Paul made an argument on drones that transcended normal partisan politics, winning plaudits from conscientious liberals and big-L Libertarians. He made opposition to targeted drones strikes the smart position for ambitious Republicans. (Do you really think Reince Preibus and Marco Rubio’s impulses on this issue are closer to Paul’s than John McCain’s?) And he opened conservatives’ minds on a crucial question: can constitutionally limited government really survive an open-ended war on terror where, as Lindsey Graham puts it, the American homeland is a battlefield?

Paul is also the only Republican in the running that has attempted outreach to minority communities through policy, rather than his own ethnicity or status as an incumbent so popular that even many Democrats will vote for him over a challenger Democratic leaders had largely abandoned.

The obvious rejoinder is that Paul has no choice, because he can’t claim to be either of those things. He isn’t Hispanic and he isn’t governor of New Jersey. But that’s true of most Republicans. Second, Paul does have a choice: he could refuse to engage in minority outreach at all, or limit his outreach to safe topics like school choice, which have occasionally succeeded in building issue-based alliances between Republicans and communities of color but have seldom won Republicans minority votes.