Rand Paul and Nate Morris were thousands of miles from their home state of Kentucky — and the United States — when Morris­ realized just how fixated Paul was on a certain address back in Washington.

It was January 2013, and Morris, a 34-year-old entrepreneur from Lexington who has been a door-opener for Paul with big-money GOP donors, was touring Israel with Paul. The two have traveled several times to Silicon Valley and Manhattan, where Morris, a big fundraiser for former President George W. Bush in 2004, has introduced Paul to friends in the banking, venture capital and tech communities.


“We were getting off the bus at the Dead Sea,” Morris said, and Paul was kibitzing about what he might ask then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her upcoming appearance on Benghazi before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Morris pointed at Paul and cracked: “This’d be a nice contrast in 2016.”

“I was joking,” Morris said. But Paul wasn’t.

He clearly had the given the matter a lot of thought. “I think you’re right,” Paul said, according to Morris.

“We could have an interesting narrative in a general election.”

All of which is to say that when Rand Paul, 52, stands before a carefully chosen crowd at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville on Tuesday, it will prove one of the most anticlimactic presidential announcements of modern times. The Kentucky senator will be doing little more than dotting the final “i” (as in, it’s official) in a long-telegraphed campaign for the White House that began four years ago in the first moments after Paul was sworn in as senator.

“Within the first year of the Senate term, he really started to focus on it,” said a former aide.

In fact, the only reason Paul didn’t run for president in 2012 was that his father, Ron, with whom he shared a Washington apartment and an ideologically fraught mentor-mentee relationship, was considering his third presidential bid. But the father is now retired — along with the brand of fiery, uncompromising libertarianism Ron Paul became identified with — and the son believes his time has come to implement the strategy he has been planning for so long.

The real groundwork for Rand Paul’s announcement Tuesday started in a Capitol Hill townhouse just days after the November 2012 election.

Mitt Romney had just lost. Republicans failed to recapture control of the Senate. And Barack Obama was preparing for four more years.

The freshman senator closeted himself with about 10 people — Rand’s brain trust — at the home of Rex Elsass, his ad man, and divulged his ambitions. Attendees included Debbie Hopper, a longtime ally of Paul’s father, and top political aide Doug Stafford. The main topic was how to support legislative proposals aimed at showcasing what Paul still believes is his biggest attribute: His uniqueness.

Another part of the discussion focused on ensuring an infrastructure was developed in key early primary states. Paul viewed his dad’s 2012 presidential campaign as an opportunity to expand his base, campaigning hard for him in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Jesse Benton, who served as communications director for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2008, and manager of his 2012 campaign, said that Rand demonstrated his political precocity way back in 2007, as the campaign struggled. The younger Paul had a lot of ideas about how the elder Paul’s campaign could be better run ­and injected them into the campaign through Benton.

“Rand and I would talk fairly regularly,” Benton recalled. “I liked a lot of his ideas. I made them better, and then pitched them around the campaign.” Most had to do with “media hand-to-hand combat.”

But later on, Rand Paul also knew that he could never win simply as Ron Paul’s son. After Romney was nominated in 2012, Rand Paul stayed on the campaign trail. He used his political action committee to attack Sen. Joe Manchin, after the West Virginia Democrat voted against Rand Paul’s controversial plan to withhold foreign aid. And Paul actively sought to help Romney, even speaking before the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, at a time when his father’s faltering campaign was squabbling with Romney’s team about seating some Ron Paul delegates.

All these moves by the younger Paul were viewed as a clear attempt to broaden his appeal beyond his father’s base. And by waiting until the 2016 cycle, he was able to nurture relationships throughout Washington on both the right and the left. He had meals with conservative intellectuals like Stephen Moore, broke bread with Al Sharpton and Cory Booker, and even lent his expertise as an ophthalmologist to give Harry Reid advice on his injured eye.

Yet despite his efforts to win over the GOP establishment and move to the middle, Paul continued to believe that his biggest advantage was that he had stood apart, even among the GOP. There was the sharply conservative budget he proposed in 2011 to cut $500 billion in just one year, five times more than the House Republican plan. There was the furious effort to slash foreign aid to Egypt, Libya and Pakistan. And then there was his failed attempt in 2011 to filibuster a four-year extension of the PATRIOT Act.

Paul knew he needed to do more, however. So as they sat down at the meeting at Elsass’ townhouse in 2012, the group brainstormed about ways to continue to broaden his appeal so that in 2016 he would be able to break through a contested GOP presidential primary.

Paul wanted to show that his kind of conservatism could appeal in purple and blue states, discussing issues like criminal justice reform, economic freedom zones in poor urban areas like Detroit, a more moderate plan to handle illegal immigrants and to continue to push his views for a less aggressive foreign policy.

“The underlining tenor of all of it was: How do we position him for 2016?” one attendee said of the meeting.

