CNS News editor-in-chief Terence Jeffrey has questioned Karl Rove’s conservative bonafides after the Republican operative launched a new group to back disciplined candidates in an effort to win back a majority in the Senate. The group, the Conservative Victory Project, is a spinoff of Rove’s American Crossroads, which spent big on the 2012 election, and seeks to avoid nominating candidates like Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin.
In a column Wednesday, Jeffrey said Rove is pitching himself as a “conservative leader” with the new group. “But Rove is no conservative,” he wrote.
If you give him credit for believing in the policies and nominations he helped Bush make and defend, then Rove was wrong on the constitutionally appropriate role of the federal government, wrong on foreign policy, wrong on immigration and wrong on a crucial nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2000, George W. Bush ran for president not as a conservative, but as a “compassionate conservative.” This was presumably because unadulterated conservatives are not compassionate.
