Manchester, N.H. — Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) issued a grassroots call-to-action Saturday during a speech in New Hampshire and called on both his fellow citizens to stand up and “fight for freedom” and the GOP to shed its timid image in favor of a more exciting stance.
Paul addressed a full house at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit and rallied the crowd with his strategy for revamping the Republican Party.
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“Now, some say we just need to dilute our message, OK, let’s just be a little more like the Democrats,” the Tea Party darling said. “Hogwash, it’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Our problem isn’t that we are too bold; our problem is that we are too timid.”
Dressed down in jeans and button-down white shirt, the Kentucky senator engaged the crowd with a call-to-action and asked those in attendance if they were going to “fight for freedom.”
“I, for one, have had enough. I, for one, will not waiver in my defense of freedom. I will not wilt in the face of adversity. I will stand and fight them at every point,” Paul said.
The Kentucky senator, a likely 2016 contender, called on his fellow Republicans to stand strong in their beliefs and abandon policies that not only reinforce his narrative of timidity — like pushing for “revenue neutral tax reform” and supporting the Export-Import Bank — but also assist the top 1 percent and rich Americans.
“If you want to be consistent, if you want to grow the movement, we cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people and Wall Street,” Paul said of the GOP.
The conservative senator has been ardent in calling for the GOP to revamp its image and has said before that the Republican Party must either “evolve, adapt or die.”
While some in the party argue that sticking with the status quo remains effective, young voters find Paul’s message to be on that resonates with them.
Phil Boynton, 22, told Red Alert Politics he agrees with the sentiments of Paul’s message. The University of New Hampshire student admitting that the Republican Party “must adopt or die” because they are not attracting the youth vote.
And Boynton’s concerns are felt by many young voters in the state of New Hampshire.
Patrick Nestor, a 19-year-old Saint Anselm College student, hopes that Paul’s message did not fall on deaf ears.
“I think that there is going to be a lot of people in the party that will fight against it because of who [Paul] is,” he said. “A lot of GOP war hawks and big government social conservatives will push back. Eventually they’ll realize they have no choice in the matter. We need to adapt to survive. …We’ve fallen into some statist positions that need to go if we are going to connect with the millennial generation.”
Paul, who has yet to announce whether he will run for president in 2016, told Freedom Summit attendees the Republican Party must not waiver in their beliefs in the United States Constitution and cited several juxtapositions of times when one freedom is substituted for another.
“Some will say, ‘you can have religious freedom and the Obamacare mandates.’ They’re mutually inconsistent. They cannot work together,” he said of Obamacare’s contraception mandate. “Some say, ‘Oh, just give up on your faith and you can stay in business. Or give up on your business to stay true to your faith.’ … We should not force people to buy things they do not want and go against their religious morals.”
