UPDATE: Newt was on with CBS This Morning to discuss his article below. One point he made in the video that I especially liked with regard to Rove and his nominee-picking Super PAC is that it’s really about destroying the candidates that you don’t like and that’s what he finds to be very dangerous.
Watch:
Newt Gingrich takes on Karl Rove for his recent assertions about the reasons why his Super PAC is wanting in on the candidate-picking business. After pointing out how we need to get away from the consultant-centric campaigns and get back to the candidate-centric campaigns where the candidate makes the decisions and consultants are only advisers, he then rips into Rove:
HUMAN EVENTS – I am unalterably opposed to a bunch of billionaires financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states. This is the opposite of the Republican tradition of freedom and grassroots small town conservatism.
No one person is smart enough nor do they have the moral right to buy nominations across the country.
That is the system of Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine. It should be repugnant to every conservative and every Republican.
There is a second practical thing wrong with Rove’s proposal.
He was simply wrong last year. He was wrong about the Presidential race (watch a video of his blow up on Fox election night about Fox News calling Ohio for President Obama). He was also wrong about Senate races.
While Rove would like to argue his “national nomination machine” will protect Republicans from candidates like those who failed in Missouri and Indiana, that isn’t the bigger story.
Republicans lost winnable senate races in Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida. So in seven of the nine losing races, the Rove model has no candidate-based explanation for failure. Our problems are deeper and more complex than candidates.
Handing millions to Washington based consultants to destroy the candidates they dislike and nominate the candidates they do like is an invitation to cronyism, favoritism and corruption.
Stuart Stevens represents a very different problem…
Click over to read his problems with Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist in 2012, that stem from the ABC News This Week panel they sat on together.