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Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. walks from the stage after speaking during the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. Carolyn Kaster/AP hide caption

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. walks from the stage after speaking during the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

Rand Paul is not like other potential presidential candidates.

The Kentucky senator, who announced his candidacy for the White House on Tuesday morning, doesn't fit neatly into the molds of either party.

Socially liberal on issues of crime and punishment especially when it comes to drug sentencing against a federal ban on same-sex marriage, and no foreign policy hawk, he's not your prototypical Republican.

As a fiscal conservative and an opponent of abortion rights, though, he's certainly no Democrat either.

"It's time for a new way, a new set of ideas and a new leader," Paul says in a Web video, with a heavy metal soundtrack, previewing his presidential campaign.

Paul fits more with libertarians. And, though he is the scion of the last carrier of the torch of "liberty," he's also not quite his father's libertarian.

Paul's father, the former Rep. Ron, ran for president three times before retiring. The elder Paul, 79, was always regarded as something of a gadfly, an outspoken fresh voice in the Republican primary with a passionate following of young libertarians.

Though Paul did not win a single state in 2008 or 2012, when measured by Election Day voting percentage, he routinely finished in the top three. In fact, he finished a solid second behind Romney in the critical early state of New Hampshire.

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Can Libertarian Rand Paul Win A Republican Primary?

Sen. Rand Paul has officially announced hes running for president. But can a libertarian-leaning candidate win the Republican nomination and ultimately the presidency?

In a political world dominated by the liberal-conservative divide, there are many doubters. But theres growing evidence that Paul can broaden the Republican base and appeal to the broad center of the electorate.

The Republican base may be divided into establishment, tea party, Christian right, and libertarian wings. Paul starts out with a strong base in the libertarian wing, which gave his father, Rep. Ron Paul, 21 percent of the Iowa caucus vote and 23 percent of the New Hampshire primary in 2012. With his strong opposition to taxes and spending and his book The Tea Party Goes to Washington, hes also well positioned for the tea party vote. His pro-life views will make him acceptable to religious conservatives as the field narrows.

Rand Paul is trying something different in a Republican presidential race.

The wild card may be who can attract voters who dont usually vote in Republican primaries. Pauls stands on military intervention, marijuana, criminal justice reform, and the surveillance state give him a good shot at getting independents and young people to come out for him.

The race could come down to former Florida governor Jeb Bush as the establishment candidate against the last standing insurgent candidate, and Paul is, as pundit Peter Beinart wrote recently, as bold as any reformist in the race.

Political observers usually talk about liberals, conservatives, and moderates. But not all voters fit into those boxes. Every year Gallup divides the public into liberal, conservative, libertarian, and populist. In the 2014 survey the firm classified 27 percent of respondents as conservative and 24 percent as libertarian. Paul has the libertarian field all to himself.

Indeed, a 2006 Zogby poll for the Cato Institute asked respondents, Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal? Fully 59 percent said yes, and only 27 percent said no. Thats a huge untapped market for a candidate who can cut across red-blue barriers.

Events of the past few years have pushed voters in a libertarian direction, causing some observers to talk about a libertarian moment in American politics. The financial crisis, the Wall Street bailouts, the $18 trillion national debt, and Obamacare created the tea party. The revelations about spying and surveillance since 2013 have caused grave concerns about privacy. Less traumatically, growing support for gay marriage and marijuana legalization shows the strength of libertarian attitudes in a country founded on the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The small band of neoconservatives who dominate conservative punditry have tried to ignore or dismiss Pauls chances on the grounds that his mildly non-interventionist foreign policy will make him unacceptable to Republican voters. They need to read more polls. Last June 75 percent of Americans, and 63 percent of Republicans, told CBS News/New York Times pollsters that the Iraq war wasnt worth the costs. Seventy percent of Republicans opposed military action in Syria. A massive Pew Research Center survey in December 2013 found that 52 percent of respondents, the highest number ever, said the United States should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.

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Can Libertarian-Leaning Rand Paul Really Win the GOP Nomination?

Rand Paul greets supporters after speaking at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, yesterday. Photograph: William DeShazer/New York Times

Republican Rand Paul, the libertarian conservative senator, has declared a plan to take America back from an unpopular Washington establishment in announcing his candidacy for the presidency in 2016.

In a speech to a hotel ballroom full of raucous supporters in Louisville in his home state of Kentucky, the first-term senator set out a vision to appeal to a coalition of civil libertarians, fiscal conservatives and anti-war proponents on the fringe of the Republican Party.

