Posted on 01/24/2012 4:33:34 AM PST by RoosterRedux
"I talked to a top Romney adviser tonight who said, 'Look, if Mitt Romney cannot win in Florida then we're going to have to try to reinvent the smoke-filled room which has been democratized by all these primaries. And we're going to have try to come with someone as an alternative to Newt Gingrich who could be Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, someone.'
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
That is exactly the reaction they predict and would want. Whoever thought a conservative participation in this party leading to consideration and respect for contitutional government who be quick and easy?
He didn’t buy them off. He is ONE of them.
If these bastards pull this, all Tea Party People and conservatives should exit the GOP, form their own party and screw the 2012 elections.
Let the Obamabastard win.
How much is Romney paying this dufus? This will never happen.
I agree. I think this advisor's comment speaks more to the desperation of the Romney camp than the actual event in question (i.e. brokered convention).
Desperation and sour grapes!
The way it is going, Newt is going to beat the crap out of Romney and win the nomination.
“They pick, we vote?”
Uh, yeah. The last time we picked the nominee was in 1980 (Reagan).
To wit, don’t you recall Bob Dole’s rant in 1996:
“I’ve waited and I’ve waited. I’ve been patient and I’ve been patient. Now it’s my turn (to be the nominee)!”
Get the popcorn ready. This year's convention is going to be a wild affair - like nothing you've ever seen before.
And we know what happened to the guys in the picture dont we.
There ... fixed it.
I have always found it useful to be underestimated. In fact, I made a career out of it--a highly successful career.
A corollary is this: Never underestimate anyone.
And this is a bit of wisdom from my highly successful--and very rich--uncle: "Never forgo an advantage, but never press one unnecessarily."
“Haley Barbour/ Lindsey Graham ticket”
The ticket from Hell. LOL!!!
The whole movie was true picture of the generation born in the thirties and forties, and the world that flowed inevitably from the attitudes and culture expressed and accurately identified therein.
Yes, I just bet they will...
"If the 'elite' think they can ignore the will of the American people (real Americans, conservatives)...they are in for a big surprise when that fury is directed at them."
-RoosterRedux-
Why aren’t we looking at Jeb Bush? He’s a Bush but he’s head and shoulders ahead of the field. We don’t like or want Romney and I’m not sure Gingrich can win over independents. We have to replace the marxist/socialist in the white house. At least Newt tells it like it is. Obama is a proponent of the Saul Alinsky model of communism/socialism and if he wins re-election, he will take off the gloves. He must be stopped this year at ALL costs.
Anything to ensure that the TEA Party Movement won’t have any effective voices at the table in DC.
We know their agenda. bttt
(Hot links within links below):
Trent Lott [R] on Tea Party candidates: ‘As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them’
http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2010/07/19/trent-lott-on-tea-party-candidates-as-soon-as-they-get-here-we-need-to-co-opt-them/
12:27 pm July 19, 2010, by Jay
The money quote from a Washington Post piece on the Tea Party and Washington’s GOP establishment:
Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” Lott said in an interview. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”
But Lott said he’s not expecting a tea-party sweep. “I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people,” he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/17/AR2010071702375.html?hpid=topnews
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Republican lawmakers gird for rowdy tea party
By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 18, 2010
So who wants to join Rand Paul’s “tea-party” caucus?
“I don’t know about that,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) replied with a nervous laugh. “I’m not sure I should be participating in this story.”
Republican lawmakers see plenty of good in the tea party, but they also see reasons to worry. The movement, which has ignited passion among conservative voters and pushed big government to the forefront of the 2010 election debate, has also stirred quite a bit of controversy. Voters who don’t want to privatize Social Security or withdraw from the United Nations could begin to see the tea party and the Republican Party as one and the same.
Paul, the GOP Senate nominee in Kentucky, floated the idea of forming an official caucus for tea-party-minded senators in an interview in the National Review as one way he would shake up Washington. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), one of the movement’s favorite incumbents, filed paperwork on Thursday to register a similar group in the House “to promote Americans’ call for fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution, and limited government.”
In six states — Kentucky, Nevada, Florida, Utah, Colorado and Minnesota — tea-party-backed Republican Senate candidates have won nomination or are favored in upcoming primaries. They are attracting outsize attention not only from Democrats and the media, but from conservative leaders such as former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and Fox News host Glenn Beck.
