Why is Rand Paul getting better press than Ted Cruz?

1. Home-Court Advantage

If you live and work in Washington, DC, it’s 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. It’s easy here to lose sight of the extreme marginality of the doctrine in the nation as a whole—especially because libertarianism as we see it in the capital looks a lot 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 group—no 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…

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4. Abiding by the Rules of the D.C. Machine

In their short time in the Senate—four years in Paul’s case, only two in Cruz’s— both Paul and Cruz have each engaged in one major media stunt: in Paul’s case, a 13-hour filibuster against the nomination of John Brennan as director of the CIA; in Cruz’s, a forced partial government shutdown of nearly two weeks. The shutdown was widely condemned as recklessly self-aggrandizing; the filibuster, accepted as harmlessly self-publicizing. Rand Paul abided by the rules of Washington for senators on the make. Cruz broke them. Paul’s utterly hopeless presidential ambitions are accordingly indulged and flattered; Cruz’s significantly less hopeless ambitions are resented and condemned.

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