Machiavellian Rove 'Kept Santorum Alive Until He Could Kill Rick Perry First... THEN Newt Gingrich'

Reaganite Republican ^ | 15 November 2012 | Reaganite Republican

[Reaganite Republican]

GO AWAY already

It's over dude...

As you've most likely already heard, the TEA Party right has declared all-out war on Karl 'Boss Hogg' Rove in the wake of numerous recent (expen$ive) GOP disasters in which
'The Architect' played an inglorious starring role. The final straw was likely his lack of willingness to take responsibility for an almost complete lack of success in the 2012 election cycle, instead pointing fingers and making excuses like an Italian cruise ship captain.

Rove's flat-out whiffing in almost every race he backed -on top of improbable Romney defeat- would be enough for any sensible organization to seek-out somebody with a different strategy/skill-set... yet now Rove has provided still more reason to turn on him by attempting to blame the right for Mitten's lack of results while pushing an ill-conceived and unhelpful amnesty agenda as a shiny fool's gold cure-all for the party's current electoral woes.

As someone who initially backed Bachmann and later Newt Gingrich, I sure haven't forgotten the way Rove utilized near-limitless resources to destroy conservative candidates and ram Romney down our gullet. I really felt like I'd been totally screwed-over... not a very pleasant feeling.

Now we read that Santorum -who I'm no fan of- served effectively as a post-Iowa useful idiot that Rove utilized to damage all other conservatives, as he diluted and split the party's right by surrepticiously funding Santorum's dead-end campaign long past it's natural life. Not a huge surprise I guess, we all knew the fix was in... apparent from very early-on.

Thanks Ricky- do you even know you were played yet?

I ASK YOU who needs a duplicitous RINO scumbag like Karl Frickin' Rove manipulating our party- this gaming-the-primaries stuff is completely anti-democratic, denying the people's will (only 30% of Republicans supported Romney in the primaries- that's what you call 'collective wisdom'). 

Small wonder then that Rove got his blobular butt kicked all up-and-down the field on Election Day, and now the whole party is paying a heavy-duty price for it, not to mention the country (highlights Ed.)-

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Business Insider:

Karl Rove was out raising money to keep Santorum alive until they could kill Newt 

Santorum basically ran for Governor of Iowa in 2011, visiting all 99 counties; 

Santorum, out of Iowa, had no organization, no money and no chance in 2012 to be the Republican nominee; he was only a stalking horse for Mitt Romney 

Rove kept Santorum alive until he could kill Rick Perry first, and then Newt Gingrich. It's instructive to note that Santorum placed 3rd in the South Carolina Presidential Primary the third week of January, and placed 3rd again the next week in Florida — yet Rove [by encouraging GOP donors to donate Santorum] was able to parlay two third place finishes into a $1M shot of money to keep Santorum alive...this is political gamesmanship on a whole other level, plus access to unlimited money. 

That Fox News and the The Wall Street Journal worked out a hefty financial contract with Karl Rove is of no concern to me, Karl has every right to be paid well and -like me- participate in the political process. 

But giving Karl Rove the perch as a neutral analyst and an unbiased observer -honest broker- when in reality Karl is driven by his desire to enhance his clients and/or personal interests -corrupts the process. 

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But guess what? WE WILL WIN this war with Karl Rove and other ossified GOP failures over the next few months...
and we're going to have one helluva lot of fun doing it. 

Yes, the imminent death of the Karl Rove's diabolical RNC cabal will mean a true Reaganite renaissance in this country: you know... the long-overdue one who's time had unfortunately not yet quite come last week- but it is coming my friends, and soon.

How soon? It's already here for Rove- he wasted millions on crap results from coast-to-coast, and nobody's going to hire him for this sort of thing again- he can just sit there and bloviate on Hannity every night, 'blah blah blah CHART blah blah blah $$$ blah blah blah 'confident' blah blah blah blah blah' -yawn-

It's here for Obama's former crony-capitalist buddies on Wall Street, too- financial markets are tanking because most investors were sure that Romney was going to win, and since this was already priced-in to securities, now-disappointed traders are dumping in dismay... tell me they're not up for a Reaganomics-driven recovery right about now.

