Rand's grand plan
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has made key decisions about how to launch his presidential campaign for the 2016 Republican nomination, including a plan to headquarter his effort in Louisville and opting to run for re-election to the Senate at the same time he moves forward with the national race.
Coming off a midterm campaign blitz in 35 states, Paul has summoned a few dozen advisers - a mix of veterans of his father Ron Paul's insurgent campaigns and more mainstream GOP leaders -- for a closed-door summit at a Washington hotel on Wednesday to discuss his future plans.
In a POLITICO interview, the 51-year-old senator talked unblinkingly about the possibility of a run, and sought to draw a sharp contrast between himself and Hillary Clinton -- none too subtly raising the issue of her age. At 67, she is 16 years older than he is.
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"I think all the polls show if she does run, she'll win the Democrat nomination," he said. "But I don't think it's for certain. It's a very taxing undertaking to go through. It's a rigorous physical ordeal, I think, to be able to campaign for the presidency."
Paul, who will face a much more crowded field on the Republican side but starts out as a slight front-runner in public polls, has begun an aggressive early campaign against Clinton. In the interview, he argued that her hawkish position inside the Obama administration for military intervention in places such as Libya will stack up unfavorably against his views.
"Her main Achilles' heel is that she didn't provide an adequate defense for our consulate in Libya," Paul said during a trip to Georgia just before the midterms. "And also, she didn't think through the unintended consequences of getting involved in the Libyan war. So I think you'd have an interesting dynamic, were there a [Republican] nominee that was for less intervention overseas and in the Middle East and that's fiscally conservative. You've never seen that kind of combination before, and I think there's a lot of independent voters, actually, that might be attracted to that kind of message."
Paul reiterated his long-standing assertion that he won't officially decide about a presidential run until the spring, but his advisers have already laid out a timetable: They expect the campaign will be a "go" by mid-April, with an announcement as quickly after that as his staff can put together a fly-around to the early states.
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Before zeroing in on Louisville as Paul's likely campaign headquarters, advisers reached out to veterans of 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney's campaign to consult on the advisability and specific requirements of running a national campaign from outside Washington, deciding the symbolic importance of basing the campaign in his home state outweighed any concerns about easy access for Washington-based staffers and political operatives from across the country.
Within the next few weeks, Paul is set to announce that he'll run for reelection to the Senate in 2016 - a race that he is likely to run simultaneously with a presidential campaign. Kentucky has a law preventing a candidate from running for more than one office at a time, but Paul advisers believe they have found multiple ways around the restriction without changing the law or challenging it in court, including exploring changing the state's GOP primary to a caucus. If Paul won the presidential nomination, he might focus on that race and drop the Senate campaign.
That decision is not without political risk: Previous presidential candidates, including Vice President Joe Biden, have often faced criticism for running concurrent national and local campaigns. Any perception that Paul is hedging his bets could also undermine his effort to be taken seriously as a mainstream front-runner.
But there's little doubt at this point that Paul will start the presidential race as a serious Republican candidate. He is slightly ahead of former Florida governor Jeb Bush for the lead among potential GOP presidential aspirants in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls. But he has a libertarian philosophy and wariness of international activism that are at odds with the views of many in the party's establishment.
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Nonetheless, he's already built what top GOP operatives consider by far the most extensive operation of any of the party's presidential hopefuls. He has his own advance staff housed at RAND PAC, his political action committee, which over the past five years has raised $13.6 million and spent $10.7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And he is planning to open a Silicon Valley office to add ties and presumably fundraising heft among the libertarian-minded tech crowd.
Sen. Rand Paul joins in support of Sen. Mitch McConnell as they begin a multi-city campaign tour. | M. Scott Mahaskey
In a development that had top Republicans buzzing, Paul was endorsed for president last week by incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- a striking turnabout just a few years after McConnell favored Paul's opponent in Kentucky's 2010 Republican senatorial primary.
Headed into the presidential campaign, leading Paul advisers include Jesse Benton, a longtime Paul family operative, who lives in Louisville; Doug Stafford, who is considered Paul's chief strategist and leading planner of his presidential campaign; Nate Morris, an entrepreneur who recently was named to Fortune's "40 Under 40" list and has been a Paul door-opener in Silicon Valley and beyond; and Doug Wead, who has been helping with outreach to evangelicals. His media consultant is Rex Elsass, CEO of the Ohio-based The Strategy Group for Media.
