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The phone calls were confounding, until they multiplied. People at the top of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's network were being asked about a new group that wanted to turn donations into campaign wins. What, they asked, was the Concerned American Voterssuper PAC?

The short answer: A headache. The new iteration of the CAV super PAC is the childof a movement that mostly helps but sometimes bedevils Rand Paul. It was relaunched this week, with much fanfare, when long-time FreedomWorks CEO Matt Kibbe announced that he'd left the Tea Party group to become a senior PAC advisor. The new PAC would try to organize Iowa for Paul, starting with 40-full time organizers.Kibbe's goal, he told reporter Byron Tau, was to prevent 2016 from being another "train wreck for the GOP" by out-organizing the Republican establishment.

At FreedomWorks, Kibbe had endorsed Paul's work whenever he could. In 2013, he and FreedomWorks endorsed Paul's filibuster over the legality of drone warfare. In 2014, he stood behind Paul to endorse the senator's civil suit overthe NSA's bulk data collection program, "on behalf of our six million-plus members."

We already have 40 full-time field staffers in Iowa knocking on doors and making phone calls.

Jeff Frazee, president, Concerned American Voters

Yet people close to Paul discouraged Kibbe from building up his own PAC. It was nothing personal; it was just that the candidate had already sanctioned America's Liberty PAC. One source euphemistically described Kibbe's move as entrepreneurial, to emphasize that the senator had not been pining for a second super PAC.

"We have no animosity and Mr. Kibbe is free to support Rand in any way he likes," America's Liberty PAC Jesse Benton told Bloomberg in an e-mail. "America's Liberty PAC, however, will remain the only Super PAC endorsed by Senator Paul, and the only PAC that will host Senator Paul at events."

Benton, that PAC's lead strategist, has spent eight years in Paul's orbit. He became the spokesman forthe quixotic presidential campaign of his father, former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, in 2007. He went on to workwith Paul's congressional re-election committee, for his Liberty PAC, for the Campaign for Liberty (a non-profit grassroots group created in the wake of the presidential bid) and for his 2012 presidential campaignand during all that, he married Paul's granddaughter and started a family. Benton and Campaign for Liberty president John Tate were making America's Liberty PAC what Right to Rise PAC was for Jeb Bush, or what Priorities USA Action was for Hillary Clinton.

But Concerned American Voters pulled from another group of pro-Paul activists. Its president is Jeff Frazee, who ran Ron Paul's youth outreach campaign in 2008 and turned that into the still-growing Young Americans for Liberty. Its senior tech advisor is Steve Oskoui, president of the 2012 pro-Ron Paul Endorse Liberty PAC that convinced Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel to fork over $2 million. Thiel, famously, has resisted making a similar commitment to Rand Paul. While America's Liberty PAC is most famous (so far) for a WWE-styled commercial for Paul's PATRIOT Act filibusters, CAV is packaging itself as an on-the-ground disrupter.

"We already have 40 full-time field staffers in Iowa knocking on doors and making phone calls," Frazee told Bloomberg. "Our team has knocked on over 75,000 doors and made over 70,000 phone calls as of today. We're building a grassroots operation that the other candidates won't be able to compete with in Iowa. Based on polling and the responses we're getting back, it's certainly a state we think Rand can win."

Excerpt from:
A New Pro-Rand Paul Super PAC is Making Pauls Official ...