Takeover (30 page)

After fifty-plus years in conservative politics at the national level, it was clear to me that great issues like those are decided by voters, not politicians. I didn’t think establishment politicians should be allowed to kick the spending, debt, and deficit can past the next election. A six- to nine-month increase in the debt ceiling would put the next debate squarely in the middle of the 2012 presidential election campaign. As long as the Republicans didn’t cave in, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid were doing a great job of solidifying the Democratic Party’s image as the party of Big Government and taxes; that could
only help conservatives.

An increase in the debt ceiling good for six to nine months would empower the Tea Party and mean the next election would be nationalized. The coming election would be focused on who will cut spending to solve the debt-and-deficit crisis. Conservatives would welcome the opportunity to put the issues in that debate before the people and to make the next campaign a referendum on exactly which members of Congress caved in to Obama’s request for a blank check.

However, instead of solidifying the new four-part coalition of economic conservatives, national defense conservatives, social conservatives, and the constitutional conservatives of the Tea Party movement by nationalizing the 2012 election and making it a referendum on spending, deficits, and the debt, the stage was set for a near-fatal rupture between the new conservative coalition and the Republican Party.

Rather than stand for conservative principles—or at least play hardball politics—by making Democrats defend their indefensible spending, deficits, and debt, there was a complete cave-in by the House Republican leadership, and the passage of a deal long in the works between Senate leaders Democrat Harry Reid and establishment Republican Mitch McConnell: the Budget Control Act of 2011.

In a gross breach of the promise Boehner made to give Members and the public three days to review legislation, fewer than twenty-four hours after the legislation was first posted online, with no review by a legislative committee, the bill was rushed to the floor. The House then voted 269 to 161 (112th Congress, first session, roll call vote 677) to approve the Budget Control Act of 2011.
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Conservatives had many objections to the Budget Control Act of 2011, from the substantive constitutional issues engendered by the creation of an extra-constitutional “Super Committee,” to the political, in that it gave Obama and the Democrats a free pass on the spending, deficit, and debt issue until after the 2012 election.

On passage of the Budget Control Act of 2011, twenty-two
principled conservatives voted against the Speaker’s cave-in. This included two freshmen Tea Party–backed representatives, Justin Amash of Michigan and Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, whom the Speaker would later strip of their committee assignments for trying to hold him and the House Republican Conference to conservative principles, and for rallying conservatives to oppose the House leadership when it strayed.

There would be many more cave-ins and much more backtracking by the establishment Republican leadership of the House, but the debt ceiling battle and the debate over Cut, Cap, and Balance set the pattern that establishment Republicans would follow throughout the Obama presidency.

The grassroots, limited-government constitutional conservatives of the Tea Party were outraged, and Senator Jim DeMint’s prediction that “the establishment is much more likely to try to buy off your votes than to buy into your limited-government philosophy” was proven correct.

Less than eight months into the addition of the Tea Party movement as the “fourth leg” of Republican coalition, the Republican Party’s Capitol Hill establishment threw away any pretense of adopting the goals and values of the Tea Party (and the potential to realign American politics for a generation or more) and opted instead for business as usual in Washington, DC.

When Republican leaders wouldn’t fight for Cut, Cap, and Balance and passed the Reid–McConnell deal embodied in the Budget Control Act of 2011, conservatives were outraged and many were demanding that heads roll—particularly those of the Tea Party–backed freshmen who had caved in and gone along with the establishment leadership to pass the bill.

My counsel was that there should be no recriminations and no witch hunt.

It was inevitable that some Tea Party–backed members of Congress were going to waiver or be won over by the blandishments of the DC establishment. At that point the Tea Party movement
was barely two years old and it had achieved an amazing victory in the 2010 congressional elections. Through this grassroots, limited-government constitutional conservative movement, the old go-along-get-along GOP establishment was being challenged in the halls of Congress, in the news media, and at coffee shops and water coolers across the country.

Some will look at the 112
^th
Congress and see a failure of the Tea Party agenda. To me the important thing was—and is—that the Tea Party movement and those candidates it backed changed the debate in Washington, and just as the New Right did in the late 1970s in the lead-up to Reagan’s 1980 victory, supplanted the Republican establishment to provide the real opposition to the Democrats.

I
f the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result, welcome to the nut house of the establishment media-sponsored Republican presidential debates.

What would you call a political party that hands the power to set the agenda during its presidential primaries to its sworn enemies in the liberal media, then doubles down to give the power to set the agenda in the waning days of the general election to a self-perpetuating “commission” of Washington, DC, progressive insiders?

Some people might call that the national Republican Party—I call it the Party of Stupid.

I’m not going to dissect every one of the twenty-plus debates held during the 2012 Republican primary season or the details of the three general election debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. However, a few examples from the 2012 election will illustrate how the primary debates helped launch the Democrasts’ “war on women” narrative they use against Republicans to this day, how their questions helped solidify Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, and how the media then turned on Romney to help
resuscitate Obama after his abysmal performance in the first general election debate.

