OPINION:
The Republican Party will make another strategic political blunder by not openly embracing the Tea Party and its candidates.
What the GOP pundits, elites and establishment had better realize real quick is that Republicans need the Tea Party more than the Tea Party needs Republicans.
Americans are not just frustrated with liberal Fedzillacrats who are addicted to all things big-government, like waste, unaccountability and enslavement. Americans who still cherish our Founding Fathers’ vision also are disgusted with Republicans who purposefully strayed from their core values of limited government, responsible spending and lower taxes.
Conservatives, the historic base of the GOP, watched in despair over the past 20 years or so as Republicans turned away from them and treated them as political pariahs, excess baggage and people to be shunned. Big, ugly, dumb mistake.
Only since President Obama was elected has the GOP started waving its conservative banner again. Until this happened, many Americans couldn’t tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats as both parties danced a jig with Fedzilla. As a hunting buddy of mine says, the Democrats are sprinting toward socialism, but sadly, the Republicans have been jogging toward socialism.
GOP strategists such as Karl Rove, other establishment wonks and Rockefeller Republicans may sip their martinis at parties and scoff at the hardworking, patriotic members of the Tea Party, but they are slitting their own political throats by discounting the growing numbers of grass-roots enthusiasts who are awakening to the fact that Washington has been working against them, not for them.
For the GOP to support liberal RINOs (Republicans in name only) over truly conservative Tea Party candidates shows just how out of touch the party is with conservatives. Establishment status-quo politics on both sides has been the problem, not the solution.
No longer will conservatives hold their noses and vote for the person with the R beside his name. Those days are past. Conservatives will support conservative candidates with their dollars and their votes and leave the RINO candidates in the dust unless the GOP stops jogging toward socialism and immediately reverses course.
The Tea Party is moving out and is attracting not only conservatives but also many moderates who are disgusted by how the two political parties have battered America with bad politics and insane programs and then have the gall to tell us it is for our own good. It has always been for their own political good, not the good of the American people.
Americans of all social, economic and political stripes now see a way to drain the Washington swamp of the cronyism, stupidity, entrenched incumbency, purposeful confusion and runaway corruption that has bankrupted America, ruined lives and destroyed small businesses and entire communities. The GOP establishment must have had blinders on not to see the grass-roots Tea Party storm brewing on the horizon.
The message of the Tea Party is ringing loud and clear across America: We demand accountability, period.
There is a palpable feeling in the air that Americans can and will bring back the nation from the brink of disaster to which the Washington bureaucratic machines have brought us with numbnut Fedzillacrat policies and programs costing trillions of dollars. Only bloodsuckers, Fedzilla lemmings and idiots would endorse more of the same.
Moderates are key to political victory, but elections are won and lost on ideas, and after watching how central planners from both parties have done their best to strangle America for the past 50 years with scores of bad ideas, many moderates surely are willing to listen to a message of limited government, much less government spending, more accountability, lower taxes and more liberty. Send moderates the message that conservatism is the path to economic growth and jobs and that liberalism is economic suicide.
We can and will win, Mr. Rove. Apparently no one in the GOP got the voting-revolution message from Scott Brown’s so-called impossible win in Massachusetts.
Wet behind the political ears as some Tea Party candidates may be, Mr. Rove, put some faith, hope and trust in them. It is exactly their political rawness and lack of political experience that appeals to Americans. Support those candidates. Stand with them. Energize those candidates and the people who elected them, and then watch in awe as, once again, ordinary Americans do extraordinary things.
Never count America out, Mr. Rove. The people are speaking. Listen to them. Learn from them. Now let’s get it on about the business of restoring America and crushing Fedzilla.
Ted Nugent is an unstoppable American rock ’n’ roll, sporting and political activist icon. He is author of “Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto” and “God, Guns, & Rock ’N’ Roll” (Regnery Publishing).
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