Politico: “When Rand Paul touches down in Iowa
Friday, it will be almost exactly three years to the day after his
landslide 2010 Senate primary victory – an unlikely and decisive triumph
over the Republican establishment that instantly transformed Paul into a
national political phenomenon. Now, as Paul weighs a 2016 presidential
bid, a different kind of challenge confronts him: Can the plain-spoken
former Bowling Green ophthalmologist build a campaign to back up his
popular appeal? For all Paul’s success as a media brand and a mobilizer
of the conservative grassroots, the Kentucky senator has done relatively
little since 2010 to assemble a political machine around his own
personality. For now, the Rand Paul project is a high-wire act that
works largely without a net.”
Meanwhile, Paul tells Bloomberg that he’s “working to help his party find ways to become competitive in
states along the nation’s coasts where it has largely fallen out of
favor.”
