Despite Detroit flop, is Paul still on pace for 2016?

 

While Sen. Rand Paul has increased the voltage in his lightning-rod political status after his visit to Detroit last week, his strategic positioning within the Republican Party and his libertarian leanings still make him a viable 2016 presidential candidate.

Paul’s keynote speech at the opening of the Michigan GOP’s “African-American Engagement Office” in Detroit was surely a bust. Nearly all of the audience was white and engagement with the surrounding inner city community was nowhere to be found.

In his follow-up speech at the Detroit Economic Club, the Kentucky Republican’s trickle-down economic plan for reviving the Motor City encountered harsh criticism, given the fact that a majority of the city’s residents live below or near the poverty level.

In his third act, Paul gave a nationally broadcast TV interview in which he essentially said that the long-term unemployed would be better off having their jobless benefits abruptly cut off rather than letting the federal government allow them to continue to survive on the public dole, so to speak.

Yet, Dennis Lennox, a GOP activist and columnist for our sister paper, The Mount Pleasant Morning Sun, believes that Paul will benefit from his highly publicized efforts to expand the Republican tent. Tapping into the intense grassroots loyalties of his father, former three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul, will also benefit the junior senator from Kentucky, Lennox asserts.

Lennox summarizes his thinking this way:

"While any politician would love to have his — dare I say -- a cult-like following, the true believers aren’t enough to win …

“Sticking his middle-finger at the establishment may have won him the admiration of libertarian ideologues, but it made him unpalatable to the vast majority of Republicans who, setting aside his kooky eccentricity, sided with him on a litany of economic issues.

“…  His shrewd political calculus is earning him IOUs with everyone from Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell -- the embattled Senate minority leader
whose own campaign manager (once worked for) Paul, to Michigan GOP powerbroker Ron Weiser, a former U.S. ambassador under President George W. Bush and
state party chairman, who has mastered the art of raising money.
“Paul’s genuine outreach to other factions of the party will prove invaluable as he jockeys for the leadership of the party’s heart and soul.”