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Sen. Rand Paul meets with local Republicans in Hiawatha, Iowa. He's made three trips to the state this year. Charlie Neibergall/AP hide caption

Sen. Rand Paul meets with local Republicans in Hiawatha, Iowa. He's made three trips to the state this year.

It's still more than 15 months until the Iowa caucuses, and no one in the crowded field of Republicans with presidential ambitions has announced. But things are already happening in Iowa, especially for Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Paul has reached out to Iowans who never considered voting for his father, Ron Paul, who made a respectable third-place showing there in 2012.

He's still popular with his father's old supporters. Many of them are in the so-called liberty faction of the Iowa GOP.

A group of them meet Tuesday nights in a Des Moines hotel bar for a gathering called "Liberty on the Rocks." These 20 or so liberty Republicans are mostly veterans of the 2012 Iowa campaign of Ron Paul. To them, it was a movement of ideas, not just politics.

For 26-year-old IT specialist Adil Khan, it's about Austrian economics. It's about abandoning policies of tax, spend and borrow. As he explains it, "this idea that if you tax from one area, it's going to be affecting a certain industry or it's going to be affecting the industry as a whole, and it really doesn't create anything."

For 42-year-old Jeremy Goemaat, who owns a computer billing company, it's about a return to the gold standard. Or some other standard private bank notes: "Is it the government's right to outlaw other currencies? Now, if you want to put your trust in small bank X, go for it."

They typically share a profound libertarian mistrust of the federal government, Keynesian economics, the federal reserve, drug laws, and interventionist foreign policies.

Twenty-nine-year-old Lexi Nuzum, who has a sales job with a chemical company, says the liberty worldview came to her when she was a college student, listening to Ron Paul on the radio.

Original post:
A New Brand Of Paul Gains Support In Iowa

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul,who recently assailed President Obamafor not acting more decisively against Islamic militants in Syria, sounded more like his old, cautious self after the presidents speech Wednesday night calling for air strikes.

Mr. Paul even agreed with Mr. Obamas statement that the Islamic State, known ISIL or ISIS, is not Islamic.

I think there was one important point that he was making about them not being Islamic or a true form of true Islam, Mr. Paul said on Fox News, pushing back on criticism of the speech from interviewer Sean Hannity. Im all in for saying we have to combat ISIS, but also the ultimate war, the long war, whoever knows how long ultimately, is going to need allies from civilized Islam.

In his speech, Mr. Obama had said that ISIS is not Islamic, adding that: No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISILs victims have been Muslim.

In his Fox comments, Mr. Paul also argued that past U.S. intervention in the Middle East has created chaos and fomented the spread of radical Islam, instead of squarely blaming Mr. Obama for the current crisis, as some of his fellow Republicans have done.

The nuanced remarks by Mr. Paul the most resistant voice to foreign intervention in the 2016 field contrasted with the no-holds-barred attack against Mr. Obama by a possible GOP rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. He called the presidents speech fundamentally unserious in a Fox News interview.

In a sign of his intention to position himself as a foil to Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2016, Mr. Cruz repeatedly referred to the Obama-Clinton foreign policy.

On one point Messrs. Cruz and Paul were wholeheartedly in agreement: The president is violating the constitution by failing to seek permission from Congress to wage war. Mr. Obama has said he has the authority to take military action in Syria.

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Rand Paul Sounds Cautious Notes After Obamas ISIS Speech

TIME Politics Foreign Policy Rand Paul Calls Obamas ISIS Plan Unconstitutional But he does support the intervention

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) agreed with President Barack Obamas strategy to combat the threat of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria on Wednesday night, but criticized Obamas methods as unconstitutional.

It doesnt in any way represent what our Constitution dictates nor what our founding fathers intended, Paul, a likely 2016 presidential contender said on Fox News. So it is unconstitutional what hes doing.

He should have come before a joint session of Congress, laid out his planas he did tonightand then called for an up or down vote on whether or not to authorize to go to war, Paul added. I think the President would be more powerful [and] the country would have been more united.

In his address to the nation Wednesday, Obama said the U.S. would expand its air campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) and provide funding to train and arm the Syrian opposition. He also reiterated his position that he has the executive authority to do so without congressional approval but that he would welcome congressional support as a sign of American unity.

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Rand Paul Calls Obamas ISIS Plan Unconstitutional

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), after spending six days in Guatemala this summer doing free eye surgeries, plans a similar pro bono mission for next summer, perhaps in China, he told POLITICO in an interview.

Paul, who traveled with three staff members, journalists from five news organizations, plus conservative filmmaker David Bossie, worked with six other eye surgeons. The group performed about 250 surgeries, and he did about 20 of them.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of a phone conversation with the senator, who spent 17 years as a practicing ophthalmologist in Bowling Green, Ky.:

(PHOTOS: Rand Paul visits Guatemala)

POLITICO: How were surgeries different in Guatemala than back home?

PAUL: In the United States, people are obviously pleased when they get their vision back. But its not always as dramatic as this, since most of these patients [were] at least nearly blind and some virtually blind. And so to get their vision back [its ]just an amazing thing to see the smiles, the hugs, the tears the day after [when the bandages come off].

POLITICO: Whats the difference between American and Guatemalan cataracts?

PAUL: The severity. I do pro bono surgery in Kentucky, as well, and I will see some cases sometimes that are nearly as bad as these, because most people have the ability to get them out. Whereas down there, maybe, a third of the people get theirs out, because [so many] dont have the resources to do it or the doctors to do it. The biggest form of preventable blindness . is cataracts. And it mostly can be restored by removing the cataracts. They also get more sun exposure than we do, so they probably have a little higher incidence of cataracts.

(Also on POLITICO Magazine: The most interesting man in politics)

POLITICO: What was it like to travel with an entourage?

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Paul mulls China medical mission

AP

Paul said the U.S. had helped facilitate the growth of jihadist groups like ISIS by leading or supporting the overthrow of dictators likeSaddam Hussein in Iraq, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, a country he now called a "jihadist wonderland."

Paul's point made Hannity interrupt. Hannity suggested that, if President Barack Obama had kept a stable force of U.S. troops in Iraq, groups like ISIS wouldn't have grown.

"What you're saying is that we created this," Hannity said. "I would argue that the war [in Iraq] was won, that the surge was effective, that we had an emerging democracy albeit an imperfect one and the only thing we needed to do was keep training forces on the ground."

Hannity suggested Obama's current actions were only needed due to a "vacuum" the president previously created.

"Which the president's now doing, which would've prevented all these cities that Americans fought, died, and bled for from being taken over by ISIS. I believe the vacuum was created by President Obama's policy."

Paul said he didn't disagree with Hannity's point, but the senator pushed back slightly by saying the overriding conflict among various Islamic sects has been going on for at least 1,000 years.

"We didn't create it, but we did allow a festering of chaos when we toppled the secular dictators," Paul said. "Every time the secular dictator has failed, chaos has arisen, and radical Islam has become dominant. Radical Islam is our enemy in those countries, so we need to understand how we got here."

Hannity proceeded to play a clip of President George W. Bush from 2007, in which he said pulling out of Iraq at that point would mean "surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaida" and "increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at a later date to confront an enemy even more dangerous."

"Senator," Hannity said, "could he have been more right?"

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Rand Paul And Sean Hannity Sparred Over Whether The Rise Of ISIS Is Obama's Fault