1 Rand Paul Senator, Kentucky The Most Interesting Man in Politics. Jon Lowenstein/NOOR

A civil liberties-loving peacenik with millennial appeal? Who’s willing to show up even at a midsummer NAACP convention to talk to a near-empty room? There’s no doubt Rand Paul is turning out to be a different kind of Republican, bringing libertarian—and contrarian—ideas to the national stage in a novel and calculated blurring of Washington’s otherwise rigid ideological battle lines.

Paul, the 51-year-old ophthalmologist son of libertarian gadfly Ron Paul, has made a concerted move from the political fringes over the past year; now he’s on a mission to remake his party, too. The GOP must “evolve, adapt or die” in the wake of two successive national defeats, the Kentucky senator insists. And, more than any other potential Republican presidential contender, he is taking his own advice. Paul’s ideas offer an utterly different Republican approach to questions of equity, education and fairness in America’s treatment of minorities, for instance—a post-partisan theme he has emphasized by teaming up with Cory Booker, the African-American former mayor of Newark turned freshman Democratic senator. Paul’s instinctive libertarianism, meanwhile, plays well with America’s pro-pot, pro-gay marriage younger generation, and the senator is aggressively wooing free-market millionaires for political support (and donations) in traditionally liberal Silicon Valley.

We need to have working-class folks, we need to have people with earrings, nose rings, tattoos, ties, without ties, ponytails, no ponytails.” Rand Paul, to the New Republic

His renegade ways have led to clashes, most notably on matters of foreign policy, with fellow Republicans, from Texas Gov. Rick Perry to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who brand Paul an isolationist. But while Paul certainly favors minimal engagement abroad and has joined the Senate’s most liberal members to rip President Barack Obama on his killer-drone and National Security Agency spying programs (with a lawsuit against the president on the constitutionality of the NSA dragnet still pending), Paul knows he will need support from establishment GOP politicians, fundraisers and media moguls if he runs in 2016, and so has softened his stance on various issues—leaving him open to charges of opportunism, if perhaps making him more electable.

If there’s one commonality to Paul’s disparate interests, it’s that he is a politician with ideas designed to overturn the party’s status quo. “Imagine what a general election would be like if it were myself and Hillary Clinton,” Paul quipped to the New York Times. “You’d totally turn topsy-turvy the whole political spectrum.”