GOP Consultant Karl Rove's Cash-Rich Election-Losing Politburo – Deems "Stupid" Candidates & Defeats Conservatives

KarlRove

by Michelle Morin

KarlRove

The GOP establishment godfather Karl Rove, whose election-pick track record has turned dismally south since the George W. Bush Presidential elections, has officially declared that his mafia seeks to annihilate conservatives in the GOP and dubiously named his PAC the “Conservative Victory Project.”  

This establishment mafia super PAC has as its mission the usual loser track:  defeat conservatives who would otherwise defeat establishment candidates in the primaries.

RedState’s Erick Erickson tells it this way:

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. Thank God they are behind this. In 2012, they spent hundreds of millions of rich donors’ money and had jack to show for it.

It is interesting though. The people who brought us No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, TARP, the GM bailout, Harriet Miers, etc., etc., etc. are really hacked off that people have been rejecting them. In 2012, about the only successful Republican candidates were the ones who directly rejected the legacy of these people.

So now they will up their game. They don’t like being shut out. They blame the tea party and conservatives for their failure to win primaries. They’ll now try to match conservatives and, in the process, call themselves conservatives.

Rove says his object is to “avoid having stupid candidates who can’t win general elections.”

Gee, Mr. Rove.  Seems to me that since you’re the one who picks the losers, that it’s your intellect which is in question.

Here are the hard numbers, from PR Watch:

Republican mastermind Karl Rove was responsible for most of the damage [in the 2012 elections]. Together, his SuperPAC American Crossroads and 501(c)(4) “dark money” group Crossroads GPS reported spending $175 million (when undisclosed spending is taken into account, the actual total may be as high as $390 million), but accomplished very little of consequence. A post-election analysis by the Sunlight Foundation found that very few of the candidates supported by Rove’s groups emerged victorious on Tuesday. Just 1.29% of the $104 million spent by American Crossroads backed a winning candidate. Crossroads GPS fared slightly better, achieving a 14.4% return on its $70 million in reported spending.

American Crossroads’ only success was with the $990,000 it spent to help elect Republican Deb Fischer over Democrat Bob Kerrey, though the election had been movingin Fischer’s favor since April. The group also backed a handful of successful House candidates.

And take a look at this.  In an exchange between author Bob Woodward and Karl Rove on the 2/17/13 broadcast of Fox News Sunday, Woodward brings up Rove’s “interesting focus on money” and tells Rove that is positioning himself as the GOP’s “politburo.”

video h/t The Raw Story 

From the video:

WALLACE: — Tea Party candidates are saying you are trying to beat them.

ROVE: No. No. No, some people associated with the Tea Party element. Look, Todd Akin was not a Tea Party candidate. Tea Partiers supported the other two candidates in the Republican primaries.

WALLACE: Todd Akin, the guy who said, legitimate rape in a Missouri …

ROVE: Right. And our object is, to avoid having stupid candidates who can’t win general elections, who are undisciplined, can’t raise money, aren’t putting together the support necessary to win a general election campaign, because this money is too difficult to raise to be spending it on behalf of candidates who have little chance of winning in a general election.

WALLACE: You say this as the Tea Party thinks — the Tea Party think you are going after — let me just — let me just finish. So they say there were plenty of bad establishment candidates in North Dakota, in Virginia and Wisconsin, they say, a lot of them blew chances in races that they should have picked up ….

(CROSSTALK)

ROVE: I think that is right. Look, let’s take case of Indiana where we had a candidate, Richard Mourdock, who lost the general election in a state that was comfortably won by Mitt Romney and reelected Republicans up and down the ballot. There are two people responsible for the loss in Indiana race, one of them is Richard Mourdock, who ran an undisciplined campaign, in which he said if a woman was raped and conceived a child, it was God’s will. But there is another person to blame there, too, and with all due respect, Senator Lugar had lost touch with the voters of his state. He was registered to vote in a place he hadn’t own since 1973, he’s last gone home for a Lincoln Day dinner in the 1980s. The top leaders of his party and his state had never met him, and he rarely went home. And there comes a point at which even accomplished statesmen like that will — will cause the loss of an election if they don’t step aside and allow a robust, normal primary to emerge.

WALLACE: Bob, what does it say about the Republican Party when you have Karl Rove stepping in there to say we have got to try to police those Republican primary voters — I mean, it’s part of the process, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, but they are trying to police who Republican primary voters are going to pick to go up against Democrats …

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: … and let me just finish the question. And, when you have Marco Rubio, who is pretty conservative and a Tea Party favorite giving the Republican response, and the Tea Party thinks they have to have somebody else to give a response to the response?

BOB WOODWARD, THE WASHINGTON POST: My last book is going to be called “Some People Never Go Away,” and Karl is going to get his own chapter.

(LAUGHTER)

WOODWARD: Because he never goes away. And …

(CROSSTALK)

ROVE: I’m sorry.

WOODWARD: OK, maybe two chapters, because, you never know what the next bounce will be with you. But, what is interesting is the focus on money. I think the problem in the Republican Party is really not money. I think they’ve got lots of it. I think it is – theory of the case, why are we here, what is our message, how to connect to the real world and this idea about 30 million here, we’re going to do that, I think is the wrong track.

WALLACE: Karl, your response.

ROVE: Well, I think he’s right. I used the $30 million to prove that we were pro-Tea Party, but I think you are right. A lot of this is just simply examining these candidates, looking at their record, doing the kind of research on ourselves as the other side is already going to be doing and trying to have discussions behind the scenes among conservative groups as to how strong are these respective candidates, because look, there was a reason why Todd Akin won the primary, he won the primary because Harry Reid went in and spent $2 million attacking him as a conservative during the Republican primary. He said he never voted for a tax increase, he’s always been pro-life, he’s even supported a balanced budget amendment, too conservative from Missouri, and the object was nominate — help nominate the weakest Republican candidate possible so they’d have a chance …

(CROSSTALK)

WOODWARD: But you’re going to set yourself up as a kind of politburo, vetting these candidates …

ROVE: No, no, I mean …

(CROSSTALK)

WOODWARD: I mean the whole theory of Republicanism is to let the local state or a district decide.

If you’re a Republican, I want to hear from you.

What are your thoughts about Rove’s mission, influence in the party, and election results?  

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Michelle Morin is a conservative blogger and speaker for freedom and America’s founding principles. Join her for updates here.

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