American Majority Action to Rove: 'Thanks for 2006 & 2008 Elections'

The conservative group American Majority Action has a message for GOP strategist Karl Rove: “Thanks for leading GOP to failure, we’ll take it from here.”

In a release to the press, AMA’s Ron Meyer said that, “Karl Rove, fresh off of a massive and embarrassing 2012 failure–both in the prediction and advocacy worlds–is trying to convince his donors that 2012 wasn’t his fault. It was conservatives’.”

Meyer said Rove’s “political adventures under President Bush (NCLB, Medicaid Part D, and increased spending) led the Republican Party into stunning and historic losses in 2006 and 2008.”

“Conservatives–led by the Tea Party excitement–took back the House of Representatives with no help from Karl Rove,” Meyer adds. “In 2012, Rove and his Super PAC American Crossroads spent just 1.29% of their money against candidates who lost, according to the Sunlight Foundation.”

Meyer’s statement comes on the heels of a piece in The New York Times detailing how Rove and Crossroads’ Steven J. Law have teamed up with the “biggest donors in the Republican Party” to create what they call the Conservative Victory Project. The Times notes the new group will “recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party’s effort to win control of the Senate.”

Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro argues, though, that “American Crossroads and its ilk [are the ones] that have run the GOP into the ground.”

“Spending millions of dollars on useless 30,000-ft. advertising campaigns during the last election cycle, training candidates to soften conservatism in order to appeal to ‘moderates,’ blowing up the federal budget under George W. Bush as a bipartisan tactic–all of those strategies led the party to a disastrous defeat in 2012,” Shapiro wrote on Sunday. “The Tea Party, which may nominate losers from time to time, also brought the Republicans their historic 2010 Congressional victory. If Tea Party candidates lose, it’s because they weren’t good candidates; if GOP establishment candidates lose, it’s because they weren’t good conservatives.”

Meyer makes a similar argument.

“Bad candidates have nothing to do with the Tea Party or conservative ideology,” Meyer said in his release. “There have been bad establishment and bad conservative candidates. Establishment, Crossroads-assisted candidates ran in the dark-red states of Montana and North Dakota in 2012 and lost. Romney was certainly an establishment candidate. He lost too. How was these races conservatives’ fault?”

“The quality of a candidate really depends on articulation and organization. Great Tea Party leaders like Senators Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz would have never been elected in this new Rove system,” Meyer adds. “These leaders are exactly the type of candidates we will need to take back the White House. Before Rove puts forth any more fancy plans, he needs to explain how he wasted $300 million in the 2012 election cycle and saw no results. Before trying to rescue Republicans from conservatives, Rove needs to rescue his donors from this continued hoodwinking.”