Senator Rand Paul taped his response to Barack Obama's in advance and posted it on YouTube.Ed Reinke/The Associated Press
Not to be left out, Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, added his own unofficial response to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address.
Taped in advance and distributed on YouTube, Sen. Paul stuck to his tax-cutting, smaller-government themes although, unlike last year, he lacked the Tea Party platform that gave him a national spotlight.
"The ticket to the middle class is not higher taxes," he said. "Economic growth will come when we lower taxes for everyone, especially people who own businesses and create jobs ," Sen. Paul said.
Later, after listening to Mr. Obama's speech, Sen. Paul lambasted the President for suggesting subsidies to big oil should end.
The President wants to " punish them for their success," Sen. Paul said, adding it was the oil and gas boom that was creating much-needed jobs in the United States.
The President has called for "a smarter tax policy that stops giving $4-billion a year to fossil fuel industries that don't need it, so that we can invest more in fuels of the future that do."
Sen. Paul said so-called alternative energy sources weren't creating significant numbers of jobs.
In his taped response, the libertarian and possible presidential hopeful called for a sweeping change in the fundamentals of U.S. society. "We must choose a new way, a way that empowers the individual through education and responsibility to earn a place alongside their fellow Americans in the most prosperous nation ever conceived."
Last weekend, in what some pundits saw as an opening shot in a still-distant political battle, Sen. Paul resurrected the Monica Lewinsky scandal that sullied former president Bill Clinton's presidency "One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn't prey on young interns in their office," Sen. Paul said. "And I think really the media seems to have given president Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that, and it is predatory behaviour."
Hillary Clinton is widely tipped as the Democratic front-runner for the 2016 presidential nomination and Sen. Paul may have designs on the Republican ticket.