Bloomberg the Company

This morning, Politico's Ken Vogel and Tarini Parti reported that KentuckySenator Rand Paul had underperformed at the past week's Koch brothers showcase. (More officially, it was a gathering of the donors who supported the Koch network of pressure groups, and who finally saw returns in 2014.) Many, including Bloomberg Politics' Michael Bender and Julie Bykowicz, had reported that Florida Senator Marco Rubio did himself the most good. Vogel and Parti reported on a "straw poll" that determined the extent of Paul's problem, conducted by Frank Luntz in a breakout session.

"Kentucky Sen. Rand Paulwho received the least enthusiastic response from donors during a Sunday nightforum of prospective candidatesthat also featured Rubio and Texas Senator Ted Cruzfinished last in Luntzs poll," they reported.

That was how a source recalled it, but Luntz disagreed.

Anybody who thinks they're loyal, faithful Republicans have not talked to them for more than three minutes.

Joe Scarborough

"It wasn't a poll," wrote Luntz over e-mail. "It was a random question. It doesn't deserve any attention. It was only to a few people."

Luntz just asked some donors who showed up to his session who'd impressed them most. Yet the "few" apparently amounted to more than 100 people; in the wake of the event, not many people are following Luntz's distinction between an actual focus group and a quick read of the room. It doesn't change the basic truth that Paul did not blow away the donors, despite a steady campaign to portray himself as the natural choice of libertarians.

Should he be? Like Paul, the Kochs are forever surprising political observers who don't know how to classify libertarians."Anybody who thinks they're loyal, faithful Republicans have not talked to them for more than three minutes," said Joe Scarborough of the Kochs after speaking at the conference. "They have no use for these people who want to go out and have these bloody battles on social issues...they don't want the federal government in your pocketbook. They also don't want them in your bedroom. I think they're like most Americans."

http://youtu.be/A4rQuB4FZlc

That's exactly the way Paul presents himself. If he failed to impress the Koch summit, there are two reasons. One is that he didn't chew into the questions the way that Rubio or Cruz did. On foreign policy, Paul made a defense of free trade, saying that"opening up China made us less likely to go to war," and that opening up Cuba worked because "we tried isolationism for 50 years." He got into a long dialogue about taxes that was unlikely to excite anybody. He made a pitch for his idea of blocking big government contractors from lobbying, which, according to people like Scarborough, sounded like a hit against the "crony capitalism" the Kochs opposed.

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Bloomberg the Company