'The party needs to be bigger, bolder and better, more inclusive,' Paul says. | AP Photos Paul quotes Kirk: GOP to 'boldly go'

Sen. Rand Paul thinks the Republican Party should take some notes from “Star Trek.”

On Friday, the Kentucky senator invoked “Star Trek” character Captain Kirk in arguing for a bigger and more inclusive Republican Party.


“Sort of like what Captain Kirk used to say, we need to boldly go where no Republicans have gone before. So we need to go to Harlem, East L.A., Berkeley, maybe even Hollywood, though that may be dangerous,” Paul said on Fox News, making a crack about Hollywood as a liberal hub.

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Kirk, the character made famous by William Shatner, vowed to take his crew “where no man has gone before.”

Paul was speaking from a Republican National Committee event in Memphis, where he and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), among others, are speaking this week. Both Paul and Rubio are considered to be potential presidential candidates in 2016.

“I’m at the Republican National Convention in Memphis, and I’ll tell them that the party needs to be bigger, bolder and better, more inclusive,” Paul said on Fox.

He added that the GOP cannot target the same constituencies as it did in 2008 and 2012, when the party lost presidential elections to President Barack Obama. But he said that if Republicans can reach out to a more diverse group of people, “we’re going to be the dominant party again.”

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He explicitly mentioned the need to target the African-American community, a group that has overwhelmingly favored Democrats in recent years. Paul said that, when it comes to helping black Americans, “we’ve tried 50 years of the Democrats passing out money and it hasn’t worked.”

The senator has spoken before about the need for the Republican Party to expand and target new constituencies. In a CNN/ORC International poll released earlier this week, Paul and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush were tied for the lead among potential GOP candidates for 2016.

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