US Senator Rand Paul, a conservative libertarian and precursor of the Tea Party branch of the US Republican Party, was to become the second major Republican to join next year’s US presidential race with a candidacy announcement planned yesterday.
Paul had publicized a 4pm speech in Louisville, Kentucky, where he has served as senator since January 2011.
Paul follows US Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, who launched his candidacy two weeks ago with an appeal to the religious right.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, brother of former US president George W. Bush, leads in opinion polls for Republican primary elections, although he has yet to announce his candidacy officially.
On the Democratic side, former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton has a team and campaign machine in place, suggesting that she will announce in the coming weeks.
In recent days, Paul’s team has left little doubt about his presidential ambitions. A video released recently and hinting at a campaign slogan said: “One leader will stand up to defeat the Washington machine and unleash the American dream.”
It was by defying the Republican “establishment” that Paul, now 52, launched his political career in 2009. This was at the start of the antitax and small-government movement that would come to exercise a powerful influence within the US Republican Party and come to be known as the Tea Party.
And it is by billing himself as a different kind of Republican leader that Paul aims to rally ultra-conservatives during the primaries and then broaden the base of his party among young people, independents and minorities.
It will be a high-wire act.
His father, former US representative Ron Paul, was a “libertarian” candidate for the presidency — conservative on economic issues, but liberal on social issues.
Rand Paul prefers the term “libertarian conservative” to describe himself, or a “constitutional conservative,” taking care to break with libertarian positions considered too strict or even marginal.
“So yes, he has taken some positions that libertarians are grumbling about, but it is still the case that if you look at the big picture, while he may not be a libertarian, he is the most libertarian of the candidates,” said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute libertarian think tank.
Democrats and some of Paul’s rivals instead said that he is just an opportunist.
“Unfortunately for Paul, it does not matter how many times he tries to reinvent himself. His policies are entirely outside the mainstream,” Democratic Party spokesman Michael Tyler said.
In Kentucky, Paul’s longtime supporters within the Tea Party are avid about the” candidate.
“I like him a lot,” said John Hodgson, president of the Louisville branch of the Tea Party. “He has modified some of his statements to be less isolationist, and I think that is a more practical view of the world.”
To insist to his critics that he can break out of the Tea Party mold and rise, Paul has repeatedly cited polls that describe him as the best Republican candidate to take on Clinton.
“Nobody is doing better against Hillary Clinton than myself,” he said recently on Fox News.
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