Posted on 08/26/2012 10:52:10 AM PDT by Bratch
“If Obama wins this year, Palin will lead (against Christie/Bush) in the Republican primary in 2016,” Quigley writes. “If Romney wins and yields to the tradition (which he will because his life is stuck in 1972) Palin will bring a challenge.”
Quigley’s observation here is of note, and may be more important if Romney wins the presidency. If Romney wins the presidency, conservatives would be fearful that Romney will morph back into the moderate-to-liberal Massachusetts politician he once was. And regardless of what other conservatives think, only one person will have the clout to ensure Romney advances the conservative agenda: Palin.
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Posted on August 26 2012 - 10:36 AM - Posted by: Doug Brady
Via Tony Lee at Big Government:
If Romney wins the presidency, conservatives would be fearful that Romney will morph back into the moderate-to-liberal Massachusetts politician he once was. And regardless of what other conservatives think, only one person will have the clout to ensure Romney advances the conservative agenda: Palin.
Here is why.
If Romney wins the presidency, the threat of a primary challenge from Palin will always loom. Romney certainly will not want what happened to George H.W. Bush, a figure to which Romney is often compared, in 1992 (when Pat Buchanan mounted a primary challenge from the right, leading his famed pitchfork brigades) to happen to him.
To date, the only force that has caused Romney to adopt conservative beliefs or not stray from them has been the electoral one.
Without a potential primary challenge from Palin looming on the horizon, there would be no check against Romney’s turning his back on the conservative movement, like many establishment politicians have done once elected.
Lee makes many excellent points. Romney has never been a conservative, but rather was adept at “Etch-a-Sketching” himself into one when he thought it would benefit him during the primaries. Now, having secured the nomination, the Mittster has given the Etch-a-Sketch a good shake, as Fehrnstrom predicted, and begun backtracking from his short-term flirtation with conservatism.
Just three days ago, Mandate Mitt indicated that health care mandates aren’t the only government mandates he likes when he reiterated his support for the indefensible ethanol mandate, which has been nothing but a text-book case of crony capitalism since its inception. Worse still, when speaking to a CBS reporter on Thursday, Mitt felt free to tout the wonders of Romneycare, his most notable accomplishment as Governor of Massachusetts:
“My healthcare plan I put in place in my state has everyone insured,” Romney told a CBS reporter on Thursday. In a second interview, he called the law an “important accomplishment” that is “working, by and large, pretty well.”
You read that correctly. Just three days ago, Mitt called the plan that served as the blueprint for Obamacare an “important accomplishment”. This occurred a scant two weeks after Romney’s long-time spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, essentially said the same thing:
“There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their healthcare in President Obama’s economy,” Andrea Saul told Fox News. “If people had been in Massachusetts, under Gov. Romney’s healthcare plan, they would have had healthcare.”
The backlash from conservative commentators was swift.
“Andrea Saul just gave the Obama campaign a big, fat, wet, kiss,” said radio host Laura Ingraham. Author Ann Coulter called Saul a “moron.” And Erick Erickson, who manages the blog site RedState, tweeted the comments may be remembered as “the moment Mitt Romney lost the election.”
To state the obvious, these latest pronouncements on the part of Team Mitt are alarming, and seem to confirm the worst fears conservatives have consistently expressed about Multiple Choice Mitt. Much of these recent statements by Romney have been overshadowed in the mainstream media by the Akin debacle and Mitt’s birth certificate joke, but conservatives are paying attention. There’s absolutely nothing in Romney’s record to suggest he’s a conservative. Quite the contrary. But for a while he’d been making an effort to talk like a conservative so that the grassroots base, many of whom can countenance the Mittster only marginally more than Obama, at least would have something to point to, however amorphous, when they attempt to justify holding their noses with both hands and voting for him.
And that’s all it will be for many conservatives: a classic “lesser of two evils” vote. But “lesser-of-two-evils” voters are most noteworthy for their unreliability, and Romney can’t afford to take anyone for granted. Maybe the Mittster thought his selection of Paul Ryan would be enough to assuage conservative doubts, allowing him to revert back to his moderate-to-liberal roots. I can’t speak for others but, as much as I like Paul Ryan, my doubts about Romney have not been assuaged. Not by a long shot.
