On Tuesday, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul intends to
announce his candidacy for the presidency in 2016, and he can already count on the support of the party faithful in his home state.
According to Politico, Kentuckians are "giddy" with excitement about the prospect of him running, and the excitement has been building for well over a year.
"We've never had a presidential candidate in our lifetime," the state's Commissioner of Agriculture James Comer, a longtime ally of Paul, told Politico. "I can tell an uptick in enthusiasm before the announcement next week."
"I think it would be great to have a Kentuckian as president," Hal Heiner, a former Louisville Metro councilman, told Politico. "I'd love to see Kentucky lead the country. We need leaders right now."
Questions, however, are already being raised about how Paul will stake out his platform without departing from his libertarian roots as he courts the GOP base.
Once considered a unique libertarian voice, Paul,
The Washington Post said, "is a candidate who has turned fuzzy, having trimmed his positions and rhetoric so much that it's unclear what kind of Republican he will present himself as when he takes the stage."
There are two specific areas that Paul appears to have shifted to a more conservative line: taking up a more hawkish position on foreign policy and courting evangelicals.
At one time, he pledged to cut the Pentagon budget, but last month proposed to increase it by $190 billion over the next two years.
Paul was noticeably silent on the furor that erupted over Indiana's religious freedom law and did not join the Republican chorus of skepticism about the president's deal with Iran.
"To the extent he sounds more like every conservative Republican, he sounds less interesting to libertarians. I don't see what he picks up by being a version of Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio," Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of the libertarian magazine, Reason, told the Post.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Paul has attempted to distance himself from his father Ron Paul's positions, which he once supported: not so libertarian, not so anti-establishment, not so anti-war.
"Executing this pivot has become a central challenge for Mr. Paul … as he seeks to reach beyond his father's base of libertarians and appeal to a wider audience. This adjustment requires the younger Mr. Paul to keep a distance from some elements of his father's legacy — his opposition to U.S. military engagement abroad, his uncompromising libertarianism and his deep hostility to GOP elites," the Journal said.
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