“Karl Rove declares war on conservatism” was a Sunday headline on Breitbart.com, the news site named for deceased conservative champion, Andrew Breitbart.
It seems Karl Rove, the architect of Romney’s election night “shellshock”, is creating an anti-conservative GOP PAC designed to keep conservatives from winning. The anti-conservative PAC’s name, appropriate given the GOP establishment’s silver-tongued MO, is “Conservative Victory Project”.
This is unsurprising, since Rove’s moderate-playbook election night disaster left him with only one option: double down. He is doubling down.
Rove is blanketing his project with William F. Buckley’s “back the most conservative candidate who can win” rule.
This new anti-conservative PAC seems intent to scrub the GOP of candidates the establishment doesn’t control.
However, Grover Norquist has already pointed out the falsity of Rove’s pitch. Norquist said, “People are imagining a problem that doesn’t exist. We’ve had people challenge the establishment guy and do swimmingly.” Just maybe, the point isn’t to get rid of candidates that can’t win, but to get rid of candidates the establishment doesn’t control.
What makes the premise of this group most distasteful is Rove’s own behavior toward Todd Akin, Rove’s poster-boy for the “too conservative to win” tea-party candidate pool that he is trying to defeat.
It was Rove himself who led the charge to beat Akin, seizing on a campaign comment, and relentlessly hounding Akin on national TV. Rove declared Akin finished in his race, and sought to make an example of him, even when Akin was still ahead or close.
Is there any reason Rove’s scathing criticism couldn’t have waited until after the election? Of course not. The Democrat was clearly preferred. His premature post-mortem was trumpeted relentlessly, helping bring about Akin’s defeat.
This new PAC’s aim is counter-intuitive given the state of American politics and recent events.
The one thing everyone on the right agrees on is that the GOP must become more attractive to Hispanic voters.
Hispanics are reliably socially-conservative, including flagship issues like life and marriage.
However, Rove and his faction are leading the push for the GOP to get rid of the social issues, or at least mute them even more than they already are.
Giving away the best common ground you have with the main group you need to attract may seem bizarre and backward to people thinking for themselves, but it is also an established page in the defunct moderate playbook.
Ditching the social issues is exactly what the GOP establishment has always pushed for, and is a major reason for the ever-present grassroots/establishment friction that is strong in the GOP and nearly absent in the Democratic Party. Ditching fiscal conservatism has now pushed the GOP establishment to the brink.
The pro-life movement recently turned out 500,000 people in Washington for a peaceful march in favor of ending legal abortion. These numbers dwarf the capability of any side of any issue in American politics, including the paid professional Left. Still, the GOP establishment would have Americans believe alienating this unparalleled political juggernaut is the path to victory.
It doesn’t make sense, but fear never does. The cowardly GOP establishment are infamous for caring much more about avoiding enemy criticism than appealing to allies. Luckily for Democrats, the former is an impossible goal – a goal the GOP is 0-for-life accomplishing. The latter is not only possible, but is actually desired desperately by everyone but Democrats. The GOP establishment goes for the former and dumbly takes for granted the latter. Go figure.
Conservatives also point out that the GOP will expand it’s base by running candidates that average voters identify more closely with.
Rove’s establishment GOP faction, on the other hand, insists on running candidates with the look and feel of a Wall Street CEO. Their campaigns are then run directly at this group, and only secondly to other vote groups on the right.
“Gordon Gecko” is precisely the GOP caricature that Hispanics, and most everyone else for that matter, have never met, and certainly don’t trust.
Additionally, Mitt Romney was the GOP establishment’s gift to Obama. A flip-flopper on almost every conservative issue, Romney was the most moderate candidate available. He only beat more conservative candidates due to a deluge of ad money in states two weeks before each primary vote. Oh, Romney got the crossover voters and independents the entire establishment was so sure was the key. However, he failed to turn out the GOP base, and was crushed. “More of a bad thing, please,” is the establishment response to this.
We have had exactly one tea party election year that wasn’t hijacked by the GOP establishment – 2010. It was an historic year of victory for the GOP.
The fear-and-appeasement-minded GOP establishment needs to be rescued from itself if the party is to have any future at all.
–Breitbart article