As Sullivan wrote, the GOP’s "apparatchiks" are scared of Dr. Paul. “We have a real phenomenon here, because someone has to stand up for what conservatism once stood for. Whether you agree with him or not … he has already elevated the debates by injecting into them a legitimate, if now suppressed, strain of conservatism that is actually deeper in this country than the neoconservative aggression that now captures the party elite and has trapped the U.S. in the Iraq nightmare.”

Paul's unwavering pronouncements against unconstitutional foreign wars and for less government and more freedom at home sound quaint, alien or hopelessly naive in the Era of Big Government.

But as he proved last week in South Carolina, Paul's brave, modest mission to be a subversive, principled, libertarian presence among the career flip-floppers, pragmatists and statists at the Republican debates is working -- maybe too well for his own good.