Getting back to Tony Lee’s piece, if the Mittster manages to win, conservatives will need to be a constant thorn in his side, doing everything possible to keep him off the statist, government mandate, crony capitalist path he inexorably gravitates toward. Governor Palin helped elect dozens of new conservatives to Congress in 2010, and she’s doing all she can to ensure more are elected this year (she could use your help). These freshman and sophomore Congressman and Senators, along with the grassroots base, will be the foot soldiers in the conservative movement as we fight to reclaim the GOP as the party of Reagan. It will be up to them to hold the Mittster’s feet to the fire. If they’re unable to do this, a primary challenge in 2016 by Governor Palin may be our only recourse. And it’s not a far-fetched idea. She’s done it before, after all, and succeeded spectacularly.
If Romney is allowed to revert back to the Massachusetts moderate he’s always been, 2014 will be a lot like 2006 for Republicans. This is a prospect which must be avoided at all costs, for the nation’s existence as a free country will be in grave danger. Romney won the nomination this year because the old-guard, GOP Establishment decreed that be the case, and were prepared to do whatever was necessary to make it so. But their power is slipping and will continue to slip with each new conservative who gets elected to local, state, and national office across the country.
Conservatives don’t much like Romney. He’s never been anything other than an “ABO” candidate. If he does manage to beat Obama in November, he’ll be on thin ice with conservatives from the get-go, and they won’t be shy about challenging him in 2016 if he does what we fear he will. In Governor Palin, we’d have a natural leader with the right message, credibility, and charisma to take on and defeat Romney and “Romneyism”. Will this, or something like this, be necessary? That’s up to Mr. Etch-a-Sketch.
If he wins.
Update: (h/t StandProudNow) Team Mitt attempts to stack the deck for the Establishment against grassroots conservatives in Tampa, via Shane Vander Hart:
Mitt Romney’s legal advisor, Ben Ginsburg, has been attacking grassroots activism within the Republican Party during the Convention of the Rules Committee that met Friday prior to the Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL according to a source at the meeting. I was told late yesterday that one of the amendments that he offered and was passed by the committee changes the RNC rules so that the presumptive nominee and the state party can decide who the delegates are that can go to the national convention. The language of the rule states that the presidential nominee and state party can disavow any delegate.
These are essentially the people who write the platform. Think about the implications of this: If the nominee is anti-life, he or she, can essential disavow any pro-life delegate. If he is in favor of same-sex marriage, he can disavow those delegates. This gives the nominee too much influence over the party and it diminishes the grassroots who choose the delegates to send. It is a top-down approach which favors the establishment.
This isn’t the only assault. Buzzfeed reports that the Romney camp executed a power grab which was passed by the committee 63-38. It would give the Republican National Committee and Mitt Romney new powers to amend the governing document of the GOP.
If this doesn’t open people’s eyes to the fact that Mitt’s only interested in preserving the power of the GOP Establishment, I don’t know what will.
What conservative agenda?
Mr. Romney created gay marriage, socialized medicine,
death panels, the Big-DIG coverup,
taxes hidden as fees, and an underground of saboteurs
against ANYONE who speaks of conservative principles.
Sarah doesn’t have that much facial hair.
It’s true. Here or there Jim DeMint is pitching in, backing genuine conservatives like Ted Cruz.
But Palin not only has more clout with the electorate, she’s working harder at it, like a one-woman crusade to make sure there’s some conservative counterweight to an unconservative president, whether that ends up being Obama or Romney.
If King Bozo Overwhelm wins re-election there won’t be an election in 2016.
You have touched on a little observed factoid about S. Palin’s crusade. All of the candidates she has backed will without question feel an allegiance to her in the future. This bodes well for her, and America.
Mittens won’t cut anything but taxes.
Not as bad for the economy as Obama, but just another big-government guy when a big-government guy is what we can’t afford.
Looks like an Irishman. I knew it!!
If Willard is elected look for more caving into the sodomite
agenda. He’s did it his entire political life. He’s already said that lifting DADT was now “settled law”. He’s already said he thinks sodomites should be in the Boy Scout. Has no problem with them at all in the military. Said it’s OK if they adopt children. How long before he throws in with the degenerates and tries to get DOMA overturned? Look for him in the debates to tell sodomites if he’s elected he’ll do more for them than Obama ever did. He said precisely that when he ran to Ted Kennedy’s LEFT when he ran against him for the Mass senate.
But the big one will be even if he wins and the republicans get complete control of the Congress, and ObamaCare is history, he will try for his versions of socialized medicine called RomneyCare.
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