John Dickerson: Rand Paul in the land of the free

This article originally appeared on Slate.

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire--Rand Paul loves the free market, and in a one-day five-stop New Hampshire tour, the Kentucky senator dispensed his praise for it like water from an aspergillum. At Murphy's Diner, when the morning hour matched the temperature on the street, he said the free market was the solution to shrinking the budget and strengthening the economy. At lunchtime, in the Quonset hut of the Londonderry Fish and Game Club, he preached to the standing-room-only crowd about "the freedom to own things." In the library at the Founders Academy, a charter school with rules for proper behavior written on a yellow sheet on the wall and volumes of Shakespeare stacked like sandbags, he argued that market competition among states should replace Common Core education standards.

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So of course he has a free market answer to the growing size of the Republican presidential field. "The more the merrier," he said as we talked in the "primary room," across the hall from the Manchester mayor's office at City Hall where the walls are decorated with buttons, yard signs, and newspapers from previous elections. (A placard in the room reads, "Assume that cameras and audio are always recording," which is good advice--and nearly encapsulates Paul's view of government surveillance).

It's good for the voters to have choices, says Paul, and it seems like Republican voters have more every day. Mitt Romney is seriously considering a run. Former three-term New York Gov. George Pataki just visited New Hampshire to see if anyone remembers him. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is making soundings. It's getting to be the case that the R next to a politician's name stands for "Running for president." "I saw in the paper recently they listed who might run for the Republican primary," said Paul. "It was like the whole page."

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But Paul isn't just being ideologically consistent when he says, "More the merrier." He's happy to see the others split the vote. On the establishment side of the party, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie will fight for the share of voters who want a pragmatist with executive experience. Social conservatives will splinter between Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee. Paul will have relatively less competition for the libertarian conservatives of the kind who supported his father in the state in 2012, when Rep. Ron Paul came in second to Mitt Romney with 23 percent of the vote.

But the son is not the father. To make that clear he has said his father will not be campaigning with him. Sen. Paul's foreign policy views are less confrontational and isolationist than his father's are, and he is running a more traditional campaign, assembling constituency groups, not just relying on tribal loyalism. At Murphy's, Paul talked to small government legislators, at the gun club it was Second Amendment enthusiasts, and at Founders it was education activists. You could almost see the chart on which the careful constituent tending had been mapped out.

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John Dickerson: Rand Paul in the land of the free