Rand Paul Straddling Presidential and Senate Campaigns
With strong support from Mitch McConnell.
Rand Paul is dealing with some tricky rules as he tries to run for president and hold on to his senate seat at the same time. Chris Moody of CNN reports:
Rand Paul’s tough choice
Rand Paul has a choice: Spend nearly half a million dollars to keep his increasingly longshot presidential ambitions alive in his home state or leave the Senate.
For now, he’s choosing to pony up.
Paul’s political future rests partially in the hands of nearly 350 Republican officials in Kentucky, who will decide Saturday whether to approve a costly plan that would allow him to run in Kentucky for president and the U.S. Senate simultaneously—and possibly salvage his chances of staying in electoral politics after 2016.
The proposal, which acts as a work-around of a state law that forbids candidates in Kentucky from running for two federal offices at the same time, would establish a presidential caucus in early March in addition to the state primary scheduled two months later.
If it’s approved, Paul would be allowed to run for president in Kentucky during the March caucus and also for his Senate seat in the May primary. But if it’s turned down, Paul would be forced to give up his Senate seat in exchange for a chance to win any presidential delegates from his home state.
Paul has one thing going for him: Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is in his corner.
Joseph Gerth of the Courier-Journal:
McConnell wants GOP to support Rand Paul caucus
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he still supports the idea of a caucus for Kentucky Republicans to choose their presidential nominee despite Sen. Rand Paul’s stalled campaign.
Speaking to reporters after addressing the Shelby County Chamber of Commerce and Shelby County Farm Bureau, McConnell said he expects the Republican Party of Kentucky’s 334-member Central Committee to approve the caucus this weekend.
“Look, all we cared about is giving Rand a chance in his presidential race,” McConnell said. “Because of the peculiarities of Kentucky law, all I asked of him was to defray the cost and he’s indicated he’s going to do that and so I think we’ll go ahead and do the nomination for president by caucus.”
Rand Paul has been in Haiti this week performing free eye surgery, but NBC News caught up with him and you can watch the video below.
Naturally, he was forced to answer a number of questions about Donald Trump, but he does speak about his campaign plans starting at the 3:35 mark:
Featured image via YouTube.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
I tend to like Rand Paul.
The fact that he is being supported by Sen. “Surrender” McConnell constantly gives me pause to consider if I am being misled.
Well, you may be being misled as to his chances.
Mitch McConnell may not be doing this if he thought Rand Paul had much of a chance of getting the nomnination.
Others in Kentucky openly oppose him, and MCConnell is only arguing Rand Paul should be given a chance.
Should the nomination be undecided by the time of the convention, McConnell will probably control most of the Kentucky delegates, and besides get Rand Paul to agree on whom to favor. Probably Bush, Kasich or Rubio, unless there’s somebody else by then. Defintely not Trump. Rand Paul is also against Trump.
What’s to wonder about? When McConnell used Paul’s support to crush the tea party candidate in the 2014 GOP primary, anybody on the top of the lawn knew that Paul defrauded the tea parties into getting him elected and that his affections were inside the beltway. If you wanted to pretend that somehow Paul’s behavior was excusable, well that’s on you.
More like ‘controlled’ than supported. McConnell and Paul each were facing a serious political problem. McConnell was being seriously challenged in the KY primary by a strong Tea Party candidate named Matt Bevin, while Paul was facing KY law which forbade him to run for both his senate reelection and the US presidency at the same time. So, a deal was struck. McConnell helped get KY law changed so Paul run for both the senate and the White House, and in return Paul agreed to keep his nose out of the KY primary race for McConnell’s senate seat and not endorse or otherwise help the Tea Party candidate dogging McConnell.
We each can decide what this says about Paul’s character and adherence to stated principles.
If Trump wants to run as a third party candidate, he has to decide well before the comvention.
I like him as a strong gadfly policy voice in the Senate. Period. Anything to do with McConnell is a major negative. Have to admire his work in Haiti, regardless of politics.
lol on this definition:
The term “gadfly” (Ancient Greek: μύωψ, mýops) was used by Plato in the Apology to describe Socrates’s relationship of uncomfortable goad to the Athenian political scene, which he compared to a slow and dimwitted horse.
This is why Paul is collapsing in the polls. Like a typical elitist, he’s trying to have it both way’s so he doesn’t have to actually risk anything, all at the taxpayers expense. The fact that he’s totally been neutered by McConnell is simply evidence.
Next candidate please.
What do you mean by “at taxpayers’ expense”? Didn’t you read the article? His campaign will pay for the extra expense of having the presidential caucus on a different day from the senate primary. So what’s your objection? What’s wrong with preserving a fallback? Even in the general election, Lloyd Bentsen, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, and Paul Ryan all ran for VP and congress at the same time.
“So what’s your objection?”
Laws are for the little people.
Which laws?
All laws
Stop playing dumb (unless you are dumb). Which laws do you claim Paul is treating as beneath him? There is no law preventing him from running for two offices, so long as the votes are not held on the same day. Now they won’t be, and the taxpayer won’t have to pay an extra cent, so as “walker” asked, what’s your objection?
For me, Rand pooed the scruch back during Ferguson when he went all “Pander Bare” with Sharpton, etc.
His lil’ light seems to be fading for this cycle. I think he might bear watching in the future, because I WANT to like him. The jury is still out if that particular sprout fell far enough from the nutty tree that is his father.
Sounds like McConnell has pretty deep hooks into Rand.
Not good – for him, or for us.
Only because Paul voluntarily struck a deal with McConnell.