Edward Snowden lifted the veil on America’s vast surveillance apparatus. But it was Rand Paul, the recalcitrant senator from Kentucky, who forced the suspension of powers used by the country’s spy agencies this week, in a high-stakes gamble he hopes will boost his campaign to be the Republican nominee for the White House in 2016.

No politician has done more to disempower the National Security Agency than Paul, whose likes to tell audiences on the campaign trail that what they do on their cell phone is “none of the government’s damn business”.

By his own admission, Paul’s latest gambit will be short-lived. The senator forced the expiration of surveillance laws introduced after 9/11 by delaying legislation that will almost certainly be passed in a few days.

Yet the widely expected passage of the the USA Freedom Act later this week will mark a more permanent victory for advocates of surveillance reform: a ban on the NSA hoovering up the telephone records of American citizens.

Paul and his allies argue the compromise bill does not go far enough. But in adopting a hard line, they can claim credit for forcing the Senate and White House to reluctantly agree to a set of a reforms they have long resisted.

Much of that can be put down to Paul’s combination of single-mindedness and tactical acumen, traits which make the senator a serious contender in the emerging – and wide-open – race for the Republican nomination.

Perhaps unfairly, Paul is often referred to as a “second-tier” Republican presidential aspirant, after Jeb Bush, the son of George Bush and brother of George HW Bush, Florida senator Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin.

Yet in the early caucus states of Iowa and New Hampshire, Paul is often cited as the dark horse to watch.

The Kentucky senator has adopted a more diluted brand of the libertarian politics of his father, Ron Paul, the anti-war Texan congressman who twice sought the nomination of the Republican party.

Rand Paul has toned down to broaden his reach, believing that his libertarian grounding can be repackaged to appeal to a wider electorate.

He has aggressively courted African Americans concerned about the racially biased criminal justice system and schmoozed with Silicon Valley donors rarely courted by Republicans.

It is unorthodox, but by design. One senior aide who works for the senator said that on their first day on the job, staffers were given a singular mandate: make friends with Democrats, and persuade senators across the aisle to partner on joint legislation that would appeal to liberals.

Paul’s two-year campaign to curtail US surveillance powers – in a partnership with leftwing Democrats – has been a case in point, although his efforts over the last 24 hours have been more as a one-man show.

The peculiar rules of the US Senate have long allowed individual senators to single-handedly block or frustrate legislation, for example with long, filibustering speeches that run out the clock on the allotted time for a bill.

Paul has used all the levers available to a senator to stand in the way of a bill in recent days, in full knowledge that the chamber’s failure to pass legislation would disempower the country’s spy agencies.

In doing so he has infuriated the White House, NSA and many of his Republican colleagues. Among the more irate has been the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who happens to be Kentucky’s other senator. McConnell has endorsed Paul for president, but he could barely conceal his contempt for his fellow senator in a speech on the Senate floor late on Sunday.

Looking toward Paul, McConnell complained that “a campaign of demagoguery and disinformation launched in the wake of the unlawful actions of Edward Snowden” had in effect led the country into “disarming unilaterally”.

It says a lot about the first-term senator that he managed to dismantle parts of the Patriot Act – one of George W Bush’s signature pieces of anti-terrorist legislation – enraging much of his party, and emerge claiming “victory no matter how you look at it”.

On paper, Paul is a rather improbable presidential candidate. The 52-year-old former opthalmologist is 5 ft 7 inches tall and dishevelled-looking. He is not especially charismatic, struggles to stir audiences with his speeches on the campaign trail and can look awkward interacting with supporters.

He has also acquired a reputation for brusqueness with journalists (he walked out of an interview with the Guardian in Iowa) and, unusually for an American politician, he hardly ever smiles.

Yet Paul boasts some rare political attributes. He has inherited from his father a large network of libertarian-leaning activists, particularly in New Hampshire, where Ron Paul came in second in 2012 after Mitt Romney.

He also enjoys taking risks and revels in the idea of swimming against the tide.

“People here in town think I’m making a huge mistake,” he said in defiant remarks on the Senate floor on Sunday, as he in effect rendered some NSA and FBI tactics inoperable. “Some of them, I think, secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me.”

Paul walked back that statement on Monday, telling a Fox News interviewer “hyperbole can get the better of anyone”, but the remark gave a glimpse into what critics insist is the senator’s achilles heel: a susceptibility to the charge that he is a radical, fringe candidate cut from the same cloth as his father.

That is a reputation that Paul has tried hard to shake, even going as far as to deliver a mildly hawkish speech in front of USS Yorktown, a decommissioned aircraft carrier in South Carolina.

Paul’s strategy is to be mainstream enough to come across as an acceptable candidate to Republican primary voters, but unusual enough to offer something genuinely different.

Still, the conventional wisdom among Republican political operatives in Washington right now is that the tightrope Paul is walking probably won’t lead to the White House.

Memories of Bush’s calamitous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are beginning to fade. The moment for a libertarian, anti-interventionist candidate has passed.

Yet even Paul’s detractors refuse to rule him out.



The Republican field of likely 2016 presidential candidates is already bewilderingly crowded.

Nine candidates have declared so far – the latest being hawkish South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham – and more than twice that number are believed to be preparing announcements in the coming weeks.

One top Republican official told the Guardian the party has for months been locked in secret talks with TV networks about how – or whether – it will fit all the candidates onstage for the primary debates. It will, the official admitted, be “a circus”.

Both sides have agreed to at least try to enable all declared candidates to line up together on one stage for the first debate in August. Thereafter, both sides will have to find a way to weed out the field, probably by leaving out candidates with the lowest national poll ratings.

Both the GOP and the TV networks fear legal challenges from candidates that don’t make the cut.

Against that backdrop, the first challenge for any Republican candidate will be standing apart from the crowd and getting noticed. On that measure at least, Paul is already in pole position.