Rand Paul: Intriguing to Some, Scary to Others

Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post writes:

Rand Paul is the most intriguing — and for Democrats, perhaps the most frightening — figure in today’s Republican Party. The Kentucky senator, who is more than flirting with a 2016 presidential run, is making a smart play for the millennial generation that was key to President Obama’s twin victories and that his own party has convincingly repelled. Paul’s unlikely pilgrimage to the progressive precincts of the University of California at Berkeley offered the most convincing evidence so far that he is serious about carving out this.. third way space — and a demonstration of his potential appeal to this lost demographic, more attuned to personality than party

 Watch the video of Paul at Berkeley the other day, and you think: This guy doesn’t even look like a Republican, with his jeans and cowboy boots, his tie-but-no-jacket look, his mop-in-need-of-cutting coiffure. More important, listen to the substance, and it is difficult to detect much Republican in Paul’s remarks. Indeed, his cross-brand pitch was explicit, and exquisitely attuned to the you’re-not-the-boss-of-me ethos of the younger generation. “Now you may be a Republican or a Democrat or a Libertarian,” Paul began his speech. “I’m not here to tell you what to be.” [Read it all]