Rand Paul To Run For President

Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky, is to announce his formal bid for presidency of the United States.

He announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential race at a speech in his home state of Kentucky on Tuesday.

Earlier this year, in reply to President Obama’s State of the Union speech, Paul had said: “I wish I had better news for you, but all is not well in America.”

Yahoo News reports:

Paul is set to declare his candidacy during a speech in his home state of Kentucky on Tuesday. As his campaign committee put it in a video beforehand: “On April 7, one leader will stand up to defeat the Washington machine and unleash the American dream.”

Expect Paul to outline a vision for America that doesn’t fit any of the traditional Republican molds.

He would alter the scale and mandate of the federal government in more radical ways than other members of the GOP. And he bucks party ideology in standing against government surveillance, for deep cuts in military spending and in questioning the wisdom of harsh sentences for drug offenders who cost government billions to imprison.

Those libertarian impulses resonate with people on the left as well as the right, though they can be hard for many mainstream Republicans to swallow. Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was his party’s 2008 presidential nominee, called Paul and others “wacko birds” of the Senate when they unsuccessfully tried to block the nomination of John Brennan as CIA chief in a dispute over the use of drones.

“He can appeal to a broader spectrum of voters,” said Eliott West, a student at Michigan’s Spring Arbor University who led a pro-Paul delegation to a recent conservative conference near Washington. “He is about more freedom, less government. And if Republicans are going to win, that’s what we need.”

Paul also plans to seek out support from those who might not necessarily think a Republican deserves their vote. Among 2016 GOP rivals, Paul alone has made a point of visiting college campuses, historically black universities and minority communities. For instance, after the protests over police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, Paul visited the city and urged black residents to vote.

Immediately after his Kentucky speech on Tuesday, Paul will visit counties in the first four early nominating states that favored Obama over GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. In three of Rand Paul’s destinations, his father, Rep. Ron Paul, came in second in his longshot 2012 bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

He’ll do so with a campaign style that is utterly unique. Where Ronald Reagan promised that “It’s morning in America again” and George H.W. Bush pitched “a thousand points of light,” Paul skips the feel-good slogans. He tells audiences, for example, that he wants to stop the government from snooping on people’s data. “We’re going to be the party that protects your phone.”