largely to the pre-surge sense of aimlessness in Iraq, the gut-wrenching images that accompanied Hurricane Katrina and the economic meltdown that occurred in the dying days of his administration, conservatives focused in on an entirely different critique: He never cared about limiting the size, scope or influence of government. Bush couldnt be an example of conservatisms failures, they told themselves, because he was never a conservative in the first place.

It was in that environment that the elder Paul first rose to sustained national prominence, launching a 2008 Republican presidential campaign that initially felt quixotic. With the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney jockeying for the nomination, who really cared about the starkly libertarian views of a doddering seventy-something obstetrician from Texas?

An awful lot of people, it turned out.

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TROY SENIK: Rand Paul must walk tightrope to White House