Republicans such as Paul and Sharron Angle in Nevada may hold provocative views, but “they’re our nominees and I think we ought to get behind them 100 percent,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.).
“The candidates are not ours to choose,” said Cornyn, chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. “They’re the choice of the primary voters in the states, and I think we should respect their choices.”
Yet some Republicans worry that tea-party candidates are settling too comfortably into their roles as unruly insurgents and could prove hard to manage if they get elected. Paul, who beat GOP establishment favorite Trey Grayson in Kentucky’s primary, told the National Review that he would seek to join forces with GOP Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Tom Coburn (Okla.), “who are unafraid to stand up” and who have blocked numerous bills advanced by both parties deemed by the pair as expanding government.
“If we get another loud voice in there, like Mike Lee from Utah or Sharron Angle from Nevada, there will be a new nucleus” to advocate causes such as term limits, a balanced-budget amendment and “having bills point to where they are enumerated in the Constitution,” Paul said in the interview.
Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” Lott said in an interview. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”
But Lott said he’s not expecting a tea-party sweep. “I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people,” he said.
Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), who failed to survive his party’s nominating process after running afoul of local tea-party activists, told a local Associated Press reporter last week that the GOP had jeopardized its chance to win Senate seats in Republican-leaning states such as Nevada and Kentucky and potentially in Colorado, where tea-party favorite Ken Buck has surged ahead of Lt. Gov. Jane Norton in their primary battle.
Bennett warned that such candidates are stealing attention from top GOP recruits such as Mike Castle in Delaware and John Hoeven in North Dakota, both of whom are favored to win seats held by Democrats. Nor are they helping the Republican Party to resolve its deeper identity problems, he said.
“That’s my concern, that at the moment there is not a cohesive Republican strategy of this is what we’re going to do,” Bennett told the AP. “And certainly among the tea-party types there’s clearly no strategy of this is what we’re going to do.”
Democrats are hopeful that voters will focus on the potential consequences of tea-party proposals as they decide whether to hand over control of Congress to Republicans. Democratic Party officials said their easiest target, given the recent economic meltdown, is the push to privatize Social Security. A recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that 48 percent of voters were “very uncomfortable” with the idea of private retirement accounts, while another 18 percent had reservations.
In Nevada, when state Sen. Joe Heck told a local reporter that he was open to a limited and voluntary version of Social Security privatization, his Democratic opponent, Rep. Dina Titus, declared he had endorsed “Sharron Angle and her radical agenda.” The Senate candidate has said she wants to phase out Social Security and Medicare as government programs.
Democrats also are trying to tarnish Ron Johnson, a DeMint-endorsed businessman who is backed by tea-party groups and establishment Republicans in his bid take on Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.). When Paul raised his caucus idea, Democrats put the question to Johnson.
“The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is asking Tea Partier Ron Johnson to tell Wisconsin voters if he would join Rand Paul’s ‘tea party caucus,’ “ read a DSCC statement released Thursday. Johnson’s campaign did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The Democratic National Committee seized immediately this week on a billboard sponsored by a local tea-party group in Mason City, Iowa, depicting President Obama next to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. “Republicans keep saying that they aren’t extremists — but they keep doing things like this,” wrote DNC Executive Director Jennifer O’Malley Dillon in a fundraising letter.
The billboard also forced Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who faces a tough challenge from Democrat Roxanne Conlin, to issue a careful rebuke. “I believe that you should always leave personalities out of it and talk policy,” he said in an interview.
But Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) said he’s still not sure of the tea party’s broader political impact. “I don’t know whether it causes a fracture in the Republican Party or provides more energy,” Cardin said. “But there are a lot of Republicans who are uncomfortable, and my gut is, at least in the short term, that will cause some problems.”
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GOP Empire’s Plan to Crush Tea Party Rebels
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/10/gop-empires-plan-crush-tea-party-rebels/43582/
Reuters Elspeth Reeve Oct 12, 2011
The Republican establishment is no longer terrified of the Tea Party, The New York Times’ Matt Bai reports. It’s now figured out how to absorb them like a slow-moving but powerful star that’s swelling into a red giant. How to take these political hooligans over? There are a couple steps.
