Lloyd Green, who writes for the Daily Beast, noted how ferociously Breitbart News has gone after Karl Rove for trying to anoint Establishment candidates in Republican primaries who may hold values antithetical to those held by the “Jacksonian” conservatives who make up the Tea Party base.
“Breitbart.com is now going hammer and tong [sic] at Rove,” Green writes.
After American Crossroads, which is affiliated with Rove, announced the formation of a super PAC to attempt to pick candidates in GOP primaries, Breitbart News observed Rove “declared war” on the Tea Party, reported that Rove fabricated details about having worked for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, noted that Donald Trump called Rove a “loser” and that Tea Party groups were attacking the Rove machine.
And when Rove aide Jonathan Collegio, in an interview with Breitbart News editor Larry O’Connor on his WMAL “Mornings on the Mall” radio program last week, referred to movement conservative leader Brent Bozell as a “hater,” Breitbart News reported on a group of movement conservatives, including Reagan biographer Craig Shirley and talk radio host and scholar Mark Levin, who sent American Crossroads President Steven Law a letter demanding Collegio be fired.
Green casts Rove as someone representing the “K Street wing” of Washington, D.C., which he notes is referred to as “Gucci Gulch.” Grove observes the “K Street wing” likes to “tilt the nominating process away from the grassroots” which is “particularly Jacksonian in off-year elections, like the 2010 Tea Party wave.”
“At its core, the Republican Party is a bottom-up, anti-authoritarian working and middle-class party,” Green rightfully observes in describing the Reagan Democrats and the so-called “cloth coat” conservatives that have been the heart and soul of the modern conservative movement and whose enthusiasm determines whether Republicans win national elections.
Tea Party conservatives have believed “K Street” Republicans like Rove want to take the party away from Jacksonian Tea Partiers and pick nominees that will further the types of policies that actually expand the size and scope of government, which has turned Washington, D.C. into a boomtown, as Director Stephen K. Bannon and the Government Accountability Institute widely documented in a “Hannity” special on Fox News.
Green notes movement conservatives reflective of Tea Partiers were upset with George W. Bush and the Republican-led Congress last decade because of such big government policies as No Child Left Behind, TARP and Medicare Part D. They were also upset at Bush’s comprehensive immigration reform proposals and the failed nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
Green writes conservatives, for these reasons, “have wasted no time in trashing the Conservative Victory Fund,” the super PAC, which they see as a vehicle for electing candidates who will champion policies like TARP, which conservatives found repulsive.
Rove, as the so-called “architect,” was not only associated with these policies but firmly entrenched in them.
“In their eyes, Rove is more Wizard of Oz than Architect, more profiteer than player,” Green writes.
Green concludes that because Rove is “more a creature of his patrons” and “lacks a party-sanctioned mechanism for imposing his will,” Rove may be defied, which is what conservatives and Tea Partiers have signaled they would do.
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