[caption id=”attachment_95157″ align=”aligncenter” width=”2128″] Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., speaks during the annual Fancy Farm picnic in Fancy Farm, Ky., Saturday, Aug. 2, 2014. (AP Photo/Stephen Lance Dennee)
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made the Sunday political news show rounds this week, with interviews on almost all channels discussing the 2016 presidential hopeful’s earlier comments about the Republican Party’s image problem.
Paul said Wednesday in Michigan, “Remember Domino’s Pizza? They admitted, ‘Hey, our pizza crust sucks.’ The Republican Party brand sucks and so people don’t want to be a Republican and for 80 years, African-Americans have had nothing to do with Republicans.”
“We’re also fighting 40 years of us doing a crappy job, of Republicans not trying at all for 40 years, so it’s a lot of overcoming,” he continued. “You got to show up, you got to have something to say and really we just have to emphasize that we’re trying to do something different.”
He didn’t shy away from this assessment on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“Our brand is broken. I don’t think what we stand for is bad,” Paul said on the show. “We have a wall, or a barrier, between us and African-American voters.”
Paul has been working to brand himself as a Republican who champions minority causes, from denouncing police militarization in Ferguson to tackling prison sentence reform and civil asset forfeiture abuse.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was also asked to discuss these comments on ABC’s “The Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
While he didn’t use the same vicious language as Paul, Priebus said these statements brought to light an issue he has been trying to work on within the party.
“What he said is that we are on the right track and that we are actually doing a lot of the things we should be doing, which is engaging Hispanic voters, black voters, Asian voters. Talking to women across the country, not just for four months for an election, but for four years,” Priebus said. “Which is what I have been talking about and, by the way, leading the way on in our party for the last two years.”
He also pointed out that he and Paul worked closely together and were on the same page in this fight.
Watch the ABC clip via Mediaite.
