Rand Paul talks marijuana, immigration at CSN
Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul told a crowd in Las Vegas on Thursday night that his party needs to take a new approach and seek new ideas to appeal to Latino voters.
"We shouldn't be locked into our past, and I think sometimes Republicans, we're locked into our past," Paul said.
Paul, a U.S. senator from Kentucky, has been polling around 1 to 3 percent, near the bottom of a crowded field of candidates.
He spoke at an event at the College of Southern Nevada sponsored by the Libre Initiative, a Texas-based conservative group focused on the Hispanic community.
Speaking before a mostly Latino crowd, which included many CSN students, Paul slipped in and out of his admittedly rusty high school Spanish.
"I took many years of Spanish, but it didn't take so well," he said, adding with a smile that he sometimes spent more time in detention than in class.
Paul's libertarian positions have sometimes put him at odds with other GOP candidates. He has said he wants to let states set their own rules on marijuana.
And while he wants to make the U.S.-Mexico border more secure, he also called himself an "immigration moderate." Paul said he favors increased legal immigration, especially for people who could fill jobs Americans don't fill, such as farm and construction work.
Paul also told the crowd Thursday that he wants to provide educational opportunities for all children, including blacks and Latinos, in part by getting the federal government "out of the way" and eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.
Republicans need to either change their attitudes toward Latino voters, Paul said, or "resign ourselves to permanent minority status."
He said he'd like to see more people emulate Jaime Escalante, the math teacher who inspired poor Latino children in East Los Angeles to excel.
"I think it's a mistake to demonize groups of people to score cheap political points. It disgusts me, and it should disgust every American," Paul said in a reference to Donald Trump's harsh criticisms of Mexican immigrants.
Contact Eric Hartley at ehartley@reviewjournal.com or 702-550-9229. Find him on Twitter: @ethartley.
