Rand Paul, president of the United States of America? Unlikely at best.

Paul the Younger hasn’t disguised the plain fact that he’s running for the 2016 Republican nomination for president; he’s already begun making appearances in early primary and caucus states, and this week he started putting in motion the machinery for a presidential campaign.  It’s always possible he won’t be running in 2016 – but for now, he’s certainly running for 2016.

And yet … Rand Paul faces very long odds. Perhaps not quite as long as his father did in his numerous presidential runs, but long enough.

There are basically two questions to ask about whether someone would be a viable candidate for a major party nomination. First, a candidate must have conventional qualifications. Paul certainly clears that hurdle, although not all that impressively. By 2016, he’ll be finishing up a full Senate term. That’s a little more than Barack Obama had (presumably Obama’s state legislative service meant little on this score). It’s more than Mitt Romney, a one-term governor, had. It’s the same number of years as George W. Bush, although Bush had the added qualification of having been reelected. So there’s no real barrier there.

But the second question is the one that probably knocks him out: Viable candidates must be within their party’s mainstream on questions of public policy. That’s particularly true for issues over which large, influential party groups can exercise a virtual veto. And that’s what’s extremely likely to happen to Rand Paul in 2016.

There are just too many public policy areas, and too many important groups within the party in those areas, for Paul to really be viable. It’s possible that Paul and Republican Party actors could work out some sort of deal on “war on drugs” issues; after all, there are limited things that a president can do without Congress, so Republicans who favor current drug laws and enforcement strategies might be willing to live with him as long as he signaled that he wouldn’t make it a priority in a Paul presidency. It’s also possible, indeed likely, that on some of the fringe issues where he and most Republicans disagree that there would be no real objection to a nominee who disagrees with them. I think that might be true, for example, on many civil liberties issues. There are, for better or worse, very few people on either side (and in either party) for whom civil liberties is a central issue.

There’s just no way, however, that the people within the Republican Party who care about foreign policy and national security would easily accept Rand Paul.  It’s bad enough for Paul that the neoconservative faction would want nothing to do with him, but the realist Republicans, those associated, for example, with President George H.W. Bush, would be almost equally opposed to Paul’s anti-interventionist policies.

Not only is there no precedent for anyone with so many, and such important, conflicts with party orthodoxy, but there’s really no precedent for anyone coming very close during the modern (post-1968) era. Not only that, but all the cases that might be said to be similar on some level happened in the early years of the reformed system, when the novelty of the process yielded some results we haven’t seen from 1980 on:

• George McGovern won the Democratic nomination in 1972 as a factional liberal candidate. However, he didn’t so much defeat orthodox positions in the party as take advantage of party fractures that left no real orthodoxy. Nevertheless, by 1972 the Democrats had essentially turned against the Vietnam War, so McGovern’s victory wasn’t really the same as a Paul win would be now.
• George Wallace, who would have been completely unacceptable to mainstream liberals, had a bit of a successful run during the Democratic primaries, also in 1972, before dropping out after almost being assassinated. Still, Wallace never really was a threat to win the nomination.
• Jesse Jackson won a few primaries in 1984, and then was essentially the runner-up to Michael Dukakis in 1988. One could make a case that Jackson was too liberal for many liberals, although there’s no particular set of issue positions that Jackson challenged – it was more a case of image. However, despite some hype late in the 1988 primary season, Jackson really never came close to the nomination.
• And then there’s Ron Paul. But Rand’s father, for all the enthusiasm and organization he inspired, never came anywhere close to a nominination.