In the states with early presidential primaries and caucuses, the team includes: John Yob, a Michigan consultant and former John McCain operative who is RAND PAC's national political director; in New Hampshire, Mike Biundo, who managed Rick Santorum's 2012 presidential campaign; and in Iowa, Steve Grubbs and A.J. Spiker, both former chairs of the state Republican Party.
His top outside foreign-policy advisers are Lorne Craner, a former assistant secretary of state for President George W. Bush; and Elise Jordan, a former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Sergio Gor, who heads Paul's communications team, is a social-media guru who turned a shot of Paul eating an In-N-Out cheese burger in San Francisco into the most-clicked image from one of the senator's California swings. With help from Gor, Paul has cultivated a mischievous streak that Twitter and Facebook love: He taunted Michelle Obama last month from a Dunkin' Donuts in New Hampshire. And on the night of the midterms, Paul had the idea for a collage of Clinton campaigning with various Democrats who had gone down - posted with the hashtag #HillarysLosers.
During the recent campaign, Paul was featured in advertisements for Senate candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire, using the midterms as a dry run for his own national campaign. Despite the skepticism of the GOP establishment, he lapped the field with his extensive campaign travel, frequent media exposure, and development of a canny message designed to appeal to voting groups that have traditionally shunned the GOP, including young people and African-Americans.
Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole's presidential campaign in 1996 and now is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's senior political strategist, said: "In any two-week period of this last six months, Rand Paul did more smart things to grow the party than everyone else combined. Going to Berkeley and barrios and ghettos - he's not afraid to go where no one else wants to go."
The Chamber, which has tended to favor establishment Republicans, enlisted Paul as a campaign surrogate for the midterms after strategists realized that libertarian candidates often were siphoning 6 to 10 percent of the vote away from Republican nominees. Chamber officials liked his anti-Washington image, and the appeal to younger voters that he inherited from his dad.
Still, Vin Weber, a partner at the Mercury public-strategy firm who is a longtime adviser to GOP presidential campaigns, said he sees considerable obstacles for Paul. "'Front-runner' implies he's most likely to win the nomination - I don't think that," Weber said. "Who's going to be a competitive candidate? Rand Paul is the surest - the capability to finance the campaign, a national network of activists, a platform to run on. He checks all those boxes better than anybody. But in compromising to make himself acceptable to the establishment, at what point does he lose those other advantages, and shed the things that make him attractive? His national base is not going to be for him if he becomes an establishment Republican."
On the trail, Paul has honed a message that emphasizes a rare area of agreement between the red and blue Americas - that Washington needs to work better. "My theory has been that we try to agree on too much and the bills are too big," he said in the interview. "If they were more narrow -- it's like immigration. We don't agree on 100 percent of it, but we agree on 50 percent of it. Why do we not pass 50 percent of it?"
Paul, who has set the ambitious goal of raising the Republican share of the African-American vote from 6 percent in 2012 to 33 percent in 2016, met with African-American groups in Ferguson, Mo.; spoke to the National Urban League convention in July; and regularly meets with small groups of African-Americans to talk up his plans for school choice and justice reform. "Until the Republican Party becomes more diverse, we are going to struggle," he said.
Paul argues that even modest success would make his campaign transformative in the mold of FDR for the Democrats and Ronald Reagan for the Republicans. "There's been very few people who have changed the demographics of how people voted," he said.
But one of Paul's biggest hurdles will be convincing top Republican donors - including ardent supporters of Israel - to give him the benefit of the doubt despite his past reputation as an isolationist. He took the first steps toward that with a foreign-policy speech in October, casting his views as consistent with those of past GOP stalwarts like Dwight Eisenhower and Reagan.
"It's to define myself about foreign policy rather than have other people define me," he said. "It's a competitive marketplace of ideas and some people ... want to knock you down."
As Paul traveled the country this year, he also held private sit-downs with rabbis and Jewish leaders in various cities. "I think we've spent a lot of time in the Jewish community, letting them know that our position is that we are very conscious of and supportive of our special alliance with Israel," he said.
As for Wednesday's summit, Paul played coy. "It's top secret -- how would anybody know that?" he quipped. "Man, you can't keep a secret in this town. ... It's getting people together to talk about how the message is resonating, whether or not we'll win battles."
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