'I think our party needs something new, fresh and different,' Paul said. Paul: 'Seriously' weighing 2016 bid

Before Thursday, Rand Paul — tea party firebrand — hadn’t vaulted into the top tier of Republican power players.

But all that seemed to change this week. The Kentucky Republican senator showed serious clout by holding a 13-hour filibuster to delay the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s candidate to head the CIA, John Brennan.


Paul himself seemed to appreciate that this was an important moment for himself, confidently acknowledging to POLITICO in an interview that he was “seriously” considering running for president in 2016.

( PHOTOS: Highlights from Rand Paul’s filibuster)

“I think our party needs something new, fresh and different,” he said. “What we’ve been running — nothing against the candidates necessarily — but we have a good, solid niche in all the solidly red states throughout the middle of the country.”

But he suggested previous Republican candidates have had limited appeal to voters beyond the Republican base.

“We have to figure out how to appeal to the West Coast, New England [and] around the Great Lakes area. We need to figure out how to appeal to the blue-collar voters that voted — that were Democrats that voted for Reagan and I think are drifting back because they see us as the party of the wealthy. … I do want to be part of making the Republican Party again more of a national party, less than a regional party, which I think we’re in danger of becoming.”

Paul appeared genuinely stunned Thursday by both the amount of positive attention he was getting on the filibuster and the support he received from his colleagues.

(" The Scrum" Podcast: Rand Paul’s filibuster)

Before long, it was clear that Paul’s one-man crusade was moving from the outside to the mainstream, as he was joined by one of the GOP stars and a potential 2016 competitor, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, as well as a Democrat, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden. Within hours, Twitter was ablaze with #StandWithRand, support from conservatives, and mainstream Republicans and tea partiers were fundraising off his name.

Sen. John Thune, who is also mentioned as presidential timber, said the filibuster was “enormously helpful” to Paul. “Standing in there, hanging in there — taking punches, fighting the good fight, always, I think, is helpful to the people whose views you’re trying to represent out there. … It’s a deeply held principle with him,” said Thune. “And I think it’s kind of contagious. A lot of people, when they saw him going and going and going, people were saying, ‘Wow, if he’s going to keep this going, we want to go down and help him out.’”

“I don’t think you can underestimate how big of a moment this was. If the Iowa Caucuses were tomorrow, he would win in a landslide,” said conservative talk radio host Steve Deace, who lives in Iowa. “Imagine taking what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin and combining it with what Mike Huckabee did with Chick-fil-A, that’s how big this is.”

Deace added that the grass roots have been yearning for a Republican in Washington to show he has a backbone, “and he did that [Wednesday] night,” he said.

(WATCH: Rand Paul filibusters CIA nomination)

Steve Schmidt, the Republican strategist who ran John McCain’s 2008 effort, said Paul could be a formidable 2016 opponent because he is a “conviction” candidate. “I can’t tell you how many hours and meetings are devoted to discussing the candidates vision in a campaign,” said Schmidt. “Well, you wouldn't have to do that with him. … He’s got the right combination of principles, oratory skills, smarts and showmanship.”

( Also on POLITICO: Rand Paul's moment)

With one play, Paul also went a long way in separating his brand from that of his father — who cared more about being heard than winning — and dispelling lingering notions that he’s an ineffectual fringe player riveted on a narrow set of beliefs. Paul seems intent on being more pragmatic, witnessed by his endorsement of Mitt Romney before his dad officially dropped out of the race last year.

In the interview, Paul said he would run a different campaign than his dad — and would run to win.

“Obviously,” he was aiming to win , Paul said.

“I think there is somehow a middle ground between what is maybe more pure libertarianism and what is more traditional, conservatism, and I think somewhere in between, there is a role as long as that person can somehow bring about an expansion of the party,” he said.

The lingering effects of the filibuster are likely to last for a long time for Paul.

