This is old news and thank God Carl Rove doesn’t rule the world. I suspect that God doesn’t even waste his time with such nonsense.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/03/Rove-declares-war-Tea-Party
http://www.redstate.com/frang8c/2013/02/03/gop-looking-to-control-primaries/

Whew! At least its Rove’s group, so we have nothing to worry about. If we end up starting a 3rd party, thank ROVE and his RINO backers.

Erick, some here at Red State have objected to the use of such shorthand terms as “RINO” and “establishment”. Your post demonstrates why such terms are handy, and even necessary. They quickly identify to us those who are not always what they claim to be, nor what they may seem to be to the casual observer. So, please use your influence to prevent a ban on the use of such terms so that we don’t have to type out long descriptors that will identify such people or organizations to the rest of us. Thank you.

Do you not understand the terms “RINO” OR “Establishment”? Your description of a “casual observer” leads me to believe that you have no idea what’s going on here.

Karl Rove has no shame. How he can continue to position himself as an expert in the Republican Party and slap the word “conservative” on his works is appalling. After the mess he spearheaded in helping Obama get reelected, he should save us all a lot of misery and retire. I nearly puke when I see him on Fox now.

Rove is a selfish, petty man desperate for relevancy. It would be interesting to know who the big donors are behind this effort.

I cannot imagine how the GOP could think that being so openly hostile to their base voters is a winning strategy, particularly when their actions (or lack thereof) have already demoralized so many.

Neil, I have never been disrespectful of anyone’s belief, Christian or otherwise, nor race or creed, or the Rules of RS. I was simply refering to the title, “Thank God for American Crossroads and the Conservative Victory Project” and that it’s a known fact that Rove and the GOP Establishment are out to ruin conservatives and as a Christian, didn’t appreciate the use of God in the title.
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While I’m very saddened to leave RS since you pointed me in the direction of over there, I will comply with your wishes of “If you’re looking for a party where Christian beliefs are silenced, the Democrats are over that way.”.
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God Bless you, RS and all my friends here. checkmate2012

checkmate’, calm down and take a deep breath. Maybe you have been up too late and are tired. Erick’s title was reflecting his reference to Rove’s new pac as a blessing in disguise as it will enable us to know who we are fighting against.” I dare say any candidate who gets this group’s support should be targeted for destruction by the conservative movement. They’ve made it really easy to figure out who the terrible candidates will be.” And you’re overreacting to Neal’s comment. I wasn’t sure how to take your words about God in your comment either, but you don’t need to leave over it.

Presumably, the states consist of the voters who elect Senators.

Duh. Thanks for informing me of that. And that is precisely why the Senate no longer functions as reps for their states but they are just an extension of the people’s House. Like one big body. Was better when they were appointed by state legislatures and power hungry Roves of the world had less influence on the appointments.

Sean Hannity, if you are reading this, please stop fawning over Karl Rove. The guy is a failed “Architect,” and a wolf in Conservative clothing. Since you claim to be a Conservative Sean, please have people on your show who are actually Conservatives.

Evidence that Republicans rejected those who supported TARP, Medicare D, etc were not elected? Show me. Karl Rove as others suggest is interested only in his reputation, badly damaged in the last election, and his actions suggest that he deserved the moniker that GW Bush gave him, namely “t…d blossom….”

American Crossroads is evidently at a Crossroads, eh?

I wouldn’t worry overmuch. If I were one of Rove’s sugar-daddies , and he came back to me hat-in-hand for the 2014 election season, I would ask, “So, Karl, tell me: How many of your candidates won? I need to know before I write you another check..”

…and Karl will shuffle about, staring at his shoes, and mumble, “Well, sir, none exactly. But, I was able to make a jackass out of myself on Fox News election night coverage. That must be worth something, right?”