All those plans began to jell in May 2013 during 13 fateful hours on the Senate floor, when Paul filibustered the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director by launching a crusade against the United States’ policy on the use of unmanned military drones. Americans, he contended, should not be targeted by drones on U.S. soil.

It was an argument few politicians wanted to quibble with, other than staunch defense hawks like Lindsey Graham and John McCain. But Paul suddenly was able to inject — at least for a time — his brand of libertarianism into the political mainstream in a way few other politicians could. With anti-government sentiment high in the wake of the Edward Snowden’s disclosures about surveillance and national weariness after the long and bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even liberals were attracted to Paul’s rhetoric. He was immediately dubbed a 2016 front-runner.

“If there was a moment, that was it,” said one of Paul’s confidants.

In 2014, Paul further tried to broaden his appeal by making a special push to help reelect Mitch McConnell who was facing a tough challenge from a tea party candidate. Paul was in heavy demand on the campaign trail in key Senate races. But he was unable to help flip the Kentucky Statehouse; as a result, he will have to perform some legal maneuvering to ensure Kentucky law won’t prevent him from running for the Senate and president at the same time. McConnell has been extremely skeptical about Paul’s plan.

In November, Paul’s planning began to get more serious.

His brain trust gathered once again at the Liaison Hotel in Washington, but this time the meeting was much more serious — and specific. Message mavens were brought in to sharpen Paul’s pitch; finance operatives to discuss a plan to raise millions of dollars to help Paul’s campaign; and there were discussions about a Paul super PAC; and grass-roots operatives who would be courting conservative activists.

The idea, however, was still the same: Paul must sell his unique brand as a libertarian-minded conservative with appeal to younger voters, making him a far more attractive candidate than the rest of the field. Along the way, Paul and his advisers mapped out a plan to articulate a message geared toward a more inclusive Republican Party, and to rid himself of any taint of racism or isolationism that might have attached to the libertarian label. On criminal justice, privacy, intrusive surveillance and other issues, he told POLITICO earlier this year, he is seeking to become part of “a right-left continuum where right and left are coming together.”

Paul had been sounding this message as far back as an April 2013 speech at Howard University where Paul declared himself and his party to be a friend to the African-American community.

“Republicans are often miscast as uncaring or condemning of kids who make bad choices. I, for one, plan to change that,” Paul said. “I am working with Democratic senators to make sure that kids who make bad decisions such as nonviolent possession of drugs are not imprisoned for lengthy sentences.”

He added: “Because Republicans believe that the federal government is limited in its function — some have concluded that Republicans are somehow inherently insensitive to minority rights. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Over the past six weeks or so, Paul’s advisers have sought to promote the image of a candidate who has left behind his father’s military isolationism and is strong on defense.

In late March, Rand pushed a pro-defense spending bill — a departure from his previous support of Pentagon cuts. His advisers have also scheduled him for a richly symbolic campaign event on Thursday in South Carolina — on the deck of the World War II-era aircraft carrier the USS Yorktown.

Rand campaign insiders are betting that he’s going to come under sharp attack for his views on defense, and they’re girding for that. Many of them are convinced that Graham is getting into the race solely to be a Rand instigator and to go after him in debates. (Taking his cue, Graham gibed on “Face the Nation” on Sunday that when it came to the Iran nuclear deal, “I think everybody on our side, except maybe Rand Paul, could do better.”)

In a speech last October, Paul sought to portray himself and his new approach to conservative realism as “a return to traditional Republican values that recognize our limits and realize our might.” As he has done for months, Paul sought to straddle the gulf between neoconservative hawks and neo-isolationist libertarians that has come to define the Republican spectrum. While he said that Americans “don’t yearn for war,” he also had rare words of praise for an unusually interventionist president, George W. Bush, who Paul noted “successfully brokered 14 new free-trade agreements and negotiated three others that are the only new free-trade agreements approved since President Obama took office.”

Still, Paul has a long way to go in escaping his purist libertarian past, which has led other GOP candidates like Ted Cruz to paint him as an extremist. In a lengthy profile last year, Sam Tanenhaus of The New York Times noted that “tucked into” Paul’s famous filibuster were references to a 19th-century law and a Supreme Court ruling restricting government power that served as dog-whistle signals to libertarians that he still has the faith.

Either way Paul still has months before the primaries to redefine himself, and he’s all in — and so apparently is his family.

While Paul has wanted to run for president since becoming a senator, his wife, Kelley, has been more skeptical. She has worried about the spotlight the campaign would place on her family and their three boys. And she was furious at the media coverage in the 2010 Senate race over pranks Paul pulled as a college kid at Baylor, something she feared would grow much worse during a presidential run.

But Paul has said repeatedly that he would run only if his wife is on board, and it appears she is.

“The whole family is behind it,” one adviser said.

Perhaps that trip to the Dead Sea was a sign. Nate Morris, Paul’s traveling companion, said the water was cold and he didn’t want to swim. But Paul and his wife, he said, both jumped in.