WCF Courier - Rand Paul Seeks To Rally College Students Around His Platform

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By Christina Crippes

Young people are difficult to rally to the polls, but Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul hopes to change that dynamic in 2016 by laying out an agenda he believes will appeal to those unlikely voters.

The U.S. senator from Kentucky has been touring 11 college campuses in Iowa seeking to get 10,000 college students to the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses. He visited Wartburg College in Waverly on Tuesday, where 150 people -- mostly students -- heard his platform.

"We think that the platform that I represent has a great deal of attraction to kids," Paul told The Courier ahead of the event.

Three policies in particular he thinks appeal to young voters: The government should not be collecting their phone records, nor putting them in jail for minor drug offenses nor sending them to war.

Paul's 20-minute speech focused mostly on the last proposition.

"There's an alarming number of people on the Republican side and the Democrat side who I'm afraid will get us involved in World War III if we're not careful, because they have a very simplistic and juvenile notion that we have to beat our chest," Paul told the crowd.

Paul said his non-interventionist position separates him from the front-runners in both parties as well as many other candidates. He said both Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump have supported no-fly zones over Syria, which he opposes.

"It's the dumbest idea, I think, that has come along in a generation, and yet Hillary Clinton is for it, and so are the majority of the Republicans," Paul told The Courier. "Maybe we should defend what our American interests are, debate what American interests are, and defend those.

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