How Rand Paul trolls his rivals

Paul doesn’t write the tweets himself: Roughly a half-dozen staffers have access to the account, and they post without getting sign-off from the the senator, according to Doug Stafford, Paul’s senior political adviser. But he is deeply involved with his Twitter feed, driven by the sense that he wants to be a different kind of Republican candidate who reaches out to new constituencies — and he sees social media as key part of that engagement.

It’s all part of a broader strategy to run a tech-savvy, “crowd-sourced” presidential campaign, where online communication is the first messaging priority and edginess is essential to cut through the clutter…

But other Republicans say that there’s a fine line between buzzy and juvenile — and Paul at times crosses it. Perhaps his most frequent target of late has been establishment favorite Jeb Bush, whom Paul regularly tweaks over his views on Common Core, the educational standards championed by the former Florida governor.

“I don’t think you want to be troller-in-chief,” said one prominent Republican digital strategist who isn’t currently working for a 2016 candidate. “This might be how they think they separate from the pack, reach out to younger people … I just think it’s pretty close to trolling, which we think is weird for a regular person, much less someone who wants to be leader of the free world.”