Rand Paul and I are trying to remember why Harlan, Kentucky, might be famous. That's where Paul is driving me, on a coiling back road through the low green mountains of the state's southeastern corner, in his big black GMC Yukon festooned with RON PAUL 2008 and RAND PAUL 2010 stickers. Something about Harlan has lodged itself in my brain the way a shard of barbecue gets stuck in one's teeth, and I've asked Paul for help. "I don't know," he says in an elusive accent that's not quite southern and not quite not-southern. The town of Hazard is nearby, he notes: "It's famous for, like, The Dukes of Hazzard."

It's a hazy, bright afternoon in early May, 12 days before the primaries for Kentucky's open U.S. Senate seat and 13 days before Rand Paul, the eventual Republican nominee, will flub his introduction to the nation by taking philosophical potshots at the 1964 Civil Rights Act during an appearance on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show—the political equivalent of a belly flop from a 10-story-high diving board. This means it's about 15 days before the Paul campaign—a jumbled casserole of Tea Party activists and Ron Paul Revolution-aries, with a former blogger and first-time campaign manager at its helm—cuts off media access to Paul entirely. Today, however, Paul seems delighted with the press attention, immodestly complaining to a group of voters that while a New York City magazine writer (me) and a Washington Post reporter are trailing him on today's tour, he—as a self-described "outsider" candidate, spurned by mainstream Republicans—can't seem to score coverage from the local media.

He plucks this theme constantly on the campaign trail. "They fear us," he tells audiences, without ever quite identifying "they" or "us." While his primary opponent, Kentucky's secretary of state, Trey Grayson, prefers to canvass the state via private jet, Paul likes to roll the way he's rolling today: kibitzing with a dozen voters at a diner in tiny Burkesville in the morning; brunching with two dozen at Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken in Albany, then lunching with four dozen at a cafeteria in Monticello; and delivering a speech in Harlan, which may or may not be famous for something.

"Maybe for some of the coal battles," a young campaign aide in the back seat suggests.

Paul ignores this. "Maybe the feuding," he offers. He mulls this for a moment and says, "The Hatfields and McCoys were more up toward West Virginia, though."

"I think it was the coal battles," the aide says.

Still ignorant of Harlan's claim to fame (if any), we pull into the coal-mining town of fewer than 2,000 people, a third of whom live below the poverty line. About three dozen of its whiter-haired residents show up to hear Rand Paul speak in a civic-center auditorium.

Paul is 47 years old, with a short, wiry frame and pale, distant eyes, his boyish face nestled under a brown-gray fluff of curly hair; he often wears an analytical expression, and, for a political aspirant, his smile is notably slow to develop, and it's mild and slightly slanted when it does. His dress is casual middle-of-the-road mallwear—pleated Izod khakis, navy Polo button-down, yellow paisley tie—with the exception of his shoes: clunky, bizarro-brown Clarks, size 8, that resemble a mercifully extinct species of bowling shoe. ("Are you going to write about his shoes?" a campaign staffer asks me. "Everyone comments about the shoes. But then everyone made fun of his dad's shoes, too.")

The outlook of the audience members is not what you'd deem undecided. Throughout the day, old men have been coming up to me, on the mistaken assumption that I'm a Paul campaign staffer, to testify, earnestly and emotionally: to explain to me how Rand Paul is different, how he tells it like it is, how he is the last, best hope for a nation staring into the abyss. They're gathered here in Harlan for something like a fix: for a steaming hot cup of Tea Party rhetoric, for jeremiads and denunciations, for a loud broadcast of all the grievances they grumble nightly in front of their television sets. They're here to see Rand Paul lance the national boil.

Funny thing about that: He's not particularly good at speaking, in the conventional sense. He doesn't channel fire and brimstone. Like his father, Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and presidential also-ran, he often veers off on obscure tangents—say, the jurisdictional expansion of the Commerce Clause under FDR, or the fate of the 17 Chinese Uyghurs held at Guantánamo Bay. He's short on folksy charm and poetic flourishes. He speaks, instead, like the physician he's been for 17 years: harried, slightly weary ("Right..." he'll say with a sigh when responding to a question, as if every patient asks the same thing), but with a robust diagnostic certainty, crisply charting the problems and best treatment options.