Despite our efforts and the efforts of millions of other conservatives,
who went all-in for the Romney candidacy, Election Day 2012 was a
disaster – Barack Obama was re-elected President, Republicans lost seats
in the House and failed to gain a majority in the Senate.
However,
out of that disaster comes some good news: conservatives are saying
“Never again” are we going to nominate a big government establishment
Republican for President.
What’s more, we won’t have to – conservatives now have a deep bench of potential presidential candidates.
We have elected a new generation of conservative leaders who are capable of taking over the GOP to become
the Party of small government constitutional conservatism.
Last
night’s election of small government constitutional conservatives --
Ted Cruz, Jeff Flake and Deb Fisher to the Senate, the election of
conservative Mike Pence as Governor of Indiana, the election of Trey
Radel and other “boat rockers” to the House -- portend that yesterday’s
defeats will spell the end of big government Republicanism.
They
join such small government constitutional conservative leaders as
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal,
Senators Jim DeMint, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey,
Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the 50-odd Members of the
House, such as Justin Amash, who stood for conservative principles and
voted against the debt ceiling deal.
Establishment Republicans
ever anxious to hold on to power, and the establishment media, are going
to blame “the Tea Party” and “radical” conservatives who voted for
principled small government constitutional conservative candidates in
Republican primaries for the election disaster of 2012.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Governor
Romney won the nomination by spending tens of millions of dollars
knee-capping his conservative opponents in the primaries and then handed
the election to Obama because he and his campaign team spent most of
the campaign mired in the establishment Republican folly of trying to
win by standing for nothing.
The “stand for nothing” strategy
didn’t work for President Ford’s 1976 campaign, it didn’t work for
President George H.W. Bush’s re-election and it certainly didn’t work
for Bob Dole and John McCain.
Republicans never, ever, win the presidency unless they nationalize the election by campaigning on a conservative agenda.
While
Obama and the Democrats threw down the gauntlet on the social issues --
such as same-sex marriage and abortion -- Republicans ran away from
such issues as same-sex marriage, religious freedom and Obama’s war on
the Catholic Church. You couldn’t find any mention of the Constitution
or the conservative social agenda in a Romney ad or in a Rove-run Super
PAC ad or an ad run by the national GOP.
The establishment
Republicans who held the reins and the checkbooks chose to run negative
ads against Obama and campaign almost solely on Romney’s biography and
economic policies, while skipping the social issues and the concerns of
Tea Partiers and small government constitutional conservatives.
In
choosing to ignore the larger conservative agenda, Romney chose not to
follow the path that led Republicans to win seven of the previous eleven
presidential elections.
In the Senate, two good and decent men –
Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock – were defeated not because they were
pro-life, but because they were inept campaigners.
Tommy
Thompson, George Allen, Connie Mack and other establishment-backed
candidates -- who ran as establishment Republicans -- all went down to
defeat in the general election after being boosted past principled small
government conservatives in the primaries by Mitch McConnell and the
Washington GOP establishment.
The leaders who forced those kinds
of candidates on us -- and manipulated the GOP rules to force the Party
to change from a grassroots-driven Party to a Party driven from the
top-down by Washington insiders -- should resign.
Republican
National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, Senatorial Committee
Chairman John Cornyn, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker
of the House John Boehner, NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions and other
Republican leaders behind the epic election failure of 2012 should be
replaced with leaders more in tune with the grassroots of the
conservative base of the Party.
Likewise, in any logical
universe, establishment Republican consultants such as Karl Rove, Ed
Gillespie, Romney campaign senior advisor Stewart Stevens and pollster
Neil Newhouse would never be hired to run or consult on a national
campaign again -- and no one would give a dime to their ineffective
Super PACs, such as American Crossroads.
Mitt Romney's loss was
the death rattle of the establishment GOP. Far from signaling a
rejection of the Tea Party or grassroots conservatives, the disaster of
2012 signals the beginning of the battle to takeover the Republican
Party and the opportunity to establish the GOP as
the Party of small government constitutional conservatism.