Karl Rove is irrelevant. It might take him a year or two for that to sink in. But, I must admit to fantasizing lately that Patrick Fitzgerald had laid a better perjury trap for the man during the Valerie Plame affair. Then, maybe he’d have been cooling his jets in some country-club prison right now, and leaving the rest of us conservatives the hell alone.

I don’t think purpose is to go after T-Party or conservatives just the fringe candidate with no discipline who make stupid questions about “Legitimate Rape” who blow up & influence narrative giving (D) advantage

Speaking of senatorial candidates, is there ANY chance that Saxby Chambliss could be replaced by EE?

Not sure if it’s still fashionable or not, but … 5.

I didn’t say it was necessarily a good thing. I said that it wasn’t the root problem.

Certainly, though, I do think they had redeeming, innovative features which might make them a tad more palatable to me and to some, and I also know that the first thing the Democrats want is to chuck those out and keep the things they like most.

“The people who brought us No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, TARP, the GM bailout, Harriet Miers, etc., etc., etc.’

You mean just about every conservative here and in the country who voted for Bush not once, but twice?

Why all the vitriol? I’m as conservative on policy issues as anyone, and I disagreed with many things Bush did. But I see the disagreements with Rove as more tactical than policy. Seems to me his primary concern is to elect Republicans. Erick is an ardent conservative who is less interested in electing Republicans than he is in electing equally ardent conservatives. It seems that, to him, it is better to have a Democrat in office than a moderately conservative Republican. Rove disagrees.

Ok, so we have two differing views. But can’t we be respectful in our disagreement? Can’t we realize that we are not enemies? I would much rather have Brown as Senator from Massachusetts than Warren. Conservatives must realize that conservative policies cannot be implemented if we don’t elect Republicans. Reagan’s view was correct: nominate the most conservative Republican THAT CAN WIN. Winning is important.

Rove and Prince Preibus made a mess the last time. Doing the same thing over and over is what? Get rid of both of them. I stopped watching Fox except Fox and Friends am when Obama won 2nd term. What a sorry day. The Tea Party should send out momma grizzly to put the GOPers in their place.

Erick, I’m disappointed to hear that you are so quick to make more enemies, and I believe that you’re feeding into Obama’s desire to have Republicans tear ourselves apart. I think that we have our hands full with the current enemy, the Obama Administration and Democrats.

I would prefer to see Republicans with different ideas as competitors during the Primary, and as friends during the general election. Republican candidates need more healthy competition during the Primaries to make them better candidates. We’ve lost too many elections with candidates who were unprepared.

The interesting thing about Primaries is that ‘grassroots’ can easily beat money, because, at that phase, it’s a turnout game.

So, if you want to be a positive influence to move Republicans in a more Conservative direction, stop wasting your time demonizing Rove, and maybe focus your energies on sponsoring candidate debates and other venues for creating competitive discussions at the Primary stage. Putting a Cruz next to a Dewhurst is the best way to demonstrate why the Conservative position is the superior position.

The sad part is that Rove still has some gravitas after being in the Bush Administration. Whether you like him or not, he gets help from Conservatives because, as much as we hate to admit it, we like to eat our own as well.

If we conservatives want to be taken seriously, we have to stop with candidates like Akin and Murdoch! That cost us holding our own in the senate! That is serious and requires organization not just appropriate “conservative positions” held to make a difference!

We have lost too many elections with establishment candidates who are simply democratic-lite. Rove and the establishment went down in flames during the last 4 elections because of the big government Republican agenda. Erick and RedState are right to make a stand.

Karl Rove just said that the 49ers still have a chance.

The problem: Most people won’t know the difference.. They’ll see Republican PAC’s and think they’re part of the collective apparatus.. They won’t realize that they are there to disenfranchise and to place power into the hands of the establishment.

The solution: Would take some real balls.. It would mean opening up on them and tagging them as a bunch of RINO’s who’s only concern is being near the federal purse.. And to drive that point home till their advantage turns into a negative.. To drive the point home till anyone associated with them is tainted..

Money isn’t everything.. And, Mr. Erickson has laid out a good. road map for doing this: (No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, TARP, the GM bailout, Harriet Miers, etc.)

That’s their legacy, and Americans have rejected most of it it soundly….
They just need to be forced to wear it like a wreath.

And I’m glad to see this column as an opening salvo to that end!

Their harping about Akin and Mourdock gets a little old too.. Yeah, Akin was completely off the reservation. No doubt. Mourdock worded something very poorly and was crucified for it.. Yeah, he was wrong and it sounded bad. Agreed.

But these are flukes.. What’s one dumb statement VS their legacy?

They say and do and propose dumb things all the time.. But they get a pass on it.

There’s no way they could withstand the same scrutiny the Tea Party gets, for example.. Or Palin.. Or anyone outside the establishment.

It’s been pretty easy for them to sit up there and cast rocks from their glass house all this time.. Be interesting to see someone pick a few up and lob them back.

Nobody wants to lose races, and I think most people would agree with what you wrote in principle..

But in practice, we really want a smaller, cheaper, more responsible government. That’s a goal the establishment types don’t seem to share.

Conservatives cast votes to that end.. and if they don’t see any progress, eventually, people begin to ask why bother voting?

I’d love to work together.. But I think the Republican party is in a crisis right now and it needs to decide what it really wants and who it really represents..

Looking back at the Republican Primary, the debates were ridiculous, and did not help in producing the best candidate. Name popularity basically dictated the position on the stage and the number of questions that were directed at the candidate. And, the debates were moderated by sworn enemies of Conservatives.

I’d like to see one-on-one live video debates (perhaps hosted by RedState.com) between possible 2016 competitors start now. I think that debates for the 2014 primaries should start now, too. If the debates focus on a single topic where the competitors disagree, that will showcase their intelligence and ability to be persuasive, as well as their ideas. That would also avoid the sound-bite talking-point platitude-spewing style of debates that is the norm today. The style of the Reagan-Buckley debates is a good model.

You are off your rocker. I should remind you that he was Governor of Viriginia, had all the establishment connections in VA and D.C., and was the darling of Rove and the establishment. He lost twice because – despite all of that – he was a moderate.

That is why you do not let the MSM organize and conduct your debates.

I think “crisis” overstates the problem. Of course, it’s a down time for Republicans, but I think they can come back in 2014 and win big in 2016 if they play it right. The issue is, did they learn the right lessons from 2012? We’ll see in 2014.

If ANY future candidate chooses the PROVEN losers who led the McCain & Romney campaigns, they should be certified!

Who set the 2012 R debate schedule? Talk about having the enemy inside the city walls…

We need to CHANGE – and I agree, the sooner the better! I’m tired of watching R on R extreme fighting matches with a judge egging them on!

I urge the Republican leadership to take the bull by the horns and never agree to such biased moderators again.

And, he was a good governor, but it was a relatively easy time, late 1990s. His performance propelled him into the Senate in 2000. His 2000 opponent, incumbent Chuck Robb, was not real popular. In 2006, he should have easily beat Jim Webb, but he ran a lackluster campaign and then made the stupid “Macaca” comment that did him in. His 2012 campaign against Tim Kaine, an establishment Democrat, was more difficult, but it was still winable if done properly. Allen was all over the lot with attacks about peripheral issues instead of focusing on a few areas where Kaine was most vulnerable.

He had connections, but that’s not enough. You have to convince the voters and he was not very good at that. His main opposition in the primary was a woman named Jamie Radtke; I liked her a lot, but she was not ready for prime time and she would have been an even weaker candidate in the general election.

Both would bring good conservative values to the Senate.

Erick has said he’s not running.

Isn’t that just the nature of representative democracy? I mean, couldn’t you flip that argument, and say that states with smaller urban areas elect senators that represent the rural areas to the detriment of the cities? And then once elected, those rural senators (if they form an overall majority, which is usually the case given the way the state lines were drawn) enact policies to the detriment of the cities? Or vice versa, if the urban senators are the majority?

