Free Republic

The National Rifle Association’s annual leadership conference is always a treasure trove of GOP smack-talk and an all-out constitutional liturgy — and if Friday night’s viral talking points are any indication, this year’s celebration ranks further right on the political spectrum than usual. Not that that’s surprising: it is the run-up year to a presidential election cycle, which means that the Republican machine was churning out even more harsh allegations than usual. Of course, one of the biggest showboats of the night was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who told political opponent Hillary Clinton to “come and take” away his guns,...

IOWA CITY, Iowa - Sen. Rand Paul called Friday for college tuition to be a tax writeoff in his first direct pitch to young voters of his presidential campaign. Paul used the power of the pocketbook, along with calls for electronic privacy and reforming the criminal justice system, to appeal to what he called the "Instagram generation," a constituency he sees as vital to his nascent presidential campaign. Paul blasted President Obama's plan for free community college, telling the crowd of a few hundred people, mostly students, that it won't work because someone has to pay for professors and facilities....

The Left has become very devoted to the strategy of defining Republicans with early hits. Conventional wisdom holds such tactics were particularly effective against Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate in 2008, and Mitt Romney on the top of the ticket in 2012. That’s why we have overheated and dishonest attempts to portray Senator Rand Paul as a short-tempered misogyinst, and a crusade to discredit Senator Ted Cruz as a spinner of tall tales, disconnected from reality. The interview between Cruz and CNBC’s John Harwood I mentioned yesterday – in which Harwood asked, “Why shouldn’t somebody listen to you and...

IOWA CITY, Iowa—Rand Paul kicked off his first public appearance in the Hawkeye State since launching his anti-establishment presidential campaign with a question that was meant as a rallying cry. “Do we have any liberty lovers here?” he asked a crowd composed mostly of University of Iowa students, who sported Rand stickers and responded with cheers and whistles. But if Paul’s going to have any chance of contending for his party’s nomination, he better hope their nonlibertarian-leaning parents feel the same way. The Iowa caucus will, of course, be the first major test for the entire GOP field—but the first-in-the-nation...

Have any of us already visioned what the GOP debates will look like? Who will be in the middle and who will be on the left and right of the leading candidate. Maybe we can already "Envision The Conservatives" on stage in a strategic order. I think we can all presume that Ted Cruz will be dead center. So who will be to the left and right of Cruz along with the other three or four. Try to go with an "Even Seven Candidates". Although by the time of the first debate we may be down to five or six.

So far, the 2016 presidential campaign is not about anything very much, excepting issues specific to the leading and emerging candidates. It has been mostly about controversies swirling around Hillary Rodham Clinton, including the legacy question, which she shares with Jeb Bush. And more recently the focus has turned to the qualifications and electability of the emerging GOP newbies, from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who stand in the way of a possible third Bush presidency. In none of this do we see anything that speaks to the general state of...

The party identification of American voters was one of the most hotly debated topics among analysts before the 2012 presidential election. Many Republicans thought there were roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, and so doubted polls showing President Obama with the lead. In the end, the polls were right. This week, a Pew Research report based on about 25,000 interviews in 2014 took a new measure of partisanship. Here are the most interesting findings: Partisan Leanings Favor Democrats Forty-eight percent of adults identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 39 percent who identify as Republicans or lean Republican....

Senator Ted Cruz’s announcement he’s running for president during a March 23 speech at Virginia’s Liberty University made him the first candidate to declare his candidacy official in the 2016 cycle. Here are five things to know about Cruz and his presidential run: 1. He wanted to be the first candidate to announce because he thought it would bring him attention. Being first out of the gate, his campaign hopes, will catch the eyes of both high-engagement Republican primary voters and the media—and, in the process, might slow or stop Governor Scott Walker’s rapid rise. From The New York Times:...

Five reasons why the Kentucky senator trails Ted Cruz in fundraising, but is still stealing the spotlight. If you’re a member of the Washington media, odds are you’ve spent at least some time over the past 48 hours discussing Rand Paul’s entry into the presidential race and his testy exchanges about abortion with an Associated Press reporter. Reporters and pundits have covered Paul’s debut for The Washington Post, NPR, The Huffington Post, and the Today Show. The Daily Beast offered space to the libertarian Cato Institute’s David Boaz to argue that yes, Paul can do it. In The Hill, Dick...

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) after a Town Hall Panel Discussion hosted by Steve Deace at the NICHE Homeschool Iowa Capitol Day at the Holiday Inn Des Moines-Airport/Conference Center in Des Moines on Thursday, Apr. 9, 2015.DES MOINES — The debate over religious liberty in Indiana spilled over into Iowa Thursday as four presidential hopefuls pledged to defend the rights of parents who home-school their children to worship as they choose and educate their children as they wish. Religious liberty is the “civil rights issue of...

