Rand Paul, greets students during a stop at Dubuque’s Loras College on Tuesday, part of his livestreamed day from the Iowa campaign trail. (Jessica Reilly/Telegraph Herald via AP)
In 1996 a woman named Jennifer Ringley decided to put a camera in her apartment and broadcast her entire life over the Internet. Because it was a new and provocative concept, and because, hey, maybe she’d get naked, millions of people tuned in, and “Jennicam” became a national sensation. Two decades later, another relative unknown tried to capitalize on the idea: Struggling GOP presidential contender Rand Paul.
Cynics will see the Kentucky senator’s decision to livestream a day on the campaign trail in Iowa as a desperate gambit to gain traction in the polls; believers will see a transparent politician willing to use technology in a novel way.
I decided to watch as much of it as I could take. I’d wake up in the morning with Rand Paul, and who knows, maybe he’d be the last voice I heard before I went to sleep. Brilliant: A way to experience all the drivel and madness of the campaign trail, but without having to get out of my pajama pants.
“It will be the Rand Paul campaign’s version of ‘The Truman Show’ or ‘EdTV,’” Paul’s technology specialist Vincent Harris told Mashable.
“Sounds fun!” I told myself. This was my day:
8:03 am: The Rand Paul livestream springs to life for the first time. It’s a cryptic distant shot of a blurry man standing by a breakfast buffet line. He’s alone, appears to have too much heft to be Paul. The feed cuts to black.
9:00 am: Already the promise of a full day with Paul has been proven a lie, and the Internet trolls are restless. “Most people in Iowa start their day before 8 am. You’re not winning any fans. #RandLive #Snoozebutton,” a Donald Trump parody account tweets.
9:27 am: We get our first glimpse of Rand Paul. He’s slouched at a breakfast table in an Iowa hotel, with half-empty orange juice cups and coffee mugs. Paul is schlumpily dressed in a blue vest with a black shirt underneath. Or is it a sweater patterned with both colors? I have all day to figure this out.
[Why does Bernie Sanders dress like that? Because he can.]
He and his tablemates — unidentified campaign staffers, presumably — talk idly about college football and Donald Trump. Someone says “Let’s load up.”
The feed cuts off again: “This channel is off the air.”
9:37 am: When the feed picks up, we’re in the back seat of the car looking up front at Paul. “This is how we roll,” someone says, hitting play on the song “Mercy” by Duffy. Paul turns down the music to take a phone call and complain about whatever airline he just flew in on.
9:52 am: Video returns after about 10 minutes of being down. (Remember in “The Truman Show” when they have to cut the feed for the first time ever, and it’s a really big deal? Old hat for the Rand Paul Show!) He’s in another large room that looks like his hotel lobby, only with a brown rug instead of a red one. “We are creating our own news and streaming it today,” Paul tells an interviewer. He then speaks to a crowd of college students.
This is what a presidential campaign looks like: Rand Paul speaks at Loras College. (Jessica Reilly/Telegraph Herald via AP)
“I ran for office because I was sick of throwing stuff at my TV,” he says, as whoever is running his Twitter account tweets roughly the same thing, in the column that appears to the left of the livestream.
11:22 am: Back in the car, Paul says to no one in particular (or perhaps to the roughly 500 souls watching his livestream at the moment) that his favorite philosopher is Albert Camus. His favorite story is the one about Sisyphus, condemned to push a rock up a hill for eternity.
Then the feed freezes, again.
“The struggle itself. . . is enough to fill a man’s heart,” Camus once wrote. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
[The zombie apocalypse has arrived, and it’s in Iowa with Rick Perry]
11:35 am: A frozen Paul springs back to life. He futzes with his phone, plays “Enter Sandman” by Metallica, and taps his hands on his knees. Just a casual guy listening to some cool tunes, totally minding his business.
“Remember when MTV had music?” he asks the car.
Then he turns down the noise. “I think we should talk about politics for a minute,” he says. He calls his fellow Republicans idiots for their interventionist foreign policy views. He refers to Bernie Sanders as “Uncle Bernie.”
I’m sitting in front of my computer screen beginning to rethink the merits of spending my day this way. What once seemed like an easy way to travel with a campaign now feels like a family road trip in which I can’t even look out the window, control the radio or steer the conversation. The feed cuts to black.
11:50 am: The screen remains frozen, and I G-chat a friend to complain. RAND PAUL’S LIFE FEED FROZEN, JUST LIKE HIS POLL NUMBERS, he writes back. Maybe Sen. Paul is just in the bathroom? RAND PAUL’S CAMPAIGN: IN THE TOILET? he responds.
12:04 pm: I’m jolted from a near-doze by the sound of Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” blaring through my computer speakers. Paul is driving over a bridge. I’m oddly delighted to see him again. Virtual Stockholm Syndrome seems to have kicked in. The feed cuts again. When we next see Paul, he’s giving an interview to the Los Angeles Times in a conference room. He says he’s keeping his father’s coalition together and adding new people. He says that polls don’t mean anything at this point and bemoans the fact that the media isn’t writing about how well organized he is in Iowa.
Paul leaves the room and walks toward an auditorium filled with more college students. He ends his speech with a bit he has done before, but as far as pushing rocks up a hill goes, this one’s pretty interesting. It’s a rumination on the Bill of Rights. Republicans, he said, are great when it comes to the Second Amendment, but what about all the others? He talks about the Fourth Amendment, the right against unreasonable search and seizure; the Fifth Amendment, the right to keep the government from taking your stuff without just compensation; and the Sixth Amendment, the right to a trial by jury.
He tells the story of a young black man sent to Rikers Island for three years without a trial, a man who killed himself while behind bars.
“That’s not what America’s about,” he said. “My goodness.”
I want to hear more from Paul here, maybe some back-and-forth with the students. But I’m not there to ask any questions, and soon the feed cuts out again. He may be one of the most transparent politicians, but he is still a politician. There’s more than an hour of silence this time.
2:15 pm: We are at the iconic cornfield baseball diamond from “Field of Dreams.” Rand Paul sits casually on the bleachers and says he believes that Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose should be allowed into the Hall of Fame. The feed cuts again.
If this is the most interesting thing a politician can do with modern technology, we have a long way to go. Periscope now allows for conversations that happen in real time, and yet Paul decided on a format that only allowed for audience to watch him answer pre-screened questions. If the idea is to show what life is like on the campaign trail, why not show it? Why continuously cut away? Yes, a full day would be excruciatingly boring and repetitive, but isn’t Paul the one who just told viewers to go read the Myth of Sisyphus?
“It gives some optimism amidst great treachery and great despair,” Paul says.
We can now report with some confidence that Rand Paul was wearing a blue zip-up sleeveless pullover on top of a black long-sleeved t-shirt. (Jessica Reilly/Telegraph Herald via AP)
3:30 pm: A campaign reporter with a video camera asks Paul why he is even bothering to livestream. “I wish I knew. . .” he says. “I’ve been saying, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this and now we’re doing this.” He was probably sort of joking, but also probably not.
The reporter asks how he would respond to people who might say this was just a stunt by a flailing politician trying to get attention.
“I would say they’re just jealous and maybe they wish they were in the car with us because it’s so much fun,” he says.
Then he goes up on a stage to complain to another audience about how he got screwed over by an airline on his way to Iowa.
The feed cuts off again.
It will return, I know. There will be some other modest-sized audiences, some other classic rock references, some more half-filled coffee mugs and intriguing yet half-completed meditations on philosophy or the law. The feed will probably cut out again, and then return, and then cut out, and then the day will end.
The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.