Which tells you exactly why he is Jeb's "top adviser."
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Which tells you exactly why he is Jeb's "top adviser."
From the Bush family perspective you don’t ‘win’ elections, you ‘buy’ elections and that means paying the right people; the right palms weren’t sufficiently greased in the Cantor race according to their view.
So ‘populist issues’ such as Amnesty or from the Bush perspective ‘xenophobic rants’ are never the issue, it’s all about the money. And to some extent that is true. They only go to the base with populist ‘talk’ when their paid consultants tell them they need to. This is why so many establishment republicans start talking the talk for a short while before the election.
The Bush perspective and approach works better in statewide Senate races where they can buy the moderate votes through ads and payments to precinct commanders. This worked in Texas for Cornyn, and in SC for Graham. We’ll see if it holds for Mississippi and Tennessee.
What we as conservatives need to do is to continue to distinguish ourselves from the establishment elites by waking up the base including the moderates and independents. The goal is to reach a critical mass, a tipping point where the current establishment loses credibility with those key groups. In a sense we continue to grow our base. If we keep it up the years 2016, 2018 could be the tipping point where we take back the GOP for conservatives.