When US Representative and conservative rebel Justin Amash (R-MI) introduced his good friend, Senator Rand Paul, to a room full of Republicans at the Michigan Republican Leadership Conference on Mackinac Island, the guests continued to talk amongst themselves as though he wasn t even there. It was almost as though they had already made up their minds about Rand Paul before he ever uttered a word. They were clearly not interested in anything Justin Amash or his good friend had to say because, after all, they represented the obstructionists in the party. Rand Paul was just an isolationist like his father right?We got to the event late and by default, were seated only 3 tables back from the stage. We were just in time to catch Carly Fiorina s speech. Carly was riding high on new poll numbers that showed she had miraculously catapulted herself to the top of the field of Republican Presidential candidates.  The crowd went wild when Carly talked tough about ignoring Putin. In fact, the crowd seemed very attentive and fairly pleased with Carly s overall message, as they clapped like seals at all of the usual  I m going to fix what s broken (yawn) in Washington  Republican campaign talking points.It wasn t until about 30 seconds into Rand Paul s speech that we noticed the disrespectful chatter around the stage began to slow down. By the time Rand Paul began speaking about foreign policy, the eyeball rolling stopped, and you could have heard a pin drop in the room.We d like to share with you a portion of his speech in this video we took from our table. Leisa and I left that night feeling much differently about Rand Paul than when we walked into the room. He is smart, extremely witty and most importantly, he s committed to the same principles our Founding Fathers held so dear.After getting a chance to see many of the Republican Presidential candidates up close and hear them speak, Rand Paul came out on top in the minds of the voters who attended this 3 day event. Rand Paul received a hefty 22% of the vote, followed Carly Fiorina with 15%, RINO John Kasich managed to get 13.8% of the vote (although we re not quite sure why), Sen. Ted Cruz was at 13%, Jeb Bush had 9.7% of the vote, Sen. Marco Rubio got 8 %, and Donald Trump came in dead last with only 6% of the vote.Many of the pundits are attempting to paint Rand Paul as a  loser  and suggest that he drop out of the race and spare us of his boring defense of our Constitution. We hope that Rand Paul continues this fight and is able to get his message out to more Americans, who like the guests on Mackinac Island might be surprised to hear that most of what he says makes perfect sense.On a side note, we registered to vote and were told we would receive an email that would allow us to cast our ballot. We never got that email, despite sending more than one email to the MI GOP asking them to please send us our ballots. We won t say who we would ve voted for, but we ll give you hint it would have either helped the guy at the top or knocked RINO John Kashich down a notch. -Patty, 100% FED UP!