IT'S TIME TO START PREPARING YOURSELF FOR PRESIDENT RAND PAUL
By Grace Wyler
Aug 17 2014
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’ve watched with amusement as Paul popped up around the country—in Iowa and New Hampshire, at evangelical powwows, Howard University, the ACLU—and at the top of early 2016 polls. Unlike his father, it’s hard to deny that he Paul is a “serious” candidate. But the idea that he could actually be elected President of the United States? That’s never been taken very seriously.
But with half of the GOP’s 2016 bench trying to avoid prison time and Democrats spinning their wheels in Obama’s 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—young people and minorities mostly—who don’t see either party as particularly effective or relevant. And some of what he’s saying makes a lot of sense.
Take Paul’s comments about the events in Ferguson, Missouri. In an op-ed published by TIME Thursday, the Kentucky Senator laid out a remarkably blunt, even angry, assessment of the racial tensions at the center of this week’s riots, linking policing issues to his broader critique of the federal government.
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