Not much, says Jonathan Tobin:
His exit from active campaigning will, no doubt, provoke some pundits to claim that in 2012, his libertarians stopped being a marginal factor in the GOP and entered the mainstream. But this is, at best, an exaggeration. There was some overlap between Paul’s strict libertarianism and Tea Party sentiment about the size of government, debt and taxes. But that common ground was dwarfed by the gap between Paul’s conspiratorial view of economics as well as his foreign policy views that had more in common with the knee-jerk anti-American doctrines of the far left than with that of most Republicans.
"Knee-jerk anti-American doctrines of the far left": an almost perfectly phrased expression of the closed mind. Charles P. Pierce thinks more pragmatically:
It is one thing to run amok at state conventions and town caucuses. It is quite another to try the same stuff at a national convention, at which the party (and, through it, the nominee) controls everything, including access to the site and the various security forces. And I believe that he's in this at least in part to make sure his son, Senator Aqua Buddha, is a force going forward. He's not the Jerry Rubin of 2012. He's going to sell them out. The only question now is for how high a price.
Reax to Paul's departure here.
(Chart by Josh Harkinson)
The Dish 
