Although Beltway observers have decided that Sen. Rand Paul's presidential campaign is on a losing trajectory, from an historical standpoint, he's doing precisely what many of the most successful aspirants did who won the presidency.

What's that?

Rather than bow to his party's powerful insiders, most of whom became influential during George W. Bush's decade leading the Republicans (as presidential candidate, nominee and incumbent), Paul's working to unseat them. He's working to change his party's leadership and, consequently, the factional composition and ideological bent of its governing coalition. (It shouldn't be a surprise that a plurality of these GOP insiders believe Jeb Bush will be their party's presidential nominee. Each knows which side his or her bread is buttered on.)

Paul is engaged in this arduous and oftentimes alienating partisan spadework because this is largely how parties adapt and evolve to meet a new era's political challenges. More fully, there are two distinct but not mutually exclusive processes through which parties change: 1) Party leaders change their positions to address current circumstances; and 2) those in leadership change to include advocates not aligned with the current party platform. As detailed in my book, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon (in 1968) and Ronald Reagan each sought to change the identity of those individuals with power in his political party rather than persuade the powerful that the party should change course. Hence, they understood that while it's often tough to replace personnel, it's much harder to change people. Notably, this is the strategy most frequently employed in business: When a corporate board wants to change an organization's culture, they change the organization's leadership.

And it's not like the Republican Party doesn't need a change in its organization's culture.

Those still skeptical that this path can lead to nomination success might well recall a junior senator from Illinois who upset the Democratic apple cart in 2008: Barack Obama. This is how he did it. Along with the help of partisans who were not aligned ideologically with the Clintons or enthusiastic about their return to the White House – from former Sen. Tom Daschle to bundlers David Geffen and Penny Pritzker – Obama changed the power structure of the Democratic Party. Then, with the help of votes from Independents and first-time voters during the nominating contests, he changed its coalition. Of course, Obama would likely not have been able to affect such a change in his party had Howard Dean's losing campaign in 2004 not already weakened the Clinton coalition.

And that's the rub with this strategy. It usually takes more than one presidential cycle to significantly alter a party's leadership. Recall that Roosevelt had help from Al Smith's losing campaign in 1928; Nixon had help from Barry Goldwater's losing campaign in 1964; and Reagan was helped by his own losing campaign in 1976.

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So, the salient question now is whether Paul in 2016 is more like Reagan in 1976 or 1980?