Rand Paul Says Hillary Will ‘Take Us Back To War’, Polls Aren’t As They Seem For Trump, And Iowa Paper Readership Backs Paul

Rand Paul is not shy about calling out his Republican or Democrat rivals on the campaign trail. Whether it be Trump or Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, all are fair game. According to The Hill, Paul took a direction that is oft taken by Democrats against the Bush Administration and other 2016 Republican presidential candidates. If you were to ask the average liberal Democratic voter who would be most likely to take the U.S. to war after the 2016 elections, they might say Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, but Senator Rand Paul has suggested Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton would be a far more formidable candidate for that title.

“It turns out that probably the most likely candidate to take us back to war is Hillary Clinton. The difference is President Obama and Hillary Clinton both supported arming the Syrian rebels, the Islamic rebels against [Syrian President Bashar] Assad. I wouldn’t have done that. They also supported toppling [Muammar] Gaddafi in Libya.”

Dr. Paul turned his attention away from Hillary Clinton specficially and took swipes at President Barack Obama and the usual call from some Republicans, 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls like Chris Christie, that he is not intervening enough in the Middle East.

“The interesting thing is while Obama gets blamed for not intervening enough, he’s actually intervened quite a bit in the Middle East and not to our benefit.”

According to Breitbart News, Senator Paul also took aim at Donald Trump, but not directly, as the Kentucky senator has in the past. In an interview with Meet The Press anchor Chuck Todd, he pointed out that, according to some of the polls, Trump has slipped from perceived front-runner status, and Todd pointed to the “frustration” he sees in the senator’s tweets about Donald Trump. He asked Senator Rand Paul to put this perceived frustration into words. The senator point out that the polls are flawed.

“Yeah, the interesting thing is, is that I think the polls are not scientific. A lot of people who follow polls never had any math classes. They don’t understand anything about standard error, standard deviation … And the problem is, is that they’ve been way wrong. I mean, look, we just had polling in the Kentucky race and a week before when they’re supposed to be most accurate they’re off 13 points. If I do have a frustration we’re being led by the nose and the news media is led by the nose to think somehow Trump is going to win this because of these polls. The polls don’t, I believe, capture who’s going to actually vote.”

Rand Paul points out that he has never seen a college student answer a presidential poll, and criticizes the media’s attention to them, allowing the polls to become a “self-fulfilling” news cycle item for the presidential race.

“We have great popularity with students. I had 1,000 students at George Washington a few weeks ago. 1,000 students at Iowa state. and the thing is, have you ever met a college student that has answered a presidential poll? If we turn them out we’re going to shock people like you’ve never seen. But the problem is, is that it’s a self-fulfilling cycle. Really in the end nobody knows and we ought to have a little bit more of an even approach to how we approach the news.”

The Iowa caucuses are coming up in less than a month, and that will again be the primary to watch to kick off the 2016 presidential primary race. If you were to go off the readership at the Daily Iowegian, Sentator Rand Paul would crush Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Paul leads the poll at 530 votes, as Ted Cruz comes in second with 215 votes, and with 132 votes sits Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

[Image under CC BY-SA 2.0 Flickr| Courtesy Of Gage Skidmore| Resized|Cropped]