Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican congressman beloved of many Tea Party supporters, has announced he is exploring a 2012 presidential bid.
The move is a key step on the official route towards announcing a final candidacy and thrusts the long-time Texas politician into a Republican field that has been more marked by hesitancy than any apparent fervent desire to take on Barack Obama.
Paul will now make a final decision in May. He joins a field of other Republicans who have also formed so-called "exploratory committees" that includes relatively well-known names like former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and former House speaker Newt Gingrich.
But many pundits see the emerging Republican field as short on the kind of name recognition and charisma that will be needed to challenge an incumbent president, even in the face of a still struggling American economy that has hurt Obama's poll ratings.
Some big Republican names, like Mississippi governor Hayley Barbour, have already announced they will not run and powerful figures like former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee also appear to be reluctant.
Paul announced his move to a small audience in an airport hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, which conducts the opening contest in the nomination race.
A win in the midwestern state is often seen as a vital springboard to eventual victory. Paul is a controversial figure whose anti-government views chime well with many Tea Party activists. But he also wants to slash the defence budget and is a well-known anti-war campaigner; stances which might not go down well with conservative Republicans.
He has also run for president before in 1988 and then again in 2008 when John McCain eventually secured the nomination. That race saw Paul fail to breakthrough electorally but he attracted a fervent core of supporters, who were often young college students, and that made him a virtual cult figure on the right. However, in Des Moines, Paul insisted that events of the last three years made another run more likely to succeed. "I believe there are literally millions of more people now concerned about the very things I talked about four years ago," he said, pointing to government spending, recent political clashes over budget cuts and a ballooning deficit.
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