Yes, it's almost here for all of us: all we got to do is roll
Rollee-Pollee Rove to the curb and usher in a NEW generation of GOP leaders... the so-called 'Children of Reagan': the Rubios, Ryans, Gowdys, the Bachmanns... Ted Cruz... Mike Pence. THESE are people who get it- and because of that, they now stand ready to inherit the leadership mantle of the TEA Party
-which is to be indiscernible from the 'new' GOP- in our ongoing quest to salvage this great nation:

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Forbes:

Rubio already has earned rock star quality, both for his personal charisma and the charisma of his ideas. 

Rubio is a leader in presenting prosperity-with-social-equity, fostering Reaganesque economic policies: 

'We don’t need new taxes. We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system. 

And then we need a government that has the discipline to take that additional revenue and use it to pay down the debt and never grow it again. And that’s what we should be focused on, and that’s what we’re not focused on.'

Rubio leads the pack among GOP Insiders in the most recent National Journal Political Insiders’ Poll. He’s built a major league team and is first tier..

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First step? Replace John Boehner with -say- Paul Ryan...

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iowntheworld   Forbes   ArkansasGOPWing   RSN   Business Insider

[Reaganite Republican]

“this is not about Adelson’s money, this is about Rove’s influence, which dwarf’s Adelsons”
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EXACTLY

[Free Vulcan]

Karl Rove doesn’t have near this kind of power. Most of these candidates did themselves in with a good pile on by the media. Rove may have contributed as he could, but he was not the prime instigator.

[Brookhaven]

No, Romney did not give us the best chance to win.

If you get off the conservative boards and start looking around other places (like the comments on newspaper stories), you’ll see a lot of comments like”

“I didn’t think there was that much difference between Obama and Romney, so I just stayed with what I knew and voted Obama.”

That may seem shocking to us here, but consider the typical swing voter. They don’t spend much time gathering information on candidates, their understanding of issues is shallow, they get most of their information from TV commercials, and they make up their mind in the last couple of months.

Romney’s pitch to these voters was “Obama’s doing a bad job, I’ll do better.” Never really explaining why he would do better; he just trusted swing voters to believe he would do better. Meanwhile, Obama painted Romney as a guy that might screw things up again.

Swing voters ended up voting for the devil they knew, instead of taking a risk on the devil they didn’t know. By not explaining why swing voters should vote FOR him (instead of just against Obama) Romney doomed his campaign.

Had we run Newt Gingrich, we wouldn’t have done any worse, but because Gingrich could explain why swing voters should vote FOR him, there would have been a chance to win.

Reagan’s greatest asset was his ability to explain conservative principles so that everyone understood them, and understood how they and the country would benefit from them. That’s the candidate we need to find (and coalesce around) next time. Holding all the right positions isn’t enough, we need someone that can communicate those positions.

The only two GOP candidates in that last election that fit that description would have been Cain or Gingrich. Looking back, we should probably have backed Gingrich.

[CharlesWayneCT]

Eventually we’ll have to stop the historical revisionism and actually deal with the issues that we need to deal with to get back to winning elections.

But for now, these fanciful postings are always entertaining.

One nice thing of the election being over is that most of the site has gone back to acknowledging that Newt Gingrich is no friend of conservatives, or if he is in some ways, he’s a very flawed one.

I’d be surprised to find any serious number of people who think Gingrich would have actually won the election, or done any better than Romney did in losing pretty convincingly.

I certainly don’t think Santorum would have won either, but he would have run a much different campaign at least.

Of course, neither Gingrich nor Santorum would have had any money to compete against Obama, so if nothing else the loss would have been cheaper.

And I don’t see how Santorum had anything to do with Rick Perry’s downfall. I happen to think Rick Perry was the only candidate that actually entered the primary contest who could have won the election, but his failures were his own.

Karl Rove didn’t make Rick Perry into an incoherent babbler in a national debate. And Karl didn’t convince conservatives to make the primaries about Gardasil rather than the economy, or to get into prolonged battles about whether we should try to put a fence in the middle of the Rio Grande. Karl didn’t decide the number one problem facing the country was Texas deciding in 2001 to make money on children of illegals by giving them incentives to attend undercrowded state colleges.

