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Rand Paul 2016 Announcement Date: Senator Eyeing April 7 To Launch Presidential Campaign

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Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul is expected to announce plans to join the party’s 2016 presidential field on April 7, multiple sources inside Paul’s camp told MSNBC on Tuesday. The announcement, scheduled to take place in Louisville, Kentucky, will serve as the official campaign launch for Paul, who has spent months traveling to early voting states to assess whether his largely libertarian message will catch fire with the party’s conservative base.

“This will be an official announcement, not an exploratory committee,” said a source close to Paul who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his plans. “Everything will happen pretty quickly over the next couple of weeks,” another source close to Paul told msnbc.

Doug Stafford, executive director at RandPAC, Paul’s political action committee, had no comment.

Paul is set to travel to the four major early voting states immediately after the announcement, aides said. He will host events in Milford, New Hampshire, April 8; Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina on April 9; Iowa City, Iowa on April 10; and Las Vegas, Nevada on April 11.

Paul, a 52-year old ophthalmologist, is the son of Ron Paul, the well-known Texas libertarian congressman who sought the presidency three times, in 1988, 2008 and 2012. The younger Paul has worked to reassemble his father’s passionate supporter base while also extending his reach into more traditional Republican audiences. Rand Paul has also courted voters not traditionally allied with the GOP, including young people and African-Americans. He recently joined Democrats including Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Cory Booker of New Jersey to introduce legislation loosening federal restrictions on the use of medicinal marijuana. (Read more from “Rand Paul 2016 Announcement Date: Senator Eyeing April 7 To Launch Presidential Campaign” HERE)

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Some Top Democrats Are Alarmed about Clinton’s Readiness for a Campaign

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Senior Democrats are increasingly worried that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not ready to run for president, fearing that the clumsy and insular handling of the nine-day fracas over her private e-mails was a warning sign about the campaign expected to launch next month.

Few Democrats believe that the revelations about her un­or­tho­dox e-mail practices as secretary of state are a substantive issue that would damage Clinton with voters, and many said she performed adequately in a Tuesday news conference defending herself.

But in interviews Wednesday with The Washington Post, current and former Democratic officeholders and operatives from across the country raised serious questions about her and her political team’s strength and readiness for a 2016 presidential campaign.

“She’s tried to put the day of reckoning off, but it’s come now, and I don’t think she can stand another couple of weeks of this without her structure in place,” said Jim Hodges, a former governor of South Carolina.

Some Democrats said Clinton’s initial refusal to provide answers in the growing e-mail controversy smacked of arrogance and a worrisome bunker mentality — and that the controversy was a self-inflicted wound. (Read more from “Some Top Democrats Are Alarmed about Clinton’s Readiness for a Campaign” HERE)

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Ben Carson Gearing Up for Presidential Run After Claiming Obama May be Guilty of Treason [+video]

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Photo Credit: Getty Images
Ben Carson Hires Fundraising Adviser

By Alexandra Jaffe. Ben Carson is expanding his fundraising operation, bringing on a senior adviser with ties to Newt Gingrich to run his small-dollar fundraising efforts if he runs for president.

Mike Murray, president and CEO of TMA Direct, a direct-mail firm that does work for conservative organizations and outlets ranging from the National Rifle Association to National Review, would oversee Carson’s grassroots fundraising, if the retired neurosurgeon makes a play for the White House.

He’s expressed interest in a run, and has begun testing the waters in early primary states and hiring staff. In January, he hired a former Michele Bachmann staffer to help him build his operation in Iowa. (Read more from this story about Ben Carson HERE)

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Ben Carson: Obama May Be Guilty of Treason

By Alex Griswold. Appearing on Newsmax TV, famed neurosurgeon and potential 2016 Republican candidate said he believes President Obama could be guilty of treason if he continues to block Homeland Security funding for national security.

(Read more about Obama being guilty of treason HERE)

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Jeb Bush is Unelectable According to This Conservative Group [+video]

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Photo Credit: Daily Signal By Ken McIntyre. A conservative group’s new online ad portrays Jeb Bush as “unelectable” to the presidency because the Republican presented a public service award to the Democratic favorite, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Clinton received the award, the video emphasizes, on Sept. 10, 2013 – one day short of the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead and stained her legacy as secretary of state.