I know, I know, “He’s not anti-war, he’s anti-intervention.” Although he’s not really anti-intervention either, at least not anymore. His speech today in South Carolina (which starts at 13:15 below) sounds a lot like the one he gave a few days ago in announcing his candidacy, but the backdrop, obviously, is … different. Message: This ain’t your daddy’s Paul campaign, and by “your,” of course, I mean Rand’s. Maybe the biggest X factor of the GOP primaries is whether Rand can keep true blue Ron Paul rEVOLutionaries in the same tent as hawkish mainstream conservatives, to whom he’s obviously appealing...

Ted Cruz backers have ushered in a new era for super PACs. Supporters of the Texas Republican presidential candidate made a bombshell announcement this week — that a network of four affiliated super PACs will have raised an eye-popping $31 million by the end of the week. The disclosure, coming within weeks of Cruz launching his campaign for president, has sent deep ripples through the political fundraising world. The idea of not one, but multiple, affiliated super PACs ostensibly working together to haul in donations for the same presidential candidate is unprecedented, campaign finance experts say. Veteran fundraisers point out...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is classic, too. You know these two guys, Heilemann and Mark Halperin, that we talk about a lot here? They've got this Internet show at Bloomberg, and they're classic. Halperin may be a little bit more informed about us than your average Drive-By Media person, but it doesn't do him much good. These are the two guys that write campaign books. They learn all the stuff that would kill a Democrat candidate, and they hold it for after the election for their book, it's those two guys. Halperin used to be at ABC, political director, whatever....

Yesterday Ed shared the news that the community of political experts was rather gobsmacked to find out that PACs associated with Texas Senator Ted Cruz had brought in a “record haul” in no time flat following his campaign announcement. While it would be lovely to pretend that money in politics doesn’t mean all that much and what really counts is grassroots support and a solid message, that’s simply not true. Does anyone really think Mitt Romney would have survived the 2012 fight without the mountains of cash behind him, both internally and through associated PACs? That’s a doubtful proposition at...

*Freshly minted 2016 GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul has a few good things going for him. He has talked back to the war hawks. He wants to radically rein in out of control intelligence spying. He wants to chip away at the draconian drug laws that still incarcerate mostly minorities for long stretches for petty drug crimes. This has brought lots of grumbles and raised eyebrows from GOP hard liners who say that he isn’t the right fit for the GOP trying desperately to take back the White House. But the one thing that Paul banks on to separate him...

(VIDEO-AND-AUDIO-AT-LINK)MILFORD, N.H. — Sen. Rand Paul claimed he’d be the Republican with the best chance of picking up black voters in the 2016 presidential campaign — and suggested a major scandal will soon threaten Democrat Hillary Clinton’s likely candidacy — during a stop here one day after announcing he’s running for the White House. “I’ve tried to expand the Republican Party by taking the message to places Republicans haven’t gone,” Paul said yesterday when asked by the Herald whether he is the Tea Party candidate in the race. “I’ve spent the last several years going to historically black colleges, going...

Yesterday was Rand Paul’s big day as the Kentucky senator announcement his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Like any baseball team on opening day, in theory his chances are as good as any other candidate, and given the expected crowded field competing for the nod, that’s still true. But though his Louisville announcement bash went smoothly, what followed hasn’t gone quite as well. Some of that is due to Paul’s personality turning media appearances sour. But just as important is the way the basic contradiction in his campaign strategy is undermining his chances almost from the start. Though Paul...

Two very different candidate test themselves with the Republican Party, and maybe the American people.Job one for Sen. Rand Paul in his new role as Republican presidential aspirant is to somehow distinguish himself from ideological doppelganger Sen. Ted Cruz and kneecap his rival for the GOP nod. Or so say some media outlets that may be driven as much by an appreciation for good political bloodsport as by a touch of political insularity. According to Bloomberg's David Knowles, "Both seen as conservatives just outside the mainstream of the party, Paul and Cruz will compete for support from the same voter...

In a relentless stream of Rand Paul-talk in the past 48 hours, three bits stood out for width of their perspective or freshness of their data. McKay Coppins at Buzzfeed reads the Paul campaign strategy as trying to be everything to everyone in his Party for maximal potential appeal. Some points from Coppins: On one side, there are those in Rand world who argue his best bet is to unite his core base of libertarian activists with elements of the GOP establishment and traditional donor class. In the other camp are advisers who say conservative evangelicals — many of whom...

Watching the ads that run during Hannity, it's not a great mystery to figure out who the show's target audience is: retirement savings plans, arthritis cream, and of course, Cialis. But speaking to Sean Hannity on Tuesday night—in an interview taped just after he announced his presidential run—Sen. Rand Paul made his pitch to expand the Republican party beyond the largely older, white party base. Hannity successfully pushed Paul to nail down his positions on topics from Iran ("we should not trust them with a nuclear weapon ever") to vaccines ("the benefits are a million to one, you should vaccinate...