Rand Paul, Media Darling

Five reasons why the Kentucky senator trails Ted Cruz in fundraising, but is still stealing the spotlight.

If youre a member of the Washington media, odds are youve spent at least some time over the past 48 hours discussing Rand Pauls entry into the presidential race and his testy exchanges about abortion with an Associated Press reporter. Reporters and pundits have covered Pauls debut for The Washington Post, NPR, The Huffington Post, and the Today Show. The Daily Beast offered space to the libertarian Cato Institutes David Boaz to argue that yes, Paul can do it. In The Hill, Dick Morris argued that he cant.

Meanwhile, the disclosure that Ted Cruzalso a declared candidate for presidentraised $31 million in a week, although certainly reported, seems to have aroused nothing like this kind of media excitement. Google News tallied half as many citations for Can Ted Cruz win? as for Can Rand Paul win? Chris Cillizza explained why Cruz chose to announce at Liberty University but had this to say about the candidates prospects: "Cruz badly needs social conservatives on his side if he wants to have any serious chance at being the Republican nominee in 2016and then went on to explain why that was unlikely to happen. Mark Halperin dismissed Cruz as a second-tier candidate.

Yet to the extent there are metrics, Cruz is outperforming Paul in the first phases of the presidential race. Not only has Cruz raised more money than Paul, but a National Journal survey of social media found that Cruzs presidential launch attracted dramatically more social media interaction than Pauls.

Neither man has an easy or obvious path to the nomination. Both men face powerful, perhaps insuperable, opposition within the party. Pauls path is probably even more emphatically foredoomed, but at a minimum it is surely no less foredoomed.

So why is Paul a favorite topic of media speculation, while Cruz cant make news?

Id offer five reasons. Theyre interesting in themselves, I think, but also interesting as examples of how news organizations can systematically mis-evaluate political realities.

1. Home-Court Advantage

If you live and work in Washington, D.C., its easy to imagine libertarianism as a powerful national movement. Washington is home to Reason magazine and the Cato Institute, and to dozens of hard-working and talented libertarian writers, commentators, and policy analysts. Its easy here to lose sight of the extreme marginality of the doctrine in the nation as a wholeespecially because libertarianism as we see it in the capital looks a lot more like the preferred politics of the institutional media (socially permissive, fiscally cautious) than like the Lincoln-hating, bullion-believing, conspiracy-mongering politics of libertarianism beyond the Beltway at the Ron Paul Institute, Antiwar.com, or the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Journalists are consequently vulnerable to claims that libertarianism appeals to independents, Millennials, or some other demographically desirable groupno matter how overwhelmingly such claims are contradicted by the evidence. Meanwhile, the conservative Christian evangelicalism to which Ted Cruz looks for his base remains perhaps more underrepresented in D.C. media and culture than any other major American social group. D.C. journalists intellectually apprehend that evangelicals are important, but they have a hard time remembering that fact when they offer their commentary.

2. Media Management

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Rand Paul, Media Darling