It wasn’t so much what Paul did but how he did it that’s generating excited chatter in political circles. The self-described libertarian senator and tea party hero calmly asked the administration to explicitly clarify its position on dispatching targeted drones on American soil. His language was often quite conciliatory to the president. There was no demagoguery or shouting, no name-calling or gamesmanship.

“What Rand Paul did in the well of the Senate breathed new life into the sails of the Republican Party that was sorely needed,” Iowa Republican Party Chairman A.J. Spiker, who served as co-chairman of Ron Paul’s campaign in the state. “I think it went way beyond the liberty crowd. The party needed that.”

South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Chad Connelly said everyone was buzzing about the speech at a lunch. “There’s no doubt in my mind that this raised his profile,” said Connelly, who recently spent a week with Paul in Israel. “It made a positive impression in most people’s mind, even if they disagree with him, … at least standing up to Obama and getting an answer.”

Paul is a physician who had a thriving ophthalmology practice in Bowling Green, Ky., when he decided to run for Senate in 2010. Although active in his community, Paul’s biggest assets were his father’s name and his support from the tea party, then at the peak of its power. Despite an all-out effort by the senior senator from the state, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the GOP establishment, to defeat him in the primary, he won easily.

From the moment he arrived on the Hill in January 2011, few saw Paul as doing anything other than positioning himself to run for president in 2016. And McConnell played no small role in helping him burst from the ranks of junior senator. As McConnell faces a potentially brutal reelection race in 2014, he has looked to Paul to help him ward off any primary opposition from tea party candidates.

In return, McConnell has given Paul powerful access to the process. McConnell is often afforded the ability to introduce amendments to Democratic legislation. From the get-go, it seemed priority was often given to Paul amendments, issues that he insisted he deserved a vote on. He often lost, but Paul was able to build a record of activity on principled issues during his first two years.

Most Democrats have viewed Paul as a fly in the ointment — a carper who has delayed legislation until he gets his way. “If all 100 senators exercise every right they had every day, where would we be?” said a senior Democratic aide. “He doesn’t want to legislate. He wants to demagogue.”

Before the filibuster, some mainstream Republicans had privately complained that his antics often did more harm to his own party than to Democrats. He tried to hold up the National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, by attaching an amendment on “when life begins.” He has introduced 100 pieces of legislation but has co-sponsors for only a quarter of them.

Some deride him as a man in a hurry — someone who is aiming to take a shortcut to the White House by grand-standing on a few issues. McCain couldn’t contain his irritation Thursday when he accused Paul of diverting attention from a serious foreign policy discussion to the “realm of the ridiculous.”

While the party stood behind Rubio’s response to the State of the Union, Paul created a distraction by giving the tea party response to the president’s speech .

Still, few would disagree with the words of one senior Hill Democrat, who has worked with Paul: “Say what you want about him, but you cannot ignore him.”

The combination of tea party values and libertarian beliefs gives Paul credibility among a number of demographic groups. The right loves him because he’s staunchly anti-abortion rights and pro-Second amendment. He has the potential to attract Latinos with immigration views that mirror most liberal Democrats. He supports giving those already here a path to citizenship. He has skillfully portrayed himself as anti-Washington at a time when voters are sick of Congress and politics as usual.

If Paul does run in 2016, one of his biggest challenges would be to knit together an eclectic coalition of tea partiers, swing voters who are civil libertarians, young people, his father’s movement followers and some mainstream Republicans.

The latter group could be the biggest headache in the primary season. While many Republicans share his conservative ideology, many establishment Republicans believe the tea party has hurt the GOP. But at least for today, it sounded as though party stalwarts couldn’t talk him out of running. Only his family could do that, he said. “You know, when I was running for the Senate, we didn’t realize how difficult it would be,” he said. “On many nights, my wife was home crying with the abuse we got, that we got, and, you know, some of it was really you take personally.”

Jonathan Allen, James Hohmann and Manu Raju contributed to this report.