Rand Paul’s slogan: One part Ron Paul, one part Republican mainstream

Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) campaign for the presidency begins Tuesday powered by a simple rhyme: "Defeat the Washington machine. Unleash the American Dream." It's not hard to parse — Washington is too big and it's constraining economic success — but it's still worth parsing. What Paul did is less wordsmithing than phrase-gluing, but we'll come back to that.

Slogans used to be more common in presidential campaigns than they are now. Barack Obama's 2008 campaign used "Change we can believe in," which caught