Through DeLay, he appealed for his old party’s support to unseat the Democratic incumbent in the district next door to his old one. Instead, Republican leaders got the Democrat, Greg Laughlin, to switch parties. Paul ran anyway. He drew on a national network of newsletter subscribers, libertarian activists, gold bugs, and other believers to vastly outspend Laughlin, despite Laughlin’s access to the GOP’s national donor base. Paul’s campaign, fueled as it was by an army of small donors, prefigured the Internet campaigns that would come later. He shocked everyone by winning.

But in Washington, Paul was out of step with the times—an isolationist as neoconservatism took over his party, a sworn foe of central banking when Alan Greenspan was being celebrated as “The Oracle,” a fiscal conservative overpowered by Karl Rove’s attempt to build a lasting Republican majority by buying off key interest groups with new government benefits.

Paul’s independent streak put him at odds with a Republican leadership that ran Congress like a Tammany Hall machine and punished anyone who strayed. Paul strayed habitually. In 2003, his seniority put him in line to chair the subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve. To deny him, Republican leaders merged two committees. In 2005, he was again set to assume the top spot. With another merger impossible, a senior colleague was pressured onto the subcommittee so that she, and not Paul, would take the gavel.

via The Tea Party’s Brain – Magazine – The Atlantic.