Rand Paul's SOTU Rebuttal Is Super Desperate

President Obama delivered his eighth and final State of the Union address Tuesday night, and as usual, GOP leaders chose one of their own to respond immediately afterwards. The thing is, Rand Paul apparently didn't get the memo that his party chose South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to give the rebuttal, and not him. So he made his own rebuttal video, which he shared on social media. Unless he somehow thought he was the chosen one, Paul's self-appointed State of the Union response seems like a desperate attempt to revive his withering presidential campaign.

In the five-minute video, the Kentucky senator harshly criticizes Obama. "What we saw was a leader with a record of failure in search of any meaningful positive legacy," Paul says. But the same could be said of him. He asserts that under Obama, the national debt nearly doubled, the surveillance state expanded, and healthcare reform failed, while saying that the next president needs to have a balanced budget, rebuild an overextended military, and make health insurance affordable. Paul then lays out his plans to set term limits for members of Congress, enact a flat tax, return power to local governments, and vet potential immigrants.

Paul's response also mentions his plan to audit the Federal Reserve, and how his bill to do so was voted on in the Senate on Tuesday. "We don't have a president yet to sign it, but we must make sure that by the next State of the Union we do," Paul says, leaving out the fact that the Senate rejected his bill, making it impossible for a president to sign it any time soon.

Rand badly needed some attention, as he got a meager 4 percent in the latest Monmouth poll of New Hampshire Republicans and 2 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll in Iowa. His campaign also said that he will boycott Thursday's GOP debate, since he was knocked down to the earlier second-tier forum. This video was a frantic attempt to breathe some fresh air into his dying campaign. Unfortunately for him, that was obvious, and it probably won't do much good.

Making his own snazzy video rebuttal to the State of the Union isn't going to magically turn Paul's campaign around, especially since it was overshadowed by the official response delivered by Haley. However, I'm excited to see if he'll host his own debate Thursday night, asking and answering all the questions himself.