Paul pleads for equal treatment with Fiorina in upcoming CNN debate

Rand Paul, looking for a way to avoid missing a spot in CNN’s prime-time debate next week, wants rules changed to give him the same treatment as a woman.

The junior Kentucky senator’s floundering bid for the Republican presidential nomination is poised for another setback.

Under rules CNN is using to decide which candidates are included in its prime time debate Tuesday, Paul looks likely to be relegated to the second-tier debate of hopefuls whose average poll numbers fall short 3.5 percent nationally or 4 percent in New Hampshire or Iowa.

Paul told Fox News Friday that he wants the same treatment as Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief who successfully protested exclusion from a top-tier CNN debate. She convinced the network allow her in by tweaking its polling rules.

“We think if they give us the same treatment that Carly Fiorina was given last time, that you measure from debate to debate, that we do meet the criteria,” Paul said on the “O’Reilly Factor.”

“We want the same in equal treatment that other candidates have gotten in the past,” Paul continued. “We have a first-tier campaign and we don’t plan on being labeled by the mainstream media anything less.”

Paul’s plea is likely to fall on deaf ears. CNN faced heavy pressure to open the door to Fiorina, the only woman in the GOP field. There’s less interest in helping Paul.

The senator’s complaint could strike feminist critics as ironic. Like other GOP candidates, Paul, opposes legislation aimed at reducing a supposed pay gap between male and female workers. But Paul has used particularly strident language to denounce that bill, comparing the measure to communism.

“In the Soviet Union, the Politburo decided the price of bread, and they either had no bread or too much bread,” Paul said last year. “So setting prices or wages by the government is always a bad idea.”

While the context of that remark differs from the fight over debate inclusion, it is still likely to draw derision from detractors who see Paul as pushing CNN to rethink a business decision to limit the debate’s size.

Relegation would force Paul to debate Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and former New York Gov. George Pataki, all national security hawks eager to bash Paul’s comparably libertarian views on national security.

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