Points for honesty.
The most quoted speech at CPAC this year was Mitt Romney's, but my vote for the most significant goes to Grover Norquist's. In his charmingly blunt way, Norquist articulated out loud a case for Mitt Romney that you hear only whispered by other major conservative leaders.
They have reconciled themselves to a Romney candidacy because they see Romney as essentially a weak and passive president who will concede leadership to congressional conservatives:
All we have to do is replace Obama. ... We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.The requirement for president?
Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.
If you're playing at home, Grover Norquist would like to defeat a guy with a 49 percent approval rating so that a guy with a 39 percent approval rating can serve as a rubber stamp to a bunch of GOP congressmen with a 19 percent approval rating.
1 comment:
As outrageous as it sounds, at some point it'll happen. Unless Dems win every presidential election into eternity we will eventually have a Republican president that owes Grover a big favor.
This isn't really much different from how Wisconsin legislators don't write their own bills anymore. They outsource that to ALEC or the NRA. That's how a college dropout can function as governor.
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