Gregory Ferenstein at TechCrunch published an interesting interview with Rand Paul:

“My general impressions of Silicon Valley and California, in general, is that Libertarian-style Republicans would do better out here, and that Bush Republicans haven’t been doing well out here in a long time,” the Senate’s uber-Libertarian, Rand Paul tells me, during his check-cashing good-will tour to Silicon Valley.

Republicans desperately want better relations with Silicon Valley’s big-pocketed donors and top-tier programmers; the Senator’s solution is to show them that they can, in fact, love the small-government strain of conservatism.

I don’t think Paul is going to win Silicon Valley’s heart, but I think he’s displaying the right political impulses. Out of all the different paths the Republican Party could select from here, I think the most successful one is to jettison the religion entirely and become the technocratic party of small government. South Park Republicans have come of age, and lots of them work in tech and hate paying taxes. The right young candidate—and again, I don’t think that right candidate is Paul, because he’s got way too much baggage—could reshape the party in that image. I could see a big chunk of Washington State voters who work in the tech sector going for a Republican who supports gay marriage and access to abortion but also wants to diminish regulations and cut the hell out of taxes under the guise of making government more efficient.