Step 1: The first rule of the establishment is: Do not admit you are part of the establishment! Bai talked to Fred Malek, a longtime Republican fundraiser who now raises money for the Republican Governors Association. He has photos of himself with various presidents on his wall.
Malek belongs to the Alfalfa Club, whose 200 or so members, the old-line political and business aristocracy in both parties, expect the president to attend their annual dinner, and he occasionally gives exclusive parties at his home overlooking the Potomac River in McLean, Va. — including one in 2009 that brought together Sarah Palin and the party’s Washington elite.
“You think I’m an establishment Republican?” Malek asked me.
When I said that I did, he let forth a lyrical string of expletives that, sadly, are not printable here. “My dad drove a beer truck delivering beer to taverns in Cicero and Chicago, Ill.,” he said. “I’m the first one in my family to go to college. No, I don’t consider myself part of the establishment.”
Bai adds, “George Will recently said there is no such thing as the Republican establishment.” George Will wears a bow tie. He wears a bow tie so much he’s on Wikipedia’s “List of bow tie wearers.” He started wearing bow ties as an anti-hippie statement in the 1960s and now, when he doesn’t wear one, people ask him where his bow tie is. You can’t get away with wearing a bow tie if you’re not part of the Republican establishment.
Step 2: Disarm them with praise. Republican lobbyist Scott Reed tells Bai that the Tea Party’s influence is “waning,” because Republican leaders have embraced the Tea Partying members of Congress, instead of calling them “those people.”
Did he mean to say that the party was slowly co-opting the Tea Partiers?
“Trying to,” Reed said. “And that’s the secret to politics: trying to control a segment of people without those people recognizing that you’re trying to control them.”
Step 3: Moderate whoever they pick as the 2012 nominee. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol tells Bai that the Republican presidential nominee merely has to be conservative enough.
Kristol told me just after Perry entered the race, a development that essentially ended [the more radical Michele] Bachmann’s brief ascent. Establishment Republicans may prefer Romney to Perry, but their assumption is that either man can be counted on to steer the party back toward the broad center next fall, effectively disarming the Tea Party mutiny.
Step 4: Teach them about compromise. Vin Weber, who was elected to Congress in 1980, was “part of a group of rebellious young conservatives who rose up against their affable minority leader, Bob Michel,” Bai explains. Weber was “the Bachmann of his day,” Bai says, and Weber tepidly agrees. But he’s trying to teach them what he learned about Washington since he first arrived 30 years ago.
“I think I know what they want to accomplish, and I agree with most of it,” [Weber] said. “But if they want to accomplish it, they need to ‘rise to the level of politics.’ I mean, you can’t just stand there and take a stand and say, ‘I’m not going to compromise on my position.’ Because you won’t achieve anything.”
Likewise, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, whom many wished would run for president, told a conservative conference earlier this year, “Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers.”
Step 5: Never forget reality. Say all the nice things you want about the activists, but don’t forget who’s really running the show. Lobbyists and former House aide John Feehery told Bai, “The thing I get a kick out of is these Tea Party folks calling me a RINO ... No, guys, I’ve been a Republican all along.
You go off into your own little world and then come back and say it’s your party. This ain’t your party.”
Given all the comparisons between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street protests, liberals should take note.
The New Republic has a new editorial condemning the activists in lower Manhattan for their silly utopian ideals. It would be smarter to follow the Weekly Standard’s strategy: pat them on the head and praise them for caring so much, then use their energy to pass your standard center-left legislation.
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GOP Senator: Tea Party Challenges ‘Killed Off’ Chances for Republican Majority in Senate
The Blaze ^ | December 25th | Madeleine Morgenstern
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2825119/posts?page=26#26
Sen. Dick Lugar said challenges by Tea Party candidates are partly to blame for the Republicans not having a majority in the Senate.
“Republicans lost the seats before in Nevada and New Jersey for example and Colorado where there were people who claimed that they wanted somebody who was more of their Tea Party aspect, but in doing so they killed off the Republican chances for majority,” he said. “This is one of the reasons why we have a minority in the Senate right now.”
I don't think so either. I'd vote for Don Knotts before I vote for another BUSH!!!
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