{mosads}What happened the last time Washington D.C. insiders hand-picked our candidate? We got Mitt Romney; a man who struggled day after day to articulate a conservative position on the economy, which the consultant class told us was the area of his expertise.
The result of their “brilliant” campaign: four more years of Barack Obama.
That’s what happens when the consultant class decides what’s best for American citizens. They listen to focus groups instead of our founding fathers. They value polling over principle. And they choose mushy establishment candidates over strong, principled conservatives.
Their results speak for themselves. Barack Obama is still president. Harry Reid is still Senate majority leader. And Speaker John Boehner is still caving in to his Democratic opponents almost every chance he gets.
It is laughable that Rove is calling his new “command and control” group the “Conservative Victory Project.”
First: it is not a “Conservative” project. It is a project designed to shut out real conservatives, and to protect establishment Republican candidates who are hand-picked by a small cabal of Washington DC know-it-alls – over the objections of the American people.
Second: it takes even more nerve for Karl Rove to launch anything with the word “Victory” in it, when he just lost a winnable election to Barack Obama.
Rove ran the biggest political action committee in political history in the 2012 campaign – and lost big. The left, which humiliated Rove whose seemingly only strategy was to run ads and spend money, called him a “laughingstock” and correctly noted that “Election 2012 made Rove, even more than the Republican ticket, its biggest loser.”
Why would anyone want a loser picking “winners?”
This power-grabbing scheme is an assault on Federalism. It is an assault on states’ rights. It is a war on conservative principles and on local, representative democracy.
And it loses elections.
Aside from losing the 2012 presidential election, and handing our country to Barack Obama for four more years, here is what happened when Washington D.C. consultants forced their hand-picked Senate candidates on the American people, they lost: Josh Mandel (Ohio), Tommy Thompson (Wis.), Connie Mack (Fla.), Denny Rehberg (Mont.), Rick Berg (N.D.), George Allen (Va.), Linda McMahon (Conn.), Charlie Summers (Maine), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.), Joe Kyrillos (N.J.), Scott Brown (Mass.) (when Scott Brown was a Tea Party candidate, he won. With Karl Rove in his corner, he lost). After a track record like that it is surprising it wasn’t renamed by donors as “American double-cross.”
Note the name change that will not have the baggage of American Crossroads’ abysmal record.
After Rove became 2012’s “biggest loser,” Donald Trump tweeted it best: “Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money.”
Now, the Washington D.C. consultant class wants to waste even more than their donors’ money. They want to lay waste to the rights of American citizens to choose their own representatives.
Let’s hope that Karl Rove’s 2013 war on democracy is as big a loser as he was in 2012.
Martin is co-founder and national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, the nation’s largest tea party organization.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill