Rush Limbaugh last week blistered Republican establishment consultants like Mike Murphy and Steve Schmidt for getting “rich no matter who wins or loses” and enhancing their profiles with the mainstream media and the permanent political class by publicly denigrating conservatives.
Murphy and Schmidt have torn into Limbaugh after the election as being “poisonous” but, as Limbaugh said, these establishment consultants are really attacking conservative voters and a movement they have loathed, never understood, and been ashamed of in their elitist social circles.
Pat Caddell has also railed against this Republican “Consultant-Lobbyist-Establishment” complex for not ever putting the candidate’s interests ahead of their own.
Limbaugh quoted establishment Republican consulted Mike Murphy, who said:
The biggest problem that Romney had was the Republican primary. That’s what’s driving the Republican brand right now to a disaster, and we’ve got to get, kind of, a party view of America that’s not right out of Rush Limbaugh’s dream journal.
Rush asked, “Did not Murphy get the candidate he wanted?”
“We need to get rid of conservatism, is what is he’s saying,” Limbaugh said. “We need to get rid of all these people shouting stupid conservative stuff.”
He then quoted failed Republican consultant Steve Schmidt:
We would have been much better off running against the real President Obama as opposed to the sinister pretend President Obama. And the total lack of credibility with some of this stuff, I think is just absolutely repellent to the middle of the electorate. And then when you look at the demographics, who is Rush Limbaugh talking to? He is talking to a demographic that’s white, 65 plus, and rural. It’s not what the country looks like anymore. So you have these talk radio hosts making millions and millions and millions of dollars a year driving a message of complete and total ludicrous nonsense into the electorate, a lot of it poisonous.
Schmidt mismanaged the McCain 2008 presidential campaign by suspending McCain’s campaign during the financial crisis and then tried to rewrite history afterward in order to falsely blame everyone — especially Sarah Palin — for McCain’s loss, except himself.
Limbaugh then railed against Schmidt’s failed record as a consultant for moderate candidates:
Steve Schmidt, in addition to running the losing campaign of John McCain, Steve Schmidt managed the losing campaign for Kentucky Attorney General Will T. Scott. Schmidt also ran California state Senator Tim Leslie’s unsuccessful race for lieutenant governor of California. Steve Schmidt was the communications director for California State Treasurer Matt Fong’s unsuccessful campaign to unseat Barbara Boxer, and in 1999 he was the communications director for Lamar Alexander’s unsuccessful presidential run. I don’t know if there are any victories in there. This is just what I have found. We know Schmidt knows how to lose and we know that Murphy knows how to lose. And so it’s quite natural to blame somebody else.
Limbaugh said Murphy spent a hundred million dollars to run Meg Whitman’s failed campaign for governor of California in 2012. And yet, Limbaugh said these consultants continue to push “these squishy candidates” because it enables to them make money while also being liked by the mainstream media.
According to Limbaugh, these moderate consultants “go to every Republican candidate and they say, ‘I’m the guy that can get you the independents. I’m the guy who can run your campaign and get you the moderates so that you will win.’ And they do not win. They lose.”
What is worse, even if such candidates were to ever win an election, Limbaugh said they would be “disasters:”
“They end up with these candidates that have no chance of winning, and even if they would win, they would be disasters because they’re Democrat-lite, and then after they lose and lose and lose, what do they do? Blame a guy on the radio,” Limbaugh said. “They think they have the strategy, they have the blueprint, they know how to win, though none of them ever do. But then I come along, and I get the public so riled up that I end up getting people to vote in ways against what the strategists have convinced their candidates they can make happen. So it’s my fault.”