I feel like what you described is the unavoidable side effect of grouping voters into districts/states/wards/whatever for the purpose of electing people to represent them. Would devolving senate election to legislatures really help if you just end up seeing the rural-versus-urban dynamic again, only this time with even more arbitrary borders? I mean, if those urban areas really are a majority of voters in a state, won’t they (theoretically, gerrymandering aside) also have a majority in the state legislature?

I think Akin looked like an idiot to the general American public. That is who mattered in the end. We are drowning in debt and he gets off in the weeds and makes a fool of himself. We need to better vet a candidate if we expect folks to get behind him!

I like adding “constitutional” at every opportunity. We must be able to distinguish our limited government beliefs from the estabishment R’s gimme more attitude.

On another front, I can’t understand WHY each and every public statement coming from an R doesn’t begin with the number of days since the Democrats have passed a budget! Silly me, I thought annual budgets were mandated by law…I guess by law exempts Harry Reid & Co.

Think you replied to the wrong person constitutionjenny, that poster will not know you responded.

I did, thanks for pointing it out.

The voters of Missouri are who got to “vet a candidate”. And they did. He won the primary. Plain and simple. And it was an election for a U.S. Senator from Missouri, not America. What the “general American public” thought was irrelevant to the Missouri election.

Sandra Fluke is a twit. I genuinely wish that Repubs had drawn more attention to this young woman because the majority of women across this nation are completely and totally embarrassed to no end to be remotely associated with such an opportunistic flake as this young women has proven herself to be.

When is the last time you ran for office and showed all the hicks how to do it right? You would not be an armchair QB acting as if they know anything about everything would you? How about you worry about continuing the nose picking and not telling everyone your sorry opinion about men who actually try to do something about the mess.

“Putting a Cruz next to a Dewhurst…” IS a good example of grassroots defeating money. I don’t remember Rove actually publically supporting Dewhurst but I would bet that he and his cohorts had money in his campaign because Rove has lots of friends in Austin where the Texas GOP establishment is very concentrated. The truth is Cruz probably would not have won that primary election if (1) the primary in Texas hadn’t been delayed (due to re-districting challenges) which gave him more time to develop the needed grassroots support (2) he hadn’t received financial support from all over the country. Dewhurst had “unlimited” funding both because he is personally wealthy and he had many of the Karl Rove-types behind him. I have been voting in Texas for more than 30 years and I don’t ever remember a Senate race anywhere that was so well-supported nationally in both grassroots, on-the-ground efforts, as well as financially. Even though conservatives in the other 49 states would not benefit directly from Cruz in the Senate, everyone is beginning to realize how much damage one or two senators could potentially have, There are days I’d really like to wring Harry Reid’s neck…..

Actually, Cruz didn’t win the Primary. He lost to Dewhurst by a sizable margin. Cruz then won the runoff by a sizable margin. The percentage of registered Republicans that was required to win this was 5.6%. That’s with Dewhurst spending $24.5M. The key to winning the Primaries against the establishment candidate is not money. It’s grassroots motivation to get people to the polls (GOTV). Palin helped Cruz in this regard.

“The…most conservative candidates who can WIN.”

There is a difference. GWB was groomed to win. He sucked.

Ted Cruz was not groomed to win. He won on his own.

Well, Rick Santorum tried, and he couldn’t get the Republican nomination.

Rick Santorum was a perfect Establishment candidate – socially conservative, big government. No thanks.

Is there anyone who ran who didn’t fit that exact description? Despite some posturing about being small government on all their parts, there wasn’t actually a small government guy in the field. Leaving Santorum as the most conservative.

Oh gosh, a scummy liberal’s opinion on what we need to do, what our “platforms” are, and what we need to do. I guess we must give a damn.

Jump off a bridge into moving traffic, that is the only entertainment we want from you.

