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For Rand Paul, campaign season is just getting started.

Less than a month before the end of the 2012 election, the first-term Kentucky senator is embarking on his most vigorous effort yet to expand his national profile.

Over the past week, Paul used his political committee — RAND PAC — to launch television ads in the Ohio, West Virginia and Florida Senate races, hammering incumbent Democrats on foreign aid. That offensive will intensify in the coming weeks, Paul advisers said, with an additional two or three Senate races on the Republican’s target list.

When Paul’s leadership PAC reports its fundraising haul later this month, a Paul strategist said RAND PAC will have more than $1 million in the bank. Paul intends to put that hefty sum to active use: the TV ads he has begun to air bolster congressional efforts to block foreign aid to Libya, Egypt and Pakistan. Paul describes the measure as a response to attacks on American diplomatic outposts in North Africa and Pakistan’s imprisonment of a doctor who helped the U.S. locate Osama bin Laden.

Paul has ramped up his political travel, too, making trips across Kentucky’s northern border to stump for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in Ohio. Later this month, he’s slated to appear in New Hampshire as a Romney-Ryan surrogate — Paul’s second visit in recent months to an early presidential primary state, after a spring trip to Iowa where Paul visited with top evangelical organizers.

If all that sounds like the maneuvering of a man who hopes to run for president in 2016 or beyond, Paul and his advisers don’t rule out that possibility. But, they say, Paul’s increased national presence — and especially the TV campaign from his PAC — have more to do with his passionate opposition to gratuitous overseas spending than any long-term political goal.

“It’s about the issue. I mean, what happens to me – who knows?” Paul told POLITICO at Thursday night’s vice presidential debate here in Danville. “We have limited resources as a country and I’m not for sending it to countries that are burning our flag, disrespecting us, imprisoning a doctor who helped us get Bin Laden. I say if you want to be our ally, act like it.”