Politico Magazine has just released its "Politico 50," a list of the most interesting political thinkers/doers, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was labeled as a "one-man think tank." Here is more:
While he’s consulting widely these days with the think tankers at the Heritage Foundation and the more libertarian-minded Cato Institute, by all accounts his real policy team is still pretty much Paul and his Senate staff. But it’s clear all this studying up is designed with a presidential campaign in mind, and presidential campaigns need a network of policy experts to churn out all those policy papers—especially so with an ideas-minded candidate like Paul.
By all accounts, up until now Paul has been an ideas guy without an ideas team; many of the usual suspects in Republican policy circles haven’t even dealt with him at all, they told me. Brian Darling, a Heritage alum who serves as a Senate counsel and spokesman for Paul, describes him as a “one-man think tank.”
The profile of Sen. Paul notes several think tankers in his "outer circle," including Stephen Moore and James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, and David Boaz of the Cato Institute.
Other think tankers made the Politico 50 list, including Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, as well as Robert Kagan, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution (his wife is State Department's Victoria Nuland)
