Looking ahead to 2014, Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer said that the best way for conservatives to defeat the permanent political class and the Republican establishment is to not compromise with or be co-opted by them.
On Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125 with Breitbart News Executive Chairman and host Stephen K. Bannon, Schweizer, regarded as the top expert on crony capitalism in the nation, said Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C. are like “two vultures fighting over a carcass.” He said both parties are fighting over “who’s going to pick at the carcass more.”
He said the natural tendency of the Republican establishment is to “compromise and give away.” Schweizer mentioned that this was also the case during President Ronald Reagan’s tenure in office, when much of the Republican establishment that had loathed him, at least since 1976, wanted to “cut a deal with the Soviets.”
Reagan did not, and Americans eventually saw the collapse of the “Evil Empire,” as Schweizer noted.
Schweizer emphasized that the way to defeat the permanent political class–in particular, the Republican establishment–is to espouse the same “no compromise” approach Reagan espoused toward the Soviet Union.
Looking back on 2013, the Tea Party and conservatives garnered victories on a host of issues–such as gun control and amnesty–because they did not go along with the Republican establishment, whose agenda is often more in line with President Barack Obama’s than the conservatives they purportedly represent. Even a Harvard professor conceded that such relentlessness will most likely enable the Tea Party to prevail in the end over a weakened GOP establishment.
Ultimately, Schweizer said, despite establishment groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads can spend hundreds of millions of dollars waging war against conservatives, “what elects people is votes not dollars.” He said that the Republican establishment can spend “as much money as they want, but those candidates will have to appeal to Americans for votes.”
In large swaths of the country, the Republican establishment’s message and policy objectives “do not resonate,” Schweizer said.
Schweizer said strong conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) receive the most vitriol because the establishment is legitimately threatened by them.
He also said that if the establishment genuinely thinks someone is a clown–they simply “laugh” at them–rather than waste their energies on them. In contrast, if the permanent political class thinks someone–like Cruz–can be, or is, “highly effective,” they get “angry and vicious.”
Schweizer asserted that Cruz, especially when it came to the “widespread collusion” that is Obamacare, fought on principle, making it evident that he was not in Washington to “feather the pockets” of the permanent political class.
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