Robert Patterson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) gave “aid and comfort to the rioters and the protestors” with his op-ed in Time against the militarization of local police forces.
Appearing on Breitbart News Saturday, Patterson said that Paul was “outdoing” President Barack Obama’s “attempt to show moral equivalence between the rioters and the police” with a Time op-ed that even Al Sharpton praised.
Patterson said that it is “another illustration of out-of-touch Republicans who are looking for love in all the wrong places” by “pandering to liberal and corporate elites instead of the middle america that the party needs to rebuild the center-right majority.”
Patterson, who also worked for Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, said Paul “wants the affirmation of the elites and the media” because it is “a lot more fun to be lionized to by the New York Times and Time magazine” and “sit in corporate luxury boxes” than to understand the middle class that Nixon and Reagan understood is “decisive” in any national election.
Patterson said the New York Times and other mainstream media elites “look down on average, ordinary Americans” because they think they “are not as sophisticated as their intellectual” and foreign friends.
But Patterson noted these voters got Republicans out of the wilderness in the 1960s and can do so again. Echoing themes from Pat Buchanan’s Encouraging The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority, Patterson said Ronald Reagan ran on a law and order platform to become California’s governor two years after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide. Two years after that in 1968, Richard Nixon carried 32 states to win the White House, and Republicans saw significant gains in Congress and governorships.
Patterson also said that just as many in the GOP have “been soft on lawbreaking in Missouri, a large number of Republicans are soft on enforcing our immigration laws.”
“Where is the Republican sympathy for this slain U.S. Border Agent?” he asked of Border Agent Javier Vega. “Where is the sympathy for that man, as opposed to the sympathy for the shot suspect in Ferguson, Missouri?”
In an op-ed for Breitbart News, Patterson echoed similar themes, asking, “Where’s all the sympathy, for example, from party ‘strategists’ like Karl Rove, former Gov. Haley Barbour, or Al Cardenas, former chair of the American Conservative Union, for the widow and three children of Javier Vega Jr., the U.S. border patrol agent who was slain by two repeated border-violators in front of his family two weeks ago?”