Takeover (34 page)

The Cruz campaign removed the political consultant class and replaced it with “a new political infrastructure powered with low cost, state-of-the-art, voter contact technologies.”

Still, the Cruz campaign was not an “everyone do their own thing” operation—it was disciplined, and kept focused on the message of change in Washington and electing a “boat-rocker” who would follow limited-government constitutional conservative principles as the next senator from Texas.

But could the Ted Cruz campaign that Lorie Medina and other Texas Tea Party movement activists organized work elsewhere?

Former
New York Times
election guru Nate Silver showed it can, and it did. Silver analyzed Republican insurgent campaigns in 2012 and found that the grassroots challengers were able to win nearly half of the primary races against the GOP establishment candidates despite being massively outspent five to one or even ten to one.
¹⁰

Ted Cruz’s 2012 nomination and election sent a strong signal that a new, limited-government constitutional conservative Republican Party is being born. It is up to us to rear it and nurture it to adulthood.

You would think that after the 2012 election the national Republican leadership would be out looking for candidates that could replicate the grassroots victories of candidates like Ted Cruz and Deb Fischer, but quite the reverse occurred. Rather than nurture conservative candidates in tight races, the Republican Party’s national leadership all but abandoned one of their rising stars—Virginia’s candidate for governor Ken Cuccinelli.

Cuccinelli, who had risen to national prominence as an out-spoken advocate of the right to life and the first state attorney general to file suit against Obamacare, was in a tough race against Democrat and Clinton confidant Terry McAuliffe.

Cuccinelli was facing a huge fund-raising deficit. However, instead of offering help to make up the fund-raising deficit he was facing, even as President Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton pulled out all the stops, and the checkbooks of their Hollywood friends, to fund a savage media campaign against Cuccinelli, the RNC actually cut back on the funds committed to the Virginia governor’s race as compared to the funds committed to Bob McDonnell’s campaign of just four years earlier.

Defeating Ken Cuccinelli was the top priority of a motley coalition of secular liberals and self-interested establishment types who want to continue to loot the state treasury for special favors and benefits at the expense of Virginia’s hard-pressed working families.

Unless you were closely paying attention to the Virginia governor’s race, you might not know that Terry McAuliffe received enormous help from national unions, abortion interests, and a Texas billionaire environmentalist who began his involvement in Virginia politics by spending $400,000 per week on TV ads on climate change to defeat Ken Cuccinelli.

That national liberal interest groups would go all in for McAuliffe
was a given, and to be expected.

That the national Republican leadership would actually starve Cuccinelli’s campaign for funds in the crucial final weeks of the campaign was unprecedented.

Sean Davis, cofounder of
thefederalist.com
and a former advisor to conservative senator Tom Coburn and Texas governor Rick Perry, claimed in an election night tweet that the RNC spent more than three times more in the 2009 race in Virginia than in the 2013 Virginia governor’s race. Principled limited-government constitutional conservative author and talk show host Mark Levin claims the RNC didn’t even spend $3 million compared to the $9 million spent in 2009.

Even worse than the lack of financial support was the fact that the national leadership of the Republican Party engaged in a summer-long whispering campaign against Ken Cuccinelli that more or less mirrored the Democrats’ charge that Cuccinelli was an “extremist,” and the organizations controlled by national Republicans gave only nominal support to Cuccinelli.

In 1964, the attacks against Goldwater as a scary “extremist” did not start with the Democrats in the general election campaign—the attacks started with the “Stop Goldwater” campaign organized by establishment Republicans, such as Michigan governor George Romney, father of 2012 establishment Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

The attacks on Goldwater from the Republican establishment didn’t stop when he became the official presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Romney and others in the “Stop Goldwater” gang never endorsed Barry Goldwater, did nothing to help him and much to hurt his already uphill campaign.

The conduct of the Republican leadership and many of Virginia’s nominally Republican business community leaders and the national Republican organizations is reflective of the precedent the Republican establishment set in the treatment of Barry Goldwater.

When an establishment Republican—such as Mitt Romney—gains
a nomination for office, the Republican leadership demands that conservatives close ranks with establishment Republicans and support the nominee, even if that nominee refuses to campaign as a conservative and has an anti-conservative record. But when a conservative gains a nomination, establishment Republicans are free to criticize the nominee and to do everything they can to undercut the conservative’s campaign.

Ken Cuccinelli did not lose because he is a principled limited-government constitutional conservative. Cuccinelli lost because he was all but abandoned by the national leadership of his own party, who allowed him to be drowned in a sea of money and then hit from behind by a Republican establishment that would rather see a Democrat in the governor’s mansion than end the “good ol’ boy” politics in the Virginia State House and allow a real conservative anywhere near the levers of power, where he might actually make good on his promises to govern as a limited-government constitutional conservative.

W
hy do I keep repeating, “It’s the primaries, stupid!”? Simple, because for more than a hundred years, we conservatives have had our political guns trained on the wrong target. We’ve been focused on defeating the liberal, Big Government Democrats, when the first, and most important, roadblock to our goal of governing America according to conservative principles is the progressive, Big Government Republicans.

During the entire centuries-long civil war in the Republican Party, the progressive establishment leadership of the GOP has been selling the notion that the Democrats and the liberals are the problem, and that if conservatives would only line up behind establishment Republicans and put them in charge of the federal government, the growth of government and America’s slide toward socialism would stop.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Democrats have purged conservatives from their party. At the national level there are no conservative Democrats, but there is a small group of smart politicians, like West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, who talk like moderates or conservatives on some issues.
The Democratic party is the party of secular liberals, and they present a coherent worldview of government, and growing government, as the solution to every problem—and the means by which to impose those solutions on the rest of society.

