Paul: If You Label Some Conservative and Others Not, 'You Miss What's Going on' in GOP

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called it a “mistake” for people to label some in the Republican Party as “conservative” and others not.

Paul made the comments on Fox last night after host Megyn Kelly noted, “Jeb Bush was considered to have taken some sort of a shot at conservative Republicans yesterday suggesting that the GOP doesn’t need conservatives to win the White House and what it needs is a candidate who would be willing to lose the primary in order to win the general.”

“I think your first mistake is when you talk about conservatives in the third person, if you don’t consider it’s a ‘we’ rather than ‘them,’ you miss what’s going on in the Republican Party,” Paul replied. “We are a conservative party. As a conservative, I can’t understand really even referring to conservatives in this third person.”

The senator announced yesterday that he’s running for re-election, while his campaign teams figures out how he might run for president at the same time.

“Right now we’re only announcing for one office, so it’s really not a controversy” of how he’ll legally run for both in Kentucky, he told Fox.

“But let’s say, hypothetically, in the spring we’re having this discussion again and we were considering running for the nomination, I think there are many different ways it could be done. Probably the simplest way is the primaries in Kentucky are controlled by the party and we could simply move up our primary, make it a caucus, we’d be more relevant and then the law wouldn’t apply. So that’s probably the easiest way to fix things should I decide to run,” Paul said.

“Is the message that I’m bringing to the country, is it viable? Is it something that’s enough different that Republicans will pause and say, you know what? This is a Republican that can attract African-American votes. This is a Republican that can attract independent votes. Is that going to resonate enough to pull new people into the party so say hey, this is a party big enough to win Illinois, a party big enough to win Pennsylvania and Ohio again. That’s what the debate will be about. We’ll see things come down. I’ll make my decision probably in the March-April timeframe.”