WASHINGTON — Change? For sure. Hope? Maybe not so much.

That’s Rand Paul’s approach to winning the White House when the original hope-and-change candidate, Barack Obama, vacates it in early 2017.

Ready to enter the chase for the Republican presidential nomination this week, the first-term Kentucky senator has designs on changing how members of his party go about getting elected to the White House and how they govern once they get there.

He will do so with an approach to politics that is often downbeat and usually dour, which just might work in a nation deeply frustrated with Washington.

Since his election to Congress, and in the lead-up to his entry into the presidential race, Paul has favored blunt takes on America’s woes instead of the sunny earnestness that helped fuel Obama’s rise to popularity in 2007 and 2008.