Establishment Republicans, on the other hand, are not the conservative party. Establishment Republicans do not offer a coherent conservative worldview as an alternative to the Democrats’ secular liberal worldview; they pursue policies that are “Democrats-lite,” and they govern as “dime store Democrats,” simply growing government at a slightly slower pace. Consequently, the abusive bureaucracies and extra-constitutional rules and regulations, which establishment Republicans either support or to which they offer little or no opposition, have continued to grow.

Moreover, the GOP establishment has been complicit in one of the worst abuses Washington’s insiders have perpetrated on America’s taxpayers—the Democrats’ decades-long program that has wasted tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on slush funds for left-wing causes such as NPR, Public TV, Legal Services Corp., Planned Parenthood, radical environmentalism, homosexual and ethnic advocacy groups such as La Raza, and the various ACORN clones of the Left, that so offend conservatives and are committed to defeating Republicans and advancing a far Left agenda.

Far from shrinking government, whenever they have been in power establishment Republicans have contributed to the growth of government. The GOP leadership can’t hide behind the excuse that they only control one-half of one branch of government—when Republicans had the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate, funding for Planned Parenthood still increased because they were simply not prepared to go to war to defund it.

Until we conservatives control the Republican Party and nominate conservative candidates who will actually fight for and govern according to the conservative principles the party stands for, there will be no coherent alternative to the Democrats’ Big Government worldview presented to the voters, and little likelihood that we
conservatives will achieve our goal of governing America according to conservative principles.

The Republican establishment loves to promote what they call the “Buckley Rule.” To paraphrase comments William F. Buckley Jr. made regarding Richard Nixon: “The wisest choice would be the one who would win. No sense running Mona Lisa in a beauty contest. I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. If you could convince me that Barry Goldwater could win, I’d vote for him.” Richard Nixon, he said, would be the strongest GOP candidate.
¹

The problem is, people who like to cite the “Buckley Rule” forget that a very few years later William F. Buckley Jr. was leading a group of conservatives who publicly announced they were pulling their support for Nixon and his re-election because he had betrayed conservative principles. Nixon was no conservative and neither are most of the candidates who cite the “Buckley Rule” as a reason for conservatives to back them.

It is also worth noting that Buckley supported the idea of defeating liberal Republicans as a matter of principle or party discipline. To that end he later formed a PAC and organized opposition to liberal Republican senator Lowell Weicker that in 1988 helped elect Joe Liebermann to the US Senate, saying, “We want to pass the word that it’s okay to vote for the other guy or stay at home.”
²

Merely having an
R
next to your name on the ballot does not mean you will hold fast to limited-government constitutional conservative principles. As I’ve documented elsewhere here and in my previous book
Conservatives Betrayed
, the time that President George W. Bush occupied the White House, and the Republican establishment led a Republican majority in Congress certainly demonstrates such a claim is false.

As I noted in the early chapters of this book, during the New Deal and Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s three campaigns for reelection, Republicans never nominated a conservative. Alf Landon, the 1936 GOP presidential candidate who had supported Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive third party in 1912; Wendell L. Wilkie (a former Democrat
who had been a pro-Roosevelt delegate at the 1932 Democratic National Convention), who was the GOP candidate in 1940; and, Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York, and the GOP presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948 were the candidates of Big Business and the Big Government Republican establishment.

What’s more, we can go back through election after election and discern a pattern where Big Government progressive Republicans fought conservatives as hard as or harder in the primaries than they fought the Democrats in the general election.

Goldwater was savaged as an “extremist” by the establishment of the Republican Party in his 1964 campaign, from the earliest primaries and state conventions right through the November election—there was no establishment effort to unify the party behind Goldwater, such as establishment Republicans demanded of conservatives when Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Dole, McCain, and Romney were the nominees.

Indeed, when conservative Ronald Reagan ran and won the Republican nomination for governor of California in 1966 by defeating establishment Republican George Christopher, the former mayor of San Francisco, several prominent establishment Republican organizations pointedly refused to endorse him—even in the general election!

Christopher had been doing exactly what big-city Democratic mayors were doing at the time—like bringing the New York Giants to San Francisco, developing Candlestick Park, and engaging in an expansive program of “urban renewal,” freeway building, and other massive government-funded public works projects.

Imagine for a moment what history might be like if the GOP’s progressive establishment had prevailed and Ronald Reagan had been defeated in his 1966 campaign for the Republican nomination for governor of California by the now virtually forgotten Christopher.

Or let’s look at Republican primaries another way—what if a limited-government constitutional conservative had run in and won another important 1966 election—that for the US House of
Representatives for Texas’s Seventh district. Arguably, George H. W. Bush’s political career would have been stopped before it got started, and there likely would have never been a President George H. W. Bush, or a President George W. Bush, or a Governor Jeb Bush.

Or what if a conservative had run against Oregon’s establishment Republican senator Mark Hatfield in the 1990 Oregon Republican primary and won? A conservative could have been on the floor of the Senate in 1995 to cast the deciding vote in favor of the Balanced Budget Amendment, instead of killing it by voting against it as Hatfield did—the lone Republican senator to do so.

The fact of the matter is, policies that have grown the federal government and grown spending have advanced regardless of whether Democrats or Big Government progressive establishment Republicans are in power. The only time government has not grown is when there were enough conservatives in Washington who were willing to stand and fight for limited government, constitutional conservative principles.