The policy at Redstate is “Conservative in the primary, Republican in the general”. And that almost always means that we are going to support candidates that are a lot more conservative than you apparently believe “can win”.

What would your opinion have been of the primary between Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio? Early in that process, the consensus was there was no way Rubio could win and that Crist was going to smoke him in the primary. Didn’t happen. Redstate led the way in supporting the “unelectable” Rubio. Similar story with Ted Cruz, although he was never trailing as much as Rubio. Same with Mike Lee.

Sometimes “can’t win” becomes “can win” when we support conservatives. Try it some time.

Now if we could just find that one candidate that espouses the majority of the points!

Sigh. Couldn’t let it go, could you, even though I gave you the chance. Oh well, your loss.

Yep. I neglected to read his comment history. That certainly explains it.

See, pal, it’s like this: liberals don’t get to come in here and tell conservatives how they should think. My mistake was to give the benefit of the doubt…when I should have read your comment history first.

Bye.

Rove needs to be MUZZLED and retired for LIFE at GITMO.

We need to start sending Rhinos, Demorats and all the Brain Dead Zombies that support OBAMA there to be water boarded UNTIL the swear on their life..

To PROTECT AND SERVE the Constitution and to do their FRIGGING Jobs to SERVE the people that put them in office.

I’ll gladly assist.

I believe there’s no better way for the individual conservative to make war on Rove and his “Conservative Victory Fund” than to help fill up all the vacant precinct committeeman slots inside the Party in one’s community with warm conservative bodies.

Go to where to conservatives gather (tea party meetings/rallies, 9.12 group meetings, right to life group meetings, etc.) and ask them to consider joining you at your next local Republican committee meeting.

Reince got reelected to the RNC chairman’s position because there aren’t enough conservatives in the “bottom rung” precinct committeeman slots in each state to ensure that local committee officers, state committeeman slots and state convention delegate slots are filled by conservatives. For example, here in Arizona, precinct committeemen in each of the 30 legislative districts elect district committee officers. About 48% of the PC slots in the LDs in Maricopa County, where I live, are unfilled. In my LD a majority of the PCs are conservatives; hence, all of the officer slots are filled by conservatives. In turn, our conservative chairman is a member of the county committee.

The PCs in each LD get to elect one state committeeman for every three PCs. So, because our LD has a majority of conservatives in the PC slots, and because we’ve come to know one another, virtually all of our state committeeman slots were filled by conservative PCs. Who in turn went to the state committee annual meeting and tried to elect a conservative state chairman and other officers. The state chairman is one of the three AZ members of the RNC, who in turn elect the RNC chairman and other officers.

About half the Republican Party PC slots in every locale are vacant. If conservatives were to fill up all of the vacant slots (about 200,000 vacancies exist nationwide) our Party apparatus would turn from being at half-strength and ideologically split to full-strength with a solid, conservative bent.

Just takes a little bit of time and effort by individual conservatives.

Each state has a unique system. Go here to learn more:

http://precinctproject.us

http://theprecinctproject.wordpress.com

Thank you,

CW

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American Crossroads is creating a new Super PAC to crush conservatives, destroy the tea party, and put a bunch of squishes in Republican leadership positions.

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This is sounding like the hyperbole I read by the hour on DailyKos, AlterNet, MMFA, MoveOn,HuffPo

Bad Form! Tone it down.

Best solution is to embrace Rove’s knowledge of how to win elections. He is not
an ideologue. Hire the man, but accept his wisdom if you want to win elections.

Rove is not Good or Bad. He is an acknowledged expert in the political science.

I like Mourdock and sent money to his campaign. Rove’s view is to
make sure people that are inexperienced in the political area are not
running.

American’s are mostly “low information” voters. They hear a comment like
Mourdock or Akin made and their minds are made up and there’s nothing anyone
can do to change it.

Rove’s mission and our mission (I am a Tea Party Type == Much smaller
government) should be to make sure our candidates know when to curb their tongues.