Topic: Rush, on CPAC

[charlesoakwood]

and more...

Caddell Rips the GOP Consultant Class

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, CPAC. I don't know if you get this same impression, but it seems to me that the Drive-Bys are spending more time covering everything at CPAC this year than they normally do. Now, C-SPAN is there for the most part wall-to-wall every year. But some of these cable networks are also going wall-to-wall with it, too. There is a fascination with what's happening there, and it's actually good because there are a lot of really, really great future stars on display, and they're not holding back.

Rubio was fabulous. Allen West was fabulous to kick the whole thing off. Rick Perry! Rick Perry yesterday just tore the place up. He said, "The popular narrative is that this country has shifted away from conservative ideals, as evidenced by the last two presidential elections. That's what they think. That's what they say. And that might be true, if Republicans had actually nominated conservative candidates in 2008 and 2012, but they didn't."

So Rick Perry is slamming McCain and slamming Romney, saying they're not conservative. Then Pat Caddell... This is unfortunate. We have scoured everywhere. We called C-SPAN. We looked at every cable network. We cannot find any video to cull audio from of Pat Caddell, but Pat Caddell blew the place up as well. Now, he's a Fox News contributor, a Democrat pollster. He worked for Jimmy Carter 1976, and he's still a Democrat. He's a frustrated Democrat, but he still is one.

He blew the lid off of CPAC two days ago. His message was that the Republican consultant class is taking the party down the tubes, that they're making filthy amounts of money -- $150 million a campaign -- whether the candidate wins or loses. It's a "closed set," so to speak. It's a very close-knit, closed group, these consultants, and they trade candidates and candidacies from year to year and they go back and forth. They're all moderates. None of them are really conservative. They say they are, and they think they've got the recipe to win.

...

So Caddell and the rest of these guys are watching all this, and they're beside themselves.
They cannot understand how this continues to happen while Republicans continue to lose, and while it all goes on, the consultants are getting rich to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the ways it works is that the consultant gets the advertising commission. Every dollar spent on advertising there's a 15% sales commission on it, the advertising agency gets. In this case the consultant is the agency. So if the consultant decides, you know, we're gonna spend a hundred million dollars on advertising, he's writing a check to himself for $15 million. It doesn't matter whether the candidate wins or loses, and it doesn't matter whether the ads are any good.


So this is what Caddell said. This is the foundation for Caddell's speech at CPAC, and he launched. "'I blame the donors who allow themselves to be played for marks. I blame the people in the grassroots for allowing themselves to be played for suckers....It's time to stop being marks. It's time to stop being suckers. It's time for you people to get real,' he told the audience that included two top Republican consultants." Like I said, we searched around the world for video and audio of this to let you hear it in his own words.

We can't find it.

I don't think there is any.

"When you have the Chief of Staff of the Republican National Committee and the political director of the Romney campaign, and their two companies get $150 million at the end of the campaign for the 'fantastic' get-out-the-vote program ... some of this borders on RICO [the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] violations." Racketeering is what Caddell essentially is accusing these people of engaging in. Get-out-the-vote program?

There is nobody that deserved a dime for the Republican get-out-the-vote program! We had four million Republicans sit home! ...

[Libertas]

Another reason to starve the beast, go back to what worked before the advent of big machine politics - support candidates, not parties.

[RickZ]

Another reason to starve the beast, go back to what worked before the advent of big machine politics - support candidates, not parties.

I'm having a sense that won't work anymore.  Just look at Boner's purge of conservative TEA Partiers from key committees.  And that after his getting the Speakership because of, not in spite of, the TEA Party.  But spite seems a natural reflex for Boner, beating up his 'radical' conservative 'allies' just like Democrats beat up on those radical and cruel conservative enemies.  I'm very much tired of the politically approved, by both parties, wife-beating mentality employed when discussing conservatism, thankyouverymuch.

The way D.C. works, or rather doesn't, electing 'independent' conservatives, unfortunately, gets us nowhere as they'll be shut out by the 'professional' Republican cocktail circuit pols. When we have a Speaker who 'absolutely trusts Owebama', there's not much else to say.  When it comes to our political parties and their supposed oppositional political ideologies, it's no longer a matter of six of one, a half dozen of the other.  Now it's six of one and where the hell is the other?

I've quit arguing for or thinking about the ballot box; no Voter ID has effectively killed free and fair elections and back door amnesty will make us a permanent one party Free Shyt Army nation.  My soapbox is broken, and will be shut down if I say too much anti-government 'hate speech', as if the government is not full of hate speech itself.  But that cartridge box thingy is looking more and more like where we're at.  And our modern political mandarins are rightfully scared of that, too, so they rush through legislatures nationwide more anti-gun laws no criminal will ever obey, yet will make criminal the law-abiding exercising a Constitutional right.

Now with Cyprus leading the way in bank account haircuts, who can honestly say that Owebama will not go after bank accounts or retirement accounts to fund his 'greater good' OwebamaCare crap and expensive entitlements?  You didn't make that money.  After all, everybody has to have skin in the game, your and my skin, not theirs.

[Libertas]

True enough, people let this system degenerate to its current dysfunctional state and there is no where near enough time to turn it around anyway.  About the only purpose to sending boat-rockers to any office is shine a flashlight on all of the ringleaders selling us down the river.  Not much of a motivation to be sure, but it is what it is.  It is folly chasing after more folly to think a political solution exists to resolve our problems.  If the latter was possible it would have been done already.  One side clearly has no interest in even talking to the other.  Our problems will only be solved (or be over) once one side has vanquished the other.  In the meantime...maintaining any participation in a useless organ like the GOP is pointless.  It must, and will, die.  If Caddell thinks 4 million sitting out an election is a big deal, he hasn't seen anything yet.