Free Republic

Release dull, ultra-sanitized, uncontroversial autobiography that folks will own but never read. Check. Buy and memorize The Quotable Ronald Reagan. Check.Lose the beer gut. Camouflage the bald spot. Hire writers to concoct explanation for all that weed smoked in high school? Check. Check. Check.It is now safe to enter the Republican primary. But there is still one major problem left: the current state of the Republican party. Tea Partiers, evangelicals, establishment RINOs, Libertarians, neocon foreign policy hawks, and moderates. According to Dr. Stella Rouse, associate professor and Director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of...

On April 17, New Hampshire hosted a Republican Leadership Summit, which drew GOP presidential hopefuls and over 500 Republican activists. The horse-and-buggy show highlighted and defined the 2016 Republican field. Covering all 19 prospective candidates was a stretch, but I will share my insights on a few here. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: My Wisconsin skeet-shooter friend Margaret claims Walker is a "good man." Is that enough though to win the presidency? Billionaire election investor David Koch seems to think Walker will be the nominee. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) almost ruined the governor's reputation by saying, "I don't...

Caffeinated Thoughts completed a non-scientific poll of our readership from May 1-8, 2015. U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) leads overall being first choice for just shy of 37% of those polled. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) leads among Iowan readers with almost 29% saying he is their first choice. Our overall results (1st Choice): 1. U.S. Senator Rand Paul – 36.8% 2. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz – 19.6% 3. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum – 11.2% 4. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry – 8.0% 5. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal – 5.2% 6. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio – 4.0% 7. Former...

When the Tea Party began in 2009, even those of us at the heart of the movement couldn’t have predicted how it would permanently alter America’s political landscape. Just six years later, it’s undeniably at the heart of American politics in spite of countless attacks from the political establishment and from the national media. Because of the Tea Party’s strength and influence, candidates who call themselves conservative must prove their bona fides to successfully court any grassroots support at all. Sen. Ted Cruz is a great example. Clearly a Tea Party favorite, Cruz has stood strong in the Senate for...

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee will be entering a very different Republican primary field when he announces his candidacy Tuesday, one that will likely bring up the debate over where libertarians stand in the Republican party, while also facing more competition for social conservative voters than eight years ago. “Huckabee does have name recognition having been on Fox News all this time,” Tim Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa, told TheBlaze. “At the same time, after he won the caucuses here in 2008, there was a lot of concern that he wasn’t as conservative as some...

The Conservative Review hands out its first report card for 2016 Republicans Monday, and two candidates get schooled. According to the group, which was formed last year to score GOP lawmakers' adherence to conservative dogma, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky need improvement. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz earns top grades -- just as he used to at Princeton and Harvard Law. International Business Times got an early look at the ratings of the three Republicans who have officially launched presidential campaigns. The Review graded them on criteria including immigration, foreign policy and "moral issues" like abortion,...

Seasoned conservatives celebrated when Ted Cruz announced his bid for presidency. Mr. Cruz is the Tea Party's favorite candidate and he is despised by liberals. Ted Cruz refuses to set aside his belief in traditional values to appease "moderates" and "swing voters". Ted Cruz knows that we need to look to our freedom loving, Christian past to get this nation back on track. The sad thing is that Rand Paul also announced he will run. Mr. Paul is one of these "libertarians". Even the word itself, "libertarian" sounds too much like liberal. Rand Paul is liberal on social issues such...

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is putting a lot of emphasis on Iowa in his presidential campaign, is continuing to notch endorsements from some well-known activists in the state. Former Secretary of State Matt Schultz told the Quad-City Times on Wednesday he is endorsing Cruz for president. "I’m looking for somebody who’s going to stand up and fight for our country, and he gives me hope we can turn things around," said Schultz, who is now the Madison County Attorney. "He's not going to back down from a fight." In a letter to two dozen members of the Cruz...

10. He wants to rebuild the old Reagan Coalitions Cruz without argument is a constitutional conservative, unwilling to compromise with progressives if it means government grows even an inch bigger. His plan to win the presidency won’t involve shifting towards the mushy middle like previous GOP candidates, but instead reforming the old Reagan Coalition of Evangelicals, Conservatives, Reagan Democrats, and Libertarians to help him get to the White House. 9. He shut down the government and beat Rand Paul’s filibuster record During the fight to defund Obamacare, Cruz pushed his filibuster past the deadline for the government shutdown; while in...

Call it the anti-Rand primary. There are at least three Republicans who seem likely to run for president in part so they can attack Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s libertarian-leaning foreign policy stances on the campaign trail. These anti-Rand candidates — South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton and New York Rep. Peter King — are ramping up their criticism especially now that Paul has officially entered the race for the White House. All three are the longest of long shots when it comes to actually winning their party’s nomination. But each of them — national security hawks...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-04-20/can-ted-cruz-make-rand-paul-obsolete-

“The difference is purely in implementation. If you had a philosophical discussion on what the world should look like, there would be no difference.”(AUDIO-AT-LINK) Rand Paul’s brother says that when it comes to ideology, there’s “no difference” between his brother, the Kentucky senator and Republican presidential candidate, and his father, the former congressman and three-time presidential candidate. Ronnie Paul, the eldest son of the former congressman and sometimes-surrogate for his brother, was speaking with libertarian podcaster Israel Anderson. He said that both his brother and father held the same beliefs, there’s just a difference in the implementation of how to...

The other night as my wife Kelsey and I were getting ready for bed, we were talking about the 2016 presidential race and discussing how things would shape up for the first-in-the-nation caucus state – our home state – of Iowa. We had both heard that Ted Cruz was set to announce his candidacy at midnight, and were keeping a finger on the pulse of the reaction within our liberty-heavy political circles. My wife’s phone buzzed, and then I heard her groan. Another of our friends had asked her who we would be supporting for president in the state where...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Round one in the battle of anti-Establishment Republican presidential candidates goes to Sen. Ted Cruz. In competition for the Tea Party's vote in 2016, the Texas Republican has bested Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky with a campaign rollout that GOP strategists say exceeded expectations and was almost flawlessly executed. Announcing for president two weeks later, Paul accomplished nearly the opposite, forcing a swift recalculation about which candidate is best positioned to win over the party's insurgent wing and vie for the nomination. "Cruz had a superb rollout. He hit all the right notes," Republican guru Ed Rollins told the Washington...

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. (AP) -- Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul made no mention of the unarmed black man killed by a white police officer during a campaign stop just miles from where the shooting happened. Paul often says that U.S. criminal justice isn't equally applied, a statement he repeated at his rally Thursday. But since launching his White House bid Tuesday, the Kentucky senator has sidestepped questions about the high-profile South Carolina case...

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...

It is a genuinely interesting topic, if you are at all interested in Rand Paul, since his rise to political prominence was so dependent on his father Ron Paul, and his success since them at becoming a fully normalized and mediagenic hot property has to some degree been dependent on his not being his father. A bevy of sources on the eve of Rand's presidential campaign becoming officially official wonder: how is he going to deal with dear old dad? First, the New York Times, which quotes me explaining why things like dual personal appearances are probably not going to...

Rand Paul might have trouble courting some Republican voters who are wary of his foreign policy vision and unorthodox views on certain issues. But it doesn't appear that the junior Kentucky senator, who announced his presidential bid on Tuesday, will have to do much to win over Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp. and 21st Century Fox. It's become something of a quadrennial tradition for Murdoch, the billionaire mogul whose observations on GOP politics are watched very closely within the party, to weigh in on the race for the White House. Two parts of his vast media empire --...