I guess we could blame Karl Rove for Romney, although I think there are a LOT of people we can blame for Romney (I’ve decided to blame everybody who opposed him in 2008, for example. If we had picked him as our nominee back then, either he would have WON, in which case we’d be marginally better off than we are now, or he would have likely LOST, in which case he would have been DONE, and we wouldn’t have had him as our nominee this year).

Actuall, I’m not really “blaming” them, I’m just illustrating how you can use history to assign blame for things.

[newzjunkey]

Having apparently lost Iowa that he spent the prior year in, Santorum had no momentum and refused to get out of the way ahead of FL.

As I said then, with FL the writing was on the wall: it was going to be Romney. And it was.

Santorum supporters can continue to spin and deny and demagogue all they like but that's the history.

[Notary Sojac]

You are exactly right. It's the political equivalent of the hipster who only likes bands that never, but never, make the charts.

And Ms. I-Am-Not-A-Witch is still the canonical example.

[Notary Sojac]

we’re going to have to narrow our choices

And, tone down the fantasizing about Mrs. Grizzly.

[onyx]

He’s a sneaky moderate. I think he ruined GWB with bad advice. GWB’s natural instincts were much like his mother’s: fight back and speak your mind. But no. Rove put a stop to that. Huge mistake.

[cripplecreek]

Having apparently lost Iowa

I just hope I'm not the only one to notice you alternate reality republitards have to play word games like the rest of the democrats.

Woo Hoo, Newt was going all the way with his one state win.!!!! LOL

[Notary Sojac]

There are lots of people on FR who just can't get over the fact that millions of GOP primary voters looked at the candidate lineup, and picked Romney.

The constant whining about the evil machinations of Rove is a serious symptom of denial.

[Charles Henrickson]

Gingrich wouldn’t have even gotten 40% of the vote. His un-erasable negatives are through the roof. It would have been one of the biggest wipeouts ever, if not the biggest. You and I would have voted for him, but not enough other people would.

[Kenny]

'We don’t need new taxes. We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system.

There's the money quote. Go Rubio!

[onyx]

Take it up with Jim. Nobody fantasizes about Sarah Palin. If she runs, you can count on several of us backing her.

[dforest]

Rick Perry lost because of his debate performances. My how quickly we forget. Could have been his back surgery rendered him not really ready to enter at the time. Who knows?

Really, what is the point of rewriting history?

[Smittie]

The Bushes were the worst thing to ever happen to the Republican Party, just about all the RINOS out there can be traced back to them.

[Charles Henrickson]

The Bushes were the worst thing to ever happen to the Republican Party. . . .

I can't disagree with you on that.

[xzins]

Yes and no. Rick Perry had a steep learning curve, it’s true. There’s no denying that. However, the “racial epithet” rock came out of no place and got traction in the media due to someone’s intervention.

Also, Perry was the best-funded conservative, so the attacks on his immigration ideas by Bachmann, Santorum, and Romney killed both him and, eventually, Romney.

Without the viciousness of the early attacks, Perry might have recovered once he figured out the ropes in terms of a presidential campaign. And he did figure it out.

Not only did Rove largely handle the backstabbing of Akin, but he piled on with Murdoch, and then he turned around and lost with his own moderate candidates.

In short, he ruined it for everybody. Almost as much as with Dick Morris, it makes you wonder whose side he’s really on.

[Notary Sojac]

What I saw here last year was lots and lots of Freepers who would not commit to supporting one of the conservative candidates who were running because they simply would not let go of the fact that Palin was not.

I don't think you can deny that that was the case, although you may not call it "fantasizing"....I do.

And I plan to disregard the possibility of a Palin candidacy unless and until she says "I am a candidate", and in that case if she's the most conservative candidate in the field I will support her too.

[Brookhaven]

You mean Gingrich would have lost...which is exactly what Romney did.

The difference between the two is that Gingrich had the ability to overcome his negatives with voters, because he could explain to swing voters why they should vote for him.