A New Brand Of Paul Gains Support In Iowa

It's still more than 15 months until the Iowa caucuses, and no one in the crowded field of Republicans with presidential ambitions has announced. But things are already happening in Iowa, especially for Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Paul has reached out to Iowans who never considered voting for his father, Ron Paul, who made a respectable third-place showing there in 2012.

He's still popular with his father's old supporters. Many of them are in the so-called liberty faction of the Iowa GOP.

A group of them meet Tuesday nights in a Des Moines hotel bar for a gathering called "Liberty on the Rocks." These 20 or so liberty Republicans are mostly veterans of the 2012 Iowa campaign of Ron Paul. To them, it was a movement of ideas, not just politics.

For 26-year-old IT specialist Adil Khan, it's about Austrian economics. It's about abandoning policies of tax, spend and borrow. As he explains it, "this idea that if you tax from one area, it's going to be affecting a certain industry or it's going to be affecting the industry as a whole, and it really doesn't create anything."

For 42-year-old Jeremy Goemaat, who owns a computer billing company, it's about a return to the gold standard. Or some other standard private bank notes: "Is it the government's right to outlaw other currencies? Now, if you want to put your trust in small bank X, go for it."

They typically share a profound libertarian mistrust of the federal government, Keynesian economics, the federal reserve, drug laws, and interventionist foreign policies.

Twenty-nine-year-old Lexi Nuzum, who has a sales job with a chemical company, says the liberty worldview came to her when she was a college student, listening to Ron Paul on the radio.

"I thought, gosh, who is this guy? He makes a lot of sense, and I think he was specifically talking about foreign policy at the time. ... Rand, I think his appeal is that he kind of brings in that other crowd," she says. "Independents, a lot of wings of the Republican Party, Democrats even."

Even if they haven't committed yet, Nuzum and the others who gather here weekly are the presumed base of the Rand Paul campaign in Iowa. Four years ago, they saw in Ron Paul a prophetic truth teller, qualitatively unlike his rivals.

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A New Brand Of Paul Gains Support In Iowa