Can the Tea Party Take Over the GOP?

By Alan Caruba

“Republicans never, ever win the presidency unless they nationalize the election by campaigning on a conservative agenda—drawing a sharp contrast between the Democrat worldview and the conservative worldview.”

That’s Richard A. Viguerie offering his insight and advice in his new book, “Takeover” ($27.95, WMD Books) and, if you have been wondering why Republicans have been losing presidential elections with candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney, he tells you why. “It is hard for conservatives to understand that establishment Republicans are the enemy.”

By “establishment” he is referring to the inner circle of elites who have been content to work with Democrats they have for decades to make government bigger because they like spending taxpayer dollars just as much and have embraced Big Government by creating the Department of Education, the EPA, and other entities.

Viguerie has been involved in building the conservative political base in America since the days of Barry Goldwater. Starting in 1961 he used direct mail to build and enlarge that base, and he has had to watch a succession of so-called Republicans from Nixon to Bush 41 and 43 campaign as conservatives and then act like Democrats.

“In the short time that George W. Bush was president and the Democrats held the majority in Congress (2007-2008), spending jumped by $700 billion—$4.7 trillion in FY 2006 to $5.4 trillion in FY 2008.”

Significantly, Jenny Beth Martin, president and co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, wrote the foreword to “Takeover”, saying “It is a civil war between limited-government, constitutional conservatives and the progressive, establishment wing of the GOP. And make no mistake: the establishment wing of the Republican Party is progressive, and has been ever since conservatives stymied Teddy Roosevelt’s attempt to reclaim the Republican presidential nomination in 1912 and make progressivism that governing philosophy of the Republican Party.”

The subtitle of Viguerie’s book is “The 100-year war for the soul of the GOP and how conservatives can finally win it.” If you need to learn that history, this is the book to read. If you want to see how conservatives can reclaim the government from both the Democrats and the Republican elites, you need to read this book.

Viguerie reminds us that, when Republicans hewed to conservative principles, they won three landslide presidential elections in 1980, 1984, and 1988, but when they put those principles of small government, fiscal prudence, and a strong military in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012, they lost—big time.

When the Tea Party movement spontaneously emerged in response to Obamacare and Obama’s intention to “transform” America, “Today’s establishment Republican leaders did their best to alienate and marginalize the new conservative bloc of the Tea Party movement.”

As of this writing, the day after the June 3 primaries, Tea Party supported Republican candidates, Joni Ernst in Iowa and Steve Daines in Montana had won while, in Mississippi, the race was so close that there will be a run-off between Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel against Thad Cochran.

The good news, as Viguerie points out is that “For over twenty years polls have shown that Americans, by a two-to-one margin, self-identify as conservatives. Today, a record number of Americans—60 percent according to the Gallup Organization’s governance poll—say that the federal government has too much power. This follows on an earlier Gallup poll in which 64 percent of those responding said the greatest threat to freedom in Big Government—and the biggest jump in that fear is among Democrats.”

The result in 2010 was Tea Party candidates, “without any real direction from the national GOP, drew a sharp contrast with Big Government Republicans and with the Democrats on taxes, spending, the growth of government, and especially on Obamacare, to power the GOP to pick up six Senate seats and win historical sixty-three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, recapturing the majority, and making it the largest seat change since 1948 and the largest for any midterm election since the 1938 midterm elections.”

Barack Obama has been a gift to conservatives and we are seeing his approval ratings fall like a rock. “For fifty years I have been saying that to change things and stop the slide to socialism, two things needed to happen: first, things need to get really bad really fast; and second, there needs to be some political vehicle, some means for the people to channel their anger, and to translate their outrage into political action. Guess what: we’re there.”

The forthcoming November midterms can save America from the Democrats and from the establishment Republicans, the elites in Washington who have been happy to expand the government and continue spending money we don’t have.

The bulk of Americans are conservative and, in November, they have to go to the polls and elect Tea Party candidates, regain control of the Senate, expand membership in the House, and provide the means to thwart Obama’s “transformation” of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2014