“These fake conservatives need to go away before they do more damage.” Brent Bozell, today on the Rove/Law money group to shut down Tea Party Senate candidates.
Matt Kibbe: “The Empire is striking back. A clear pattern has emerged, beginning with the GOP leadership’s efforts to silence delegates on the floor of the RNC, continuing with House Leadership’s purge of fiscally conservative congressmen from their committee positions for voting out of line with the GOP establishment. Now, an Orwellian-named ‘Conservative Victory Project’ is created with the sole operating mission of blocking the efforts of fiscally conservative activists across the country.”
Two quotes I found in this article by Julie Bykowicz at Bloomberg.
I expect we’ll see a lot more of these kinds of quotes. But quotes are cheap. What gets traction? What makes grousing more than grousing? What forces votes and scared elected officials to change their minds and shift their strategies?
Every interparty feuds come down to the ability to shift elections — everything else is the power to shift things that shift elections: money, political organizing, and the rest. The fact that base Republicans have essentially consented to John Boehner making a series of tactical retreats on budget issues over the last three months suggests a mix of uncertainty, confusion and disillusion, not the kind of fight picking we in 2009, 2010 and 2011.
To date, even the conservative pushback on immigration reform has been notably tepid. None of this will be clear until we see some fights, some points of contention where one side stands down the other. Until then it’s all words and there’s little basis to evaluate each side’s relative power.
