Tea Party Nation chief Judson Phillips isn’t going to get his first choice for Republican National Commitee chair, so he says he’ll settle for Saul Anuzis instead. Yesterday, Phillips implored Sarah Palin to make a run for the top job, claiming that Palin was the best chance the tea party has to keep the “establishment” from taking over. Palin said thanks but no thanks, stating that “there are others who would probably be much more comfortable asking people for money than I would be.”
In a new statement on the Tea Party Nation website, Phillips said he expected Palin to say no to his idea, but “I was surprised at how quickly that ‘no’ came.” Still, he writes, Palin’s rejection doesn’t mean the tea party can’t have a candidate in the race for RNC chair.
“Fortunately for us, there is a conservative alternative,” Phillips writes. “Saul Anuzis.”
Anuzis, the former chair of the Michigan GOP and a candidate for RNC chair in 2009, was the first to make his candidacy official ahead of January’s RNC elections. He’s now part of a big field where no real frontrunner has emerged. Steele, the embattled current chair, has not said if he’ll run again.
According to Phillps, Anuzis offers tea partiers the same protections against mainstream Republicans that Palin did. Anuzis is a “supporter of the Tea Party in Michigan,” Phillips writes.
“We need a conservative in as Chair of the RNC. If not, we will end up with the same class of GOP knuckleheads that blew it so badly in 2006 and 2008,” Phillips writes. “If we do not win this battle for the heart and soul of the GOP, we will end up with either a second Obama term or perhaps as bad, a [Mitt] Romney presidency.”
As we reported yesterday, Phillips is a controversial figure in the tea party movement who other tea partiers often publicly criticize. He’s perhaps best known for failing to get the movement behind his tea party convention concept, which many other tea partiers dismissed as a money-making scheme by an opportunist.
Read Phillips’ endorsement of Anuzis here.