(Read more about the conservative group saying Jeb Bush is unelectable HERE)

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Hotline’s GOP Presidential Power Rankings

By National Journal Staff. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and a surging Scott Walker top Hotline’s new GOP Presidential Power Rankings – in part because they’re that good, and in part because the competition has been so bad.

If you’re going to make mistakes in the presidential race, it’s better to make them early. But Rand Paul and Chris Christie have stumbled so often they’ve slipped from the top-tier slots they occupied in the first round of the Power Rankings we released last month. Walker is moving hard in the opposite direction.

We rank would-be candidates’ chances of winning the Republican nomination based on their individual strengths and weaknesses, political organizations, poll numbers – and on the odds that they even decide to run. No serious candidates are officially running yet. Here’s how it looks if they do:

1. Jeb Bush (Previous ranking: 1)

The former Florida governor stays on top for now, if only because his fundraising prowess — charging $100,000 per ticket at a recent Wall Street event — is unrivaled among his Republican peers. But the past few weeks have revealed chinks in Bush’s armor. For starters, his first major policy speech in Detroit was flat and uninspiring; it wasn’t until the Q&A section that Bush came to life and spoke with energy and urgency about his candidacy. Worse was Bush’s failure to properly vet CTO Ethan Czahor, who was pushed out after reporters found a history of offensive remarks on social media and elsewhere. Bush aspires to be a hip, 21st-century campaigner. But his team’s failure to investigate the background of a major hire — whose 177 tweets could have been reviewed in a matter of minutes — raises serious doubts about the agility and tech savvy of the emerging Bush operation. Remember: His last winning campaign was in 2002, before Twitter even existed.

(Read more from this story HERE)

Jeb Bush Launches ‘Right to Rise’ PAC

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By Rebecca Berg. Gov. Jeb Bush on Tuesday will take another big step toward potentially running for president, filing the paperwork for a political action committee.

Bush announced the new leadership PAC, called “Right to Rise,” with a video posted to social media in English and in Spanish. In the video, Bush said the PAC will “support candidates that believe in conservative principles to allow all Americans to rise up.”

A website for the fledgling PAC promoted a similar mission statement.

“We believe passionately that the Right to Rise — to move up the income ladder based on merit, hard work and earned success — is the central moral promise of American economic life,” the website reads. “We are optimists who believe that America’s opportunities have never been greater than they are right now. But we know America is falling short of its promise.”

The idea of the “right to rise” has its roots with Abraham Lincoln, who popularized the political idea of rising from rags to riches. He did not use that exact language, although lauded Lincoln scholar Gabor Boritt later did. (Read more about what Jeb Bush launches HERE)

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Jeb Bush: I will not join the fight against homosexual marriage, respect the tyranny of the federal courts

By Nia-Malika Henderson. With 69 words, likely White House contender Jeb Bush staked out a position on same-sex marriage that boils down to this: I’m not my brother; I’m more like the pope.

Whereas George W. Bush carried the evangelical flag on same-sex marriage, energizing a cross-cultural section of voters in key swing states, Jeb Bush has essentially waved the white flag while also nodding to his Catholic faith. . .

We live in a democracy, and regardless of our disagreements, we have to respect the rule of law. I hope that we can also show respect for the good people on all sides of the gay and lesbian marriage issue — including couples making lifetime commitments to each other who are seeking greater legal protections and those of us who believe marriage is a sacrament and want to safeguard religious liberty. – Jeb Bush

. . . Holding together those evangelicals, who see the march toward legalizing same-sex marriage as an affront to their faith and a culture war worthy of a might fight, will be much trickier for Bush. He has said, quite simply, he won’t join that fight.

This will put him at odds with, especially, Mike Huckabee, who has deep ties to evangelicals and has threatened to leave the GOP if party leaders bow to more a more centrist stance on same-sex marriage. (Read more from this story HERE)

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