{"id":27435,"date":"2014-08-20T00:01:45","date_gmt":"2014-08-20T05:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27435"},"modified":"2014-08-19T15:56:17","modified_gmt":"2014-08-19T20:56:17","slug":"vice-com-prepare-yourself-for-president-rand-paul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/08\/20\/vice-com-prepare-yourself-for-president-rand-paul\/","title":{"rendered":"Vice.com<\/em> – prepare yourself for President Rand Paul"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vice<\/em> is not a venue that normally has nice things to say about any Republican, but they go out of their way to do so for Rand Paul in this profile by Grace Wyler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For the past two years, from the moment Ron Paul called off the Revolution and headed back to Texas, the political establishment has been eagerly waiting for his son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, to run for president. They\u2019ve watched with amusement as Paul popped up around the country \u2014 in Iowa and New Hampshire, at Evangelical powwows, Howard University, the ACLU \u2014 and at the top of early 2016 polls<\/a>. Unlike his father, it\u2019s hard to deny that he Paul is a \u201cserious\u201d candidate. But the idea that he could actually be elected President of the United States? That\u2019s never been taken very seriously.<\/p>\n

But with half of the GOP\u2019s 2016 bench trying to avoid prison time<\/a> and Democrats spinning their wheels in Obama\u2019s second-term rut, the idea of a President Rand Paul is starting to sound less and less crazy. On issues like criminal justice reform, mass surveillance, and drug policy, Paul is casting himself as Another Option, carving out new space as the candidate who can make room for both small-government libertarians and other voters \u2014 young people and minorities, mostly \u2014 who don\u2019t see either party as particularly effective or relevant. And some of what he\u2019s saying makes a lot of sense.<\/p>\n

Take Paul\u2019s comments about the events in Ferguson, Missouri. In an op-ed published by Time<\/em><\/a> on Thursday, the Kentucky Senator laid out a remarkably blunt, even angry, assessment of the racial tensions at the center of this week\u2019s riots, linking policing issues to his broader critique of the federal government.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

On other issues, too, Paul has been able to find unexpected common ground with voters outside of the aging, white GOP base. His views on issues like medical marijuana, federal sentencing laws, government spying, drones, and military intervention are much more closely aligned with public opinion \u2014 particularly among young voters \u2014 than those of any of his potential 2016 Republican rivals, and also of Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee. This is probably not, as last week\u2019s New York Times Magazine<\/em> suggested<\/a>, the harbinger of some national libertarian moment. But it does give Paul the space to expand his appeal with the younger generation of voters \u2014 something the Republican Party admits it needs to do<\/a> if it ever wants to win another presidential election.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vice is not a venue that normally has nice things to say about any Republican, but they go out of their way to do so for Rand Paul in this profile by Grace Wyler: For the past two years, from the moment Ron Paul called off the Revolution and headed back to Texas, the political […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,53,13],"tags":[188,550,573,517],"class_list":["post-27435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-politics","category-usa","tag-electionwatch","tag-libertarianism","tag-randpaul","tag-republican"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-78v","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27436,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27435\/revisions\/27436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}