This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 5th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

With Ran Paul out of the GOP side of the presidential race,

the field that's left is far more amenable to foreign

intervention and war.

Chris Preble and John Samples, Vice Presidents at the Cato Institute, describe what's

ahead for the GOP and Democrats.

A year ago at this time, it seemed like Ran Paul was going to be a considerably better

candidate than he turned out to be.

What happened?

Well, I think that for him to get the nomination all along, two things had to happen.

He had to be extremely lucky about the external environment, particularly on foreign policy.

And he had to go from strength to strength in his development as a politician.

He had to prove himself to be a kind of political genius

or at least to seem to be one. And on the one side he didn't catch any breaks at all on the external environment and got thrown in on top of everything

else.

The emergence of Donald Trump who took all the air out of the area for discussing issues and then you know it's hard to say about him.

People look like geniuses in good environments but in difficult environments they don't and

he doesn't seem to have emerged in precisely the way we I think a lot of us hoped he would.

I think his response to the unfortunate external environment that John refers to, which is the

starting with the ISIS killings of the video killings of the Americans followed by the terror attacks in Paris and

San Bernardino.

...