Rand Paul announces 2016 presidential campaign

Rand Paul’s first full day as a presidential candidate included a lengthy exchange over abortion — one that arguably played in his favor.

A New Hampshire reporter was pressing Paul on his views on abortion and whether he supports any exemptions from restrictions. Paul arguably dodged the question, but took the debate to a much better place for himself. He flipped it back toward Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) — and to late-term abortion more broadly.

We knew Rand Paul had a pretty deep commitment to ending mass incarceration. But his speech announcing a 2016 run for president might have promised something more radical than even he would want: legalizing every type of crime, including murder and assault.

And while it’s clear that’s not what Paul actually wants to do, the line illustrates an important difference between Paul and many criminal-justice reformers on the left about how to fix racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is running for president — and he’s unmistakably a candidate of ideas.

Paul wants a much smaller federal government that does much less — and he’s laid out a detailed plan for what this would look like. On foreign policy, he wants to be far more cautious about using the military abroad — a challenge to his party’s orthodoxy. He wants to reform our criminal justice system’s sentencing and drug laws. And he strongly opposes abortion and supports gun rights.

Sen. Rand Paul is about to announce that he’s running for president — kicking off a long-postponed Republican civil war on foreign policy.

Unlike the rest of the likely GOP presidential field, Paul is a die-hard true believer in scaling down America’s involvement in conflicts around the world. That pits him against the mainstream, hawks in the Republican party whose ideas are sure to dominate the campaign. By running for president, Paul hopes to inject his ideas into the debate and shift priorities his party’s held for decades.