Tapping the unpopularity of Washington by railing against the special interests of the political establishment and big government, Paul painted himself as an outsider, blaming Republicans and Democrats for the problems in the US.

The Christian senator took the stage at the Galt House hotel on the banks of the Ohio River to the strains of 1970s rock music and stood before a campaign banner slogan: Defeat the Washington machine; unleash the American dream.

The anti-establishment senator, a household political name since his nearly 13-hour filibuster in the US Senate about drone attacks on American citizens in 2013, is the second Republican to declare his candidacy, following another freshman senator, Ted Cruz of Texas.

Paul (52), a former ophthalmologist, will benefit from a base built by his father, Ron (79), the former Texas congressman who ran for the presidency three times and electrified a well-organised grassroots network of young libertarians, many of whom were new to politics.

Those supporters, who backed Ron Pauls isolationist foreign policy, have been less easy with the younger Paul, who has generally opposed military intervention but who said last year that war was a last resort and recently proposed a $190 billion (175 billion) increase in defence spending.

Entering the presidential race early, with 580 days to election day, Paul sought to challenge the perception that he is isolationist on foreign policy or weak-kneed on national security. He said: Conservatives should not succumb to the notion that a government inept at home will somehow succeed at building nations abroad.

I envision an America with a national defence unparalleled, undefeatable and unencumbered by overseas nation-building.

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Rand Paul enters 2016 US presidential race with battle cry to take America back

Nothing screams Im a libertarian like a creepy, cultish, rhyming campaign slogan, dont you think? Something like Defeat the Washington machine. Unleash the American dream, Sen. Rand Pauls new motto (as leaked to Politico), teasing the kickoff to his 2016 presidential campaign?

Cant you imagine glassy-eyed, libertarian-minded Millennials chanting that slogan, maybe wearing some kind of military-style yet vaguely hipsterish campaign uniform?

No, actually, I cant either. Rhyming slogans dont say libertarian to me; Pauls tweet seemed weirdly authoritarian, in fact. But on the eve of Pauls announcing a 2016 presidential run, nothing makes sense about his campaign branding, or the way the media simply accept it, in all its messy, massively self-contradictory glory.

So I write to give my colleagues one simple tip to improve their Paul campaign coverage: Stop calling him a libertarian. Stop it right now.

And a related piece of advice: Stop reflexively insisting hes going to appeal to supposedly libertarian-minded Millennials. Because hes not.

Robert Draper didnt create the Paul charade, but he seriously helped it along, in his New York Times magazine piece on the nations supposed libertarian moment last August. He saw the moment well-captured by Rand Paul, who was to the libertarian movement what Pearl Jam is to rock, Draper wrote, explaining.On issues including same-sex marriage, surveillance and military intervention, his positions more closely mirror those of young voters than those of the G.O.P. establishment.

Many good reporters and analysts have spent many long hours debunking Drapers assumptions. (I tried it here.) On issues of womens rights and LGBT rights, immigration, drug legalization and even military spending and intervention, Paul has either always been or has become a fairly standard issue Republicans.

Think Progresss Judd Legum runs exhaustively through the record, but here are a few highlights. First of all, hes staunchly anti-choice, supporting the Life begins at Conception Act and pretty much every other piece of anti-abortion legislation thats come before him. Hes got a 100 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee. To be fair, other libertarians have gotten away with being pro-liberty for everyone but women. Pauls father Ron, who was somewhat more genuinely libertarian than his son, likewise supported draconian anti-abortion laws.

And while Paul used to sound vaguely live-and-let-live when it came to gay marriage, he has toughened his rhetoric. He now says the idea of a marriage between a same-sex couples offends myself and a lot of people, and hes joined Rick Santorum in suggesting it may lead to interspecies intimacy. We learned last week that he doesnt even believe in the concept of gay rights, telling an interviewer in 2013, I really dont believe in rights based on your behavior.

Where libertarians tend to support liberalizing immigration laws and promoting more open borders, Paul has voted against any liberalization of U.S. immigration policy. He even cosponsored a bill with Sen. David Vitter to end citizenship rights for the children of foreigners born on this soil, when he first got to the Senate. Citizenship is a privilege, Paul said at the time, and only those who respect our immigration laws should be allowed to enjoy its benefits.

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Stop calling this man a libertarian: What 2016 campaign journos miss about Rand Paul

The Libertarian Angle - Communism and the Cold War
Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger discusses the hot topics of the day. This week: the national-security state #39;s hardening during the Cold War. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go...

By: The Future of Freedom Foundation

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The Libertarian Angle - Communism and the Cold War - Video