On January 7, 2012, ABC News, Internet giant Yahoo! and WMUR-TV hosted a New Hampshire Republican presidential primary debate; the media panel consisted of Diane Sawyer of ABC News, Josh McElveen of WMUR-TV, and former Clinton campaign operative and White House press secretary George Stephanopoulos, now of ABC News.
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Not long into the debate, George Stephanopoulos bizarrely pressed former governor Mitt Romney on whether he believed the US Supreme Court should overturn a 1965 ruling that a constitutional right to privacy bars states from banning contraception—the
Griswald v. Connecticut
case. Here’s the exchange according to the transcript of the debate:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Romney, I want to go straight to you. Senator Santorum has been very clear in his belief that the Supreme Court was wrong when it decided that a right to privacy was embedded in the Constitution. And following from that, he believes that states have the right to ban contraception. Now, I should add that he’s said that he’s not recommending that states do that. [
Santorum tries to jump in but is inaudible
] Well, I’ll, I’ll, absolutely, I’m giving you your due.
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Persisting, Stephanopoulos later said: “But I do want to get that core question. Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?”

As Brad Wilmouth of the Media Research Center so accurately characterized it, Romney was “befuddled by the off the wall nature of the question on such an issue that is not on any state’s legislative agenda, eventually observed that it was a ‘silly thing’ for the ABC co-moderator to ask such an irrelevant question.”

But Stephanopoulos was not to be deterred and kept after Romney with an odd persistence that prolonged the discussion with Romney
for more than three and a half minutes. Only after Stephanopoulos’s hectoring of Romney inspired a number of boos from the audience were Ron Paul and Rick Santorum allowed an opportunity to speak.
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Although former senator Santorum made it clear that he would be
opposed
to banning contraception, as contraception merely violates his religious beliefs without entering into his public policy agenda, Stephanopoulos began the question to Romney by referring to what he claimed was Santorum’s position in favor of allowing states to ban contraception.

So not only did Stephanopoulos make the headline story on the New Hampshire debate about a nonexistent issue—he set up the question by mischaracterizing Senator Santorum’s position on
Griswald
, delivering a “twofer” to President Obama and his radical liberal feminist allies.

This was all part of the plan, claimed Rush Limbaugh:

“The design was they hoped Romney would say, ‘Well, if the states want to,’ they could then allude to the Republican front-runner suggesting that contraception be banned. Then they went out and they found an interview with Santorum where they can take him out of context and say that this is what he intends to do when he has not and did not say that.”
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Limbaugh later noted that this was all about exciting the radical feminist base of the Democratic Party. As Rush put it, “All you have to do to get their attention is to dredge it back up that the Republicans want to get rid of their birth control pills and deny them abortion, and that will bring ’em back, and that’s what they’re trying to do. It’s a total move of feint and distraction.”
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And by allowing President Clinton’s former press secretary George Stephanopoulos on the media panel, the Republican Party played right into their hands. The liberal message that feminists must rise up to protect women’s rights from hostile, paternalistic Republicans was pushed hard by the liberal talking heads on TV
and was all over the opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers for the next few days.

What would make Republican candidates for President agree to a debate moderated by George Stephanopoulos, the former press secretary of a Democratic president, or the likes of CNN’s notoriously liberal host Anderson Cooper? Besides rank stupidity, it is hard to think of a reason.

And here is what Republicans get when they act like the Party of Stupid and agree to a debate moderated by the same Anderson Cooper whose vulgar jocularity with David Gergen resulted in this crass comment about the Tea Party during a 2009 broadcast, “It’s hard to talk when you’re tea-bagging.”
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If you’d never heard about “tea bagging” (as I hadn’t) before this, take my word for that it refers to a homosexual activity.

During the 2011 debt ceiling debate, CNN conducted a poll that Cooper reported as showing 64 percent of the public supported raising taxes, making Republicans appear to be dishonest for claiming most Americans were opposed to a tax increase.

What Cooper failed to report was that the same CNN poll showed that two-thirds of those polled favored the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan advocated by conservatives and passed by House Republicans.
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Likewise, during the CNN-sponsored Republican primary debate in Tampa before the crucial Florida Republican primary election, the question of Social Security being a “Ponzi scheme,” as Texas governor Rick Perry had called it in his book, was thoroughly aired.

However, a question from a member of the audience that went right to the heart of Republican voters’ concerns about the growth of government: “Out of every dollar that I earn, how much do you think that I deserve to keep?” was referred to only one of the candidates, with no follow-up.
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Republicans who agreed to this debate on the theory that Cooper and CNN would be on their good behavior and dispense with the junior high school vulgarity need to wake up and take a look at just how liberals like Anderson Cooper make Republicans look bad.

It isn’t by fabricating news or outright lying; it is by selecting questions that set the agenda on liberal terms and presuppose the outcome favored by liberals—or by editing out the conservative viewpoint or facts that tend to support the conservative viewpoint.

The result in the general election debates is that Republican presidential candidates are always outnumbered two or three to one in a fight that pits them against a liberal debate moderator and their liberal Democratic opponent.

After the first 2012 debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, moderator and PBS host, James Lehrer was roundly criticized by his fellow liberals for not wading in and helping Obama.

Still, he slipped several interesting “tells” of his liberal bias, such as referring to Romney’s economic plans as “trickle-down” and breaking up Romney’s train of thought by calling time when he was prosecuting especially effective attacks on Obama, while letting Obama go well past his deadline to finish his thoughts.

But these were fairly minor things compared to how Lehrer handled the 2000 debate between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

In 2000, Lehrer moderated all three presidential debates. In the third one, as the Media Research Center pointed out, “a town hall debate, Lehrer approved mostly liberal questions from the ‘uncommitted’ audience. Eight questions came from the Left, only two could be counted as conservative, and five were requests for information without an ideological tone.”

And that’s the key to how liberal bias at the debates, and in the media at large, works. It is not so much that reporters will lie or make up things to make conservatives look bad—it is the premises of the questions and even the questions themselves that accept an underlying belief in liberal policy choices.