At the Reagan Foundation forum last night in California, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. explained that the GOP needed to become “bigger and more inclusive.”
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Vote in Term Limits “When the Republican Party looks like the rest of America, we will win again,” explained during a Reagan forum speech in California. “When we have people with tattoos and without tattoos, with ties and without ties, with suits and in blue jeans, then we win nationally.
“You know, I hardly know where to start. It’s kind of like Old MacDonald’s farm of scandals,” said Paul, who is the son of former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. “Here a scandal, there a scandal, everywhere a scandal. But you don’t have to fear. The president has now asked [Atty. Gen.] Eric Holder to investigate Eric Holder.
"That can only work out well.”
Paul went on to challenge Obama to “fire and prosecute anyone who used government power to punish political opponents.”
“I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, there is something profoundly un-American about using the brute force of government to bully someone,” Paul said. “And I’m dead serious when I say, if the president doesn’t hold someone accountable, I think he will have lost the moral authority to govern effectively.”
Paul did not spare his own party from criticism, noting the GOP’s failure to draw in minority voters in recent elections. He said the party could win in states like California by ending “welfare to big business” and tackling “over regulation” in an effort to create more jobs.
“We need to get away from the perception that we only care about big business and rich people,” he said. Republicans, he added, could make inroads by being more innovative on issues like education, championing school choice and reforms to turn around failing schools.
“The educational establishment has really has given up on many blacks and Latinos,” Paul said. “We can come in to the rescue because they are not willing to change anything to make education better.”
Through school choice and granting more local power to schools, he said, “We can be the people who come in and rescue people from a tragic life where the schools don’t serve them any good.”
Paul has also expressed openness to the immigration legislation that a bipartisan group of lawmakers is crafting in the U.S. Senate, but he has not been one of the leaders on that effort as potential rivalMarco Rubio, the senator from Florida, has been. “Latinos will come to the GOP when we treat them with dignity,” Paul said Friday.
The first-term senator added that Republicans have also turned off more progressive voters, particularly in California, with their stance on environmental issues. “I bike, I hike, I kayak, I compost,” he said listing his credentials, to laughter, and adding that he also plants trees and has tried without much success to grow a giant sequoia in his Kentucky yard.
