Pat Caddell:

Pat Caddell, the Fox News Contributor and Democrat pollster who engineered Jimmy Carter’s 1976 Presidential victory, blew the lid off CPAC on Thursday with a blistering attack on “racketeering” Republican consultants who play wealthy donors like “marks.”

 

“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.

Caddell stole the show as a panelist in the breakout session titled “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?” He spoke with a fire and passion that electrified the room. When the session began the large room was half filled, but as word spread of the fireworks going on inside, the audience streamed in. By the end, it was standing room only.

Breitbart News spoke with Caddell prior to his talk, and he promised he would deliver a “brutal critique” of the Republican establishment and its political consulting class. He did not disappoint, pulling no punches with an unyielding evisceration of a small group of Republican consultants, the Romney campaign, the Republican National Committee, and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS Super PAC.

“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,” Caddell told the crowd. “It’s all self dealing going on. I think it works on the RICO thing. They’re in the business of lining their pockets.”

“The Republican Party,” Caddell continued, “is in the grips of what I call the CLEC–the consultant, lobbyist, and establishment complex.” Caddell described CLEC as a self serving interconnected network of individuals and organizations interested in preserving their own power far more than they’re interested in winning elections.

Jeff Goldstein:

In the years after the 2008 presidential election, and in particular, after my public chastisement of certain right wing sites for their having bought in to the establishment spin (as an aside, you don’t need to take my word for this, you can research it yourself:  look at the number of links I received from the top-tier right-wing sites prior to Obama’s ascension and then afterward when I started turning my attention to the problems within the Republican Party and its strategy makers and mouthpieces, whom I called out by name), protein wisdom was very obviously relegated to some sort of networking black list; people who once linked me routinely today won’t even follow me on Twitter, much less link back to the site.   Which is why I find the sudden return to a demand for conservative principles from some of those same sites who worked so determinedly to marginalize me both ironic and galling, and yet humorous in their cynical transparency.  That is, for those who wish to naval gaze.

All of which I mention only as a prelude to what many of us can feel is happening right now within the GOP:  a civil war, one in which the young TEA Party constitutionalists, far from backing down from the establishment old bulls (who are content to foist symbolic but feckless votes on us to “prove” they stand with us, while simultaneously surrendering their leverage in advance of every procedural battle in which they might actually affect change and slow down the march of progressive government growth and institutionalization), are actively — and, more importantly, publicly  — challenging them.

[…]

Aside from a few people left on the network, FOX News is not a conservative outlet.  It is the white-boarded symbol of GOP status-quo governance.  Similarly, the suddenly red-meat conservative commentators popping up in the online opinion circles?  I’d advise you go back and look at what they were writing in from 2008 before the TEA Party revolution, many of them having been caught completely off guard by it. I’d invite you to examine — regardless of the awards they are granted, or the incestuousness of the networking that keeps them extraordinarily influential — which types of Republicans they attack and which they support; if they have been pro-incumbent or pro-primary challenge; if they have counseled pragmatism or principle. If they’ve joined the chorus demeaning the “True Believers” and Hobbits and Visigoths, until such time as it became apparent to them that such people, and their message, is beginning to resonate with a revived and energized base.

Because these are the kinds of people who benefit from a perpetual state of political expedience, who blow with the political winds, as it were.  They dislike being criticized, and they are perfectly happy to freeze out those who they believe muddle the communication strategy they have determined is the right one — often quite wrongly.  They dislike debate and a free exchange of ideas, though they give lip-service to supporting it; they admire and seek to emulate the unified front of the Democrats, because they mistakenly believe that it is that unified front that secures Democrats electoral victories, when instead it is their own very determined decision to try to manage messages instead of fighting for principles that turns voters off.

And even now, many of them are trying desperately to cling to power, to maintain the status quo, because it is within the current broken system — the one that benefits politicians while screwing over their constituencies — that they thrive.  And they’ll be goddamned if any presumptuous set of “citizen legislators” — that is, those who aren’t looking to make a career out of living inside the DC bubble and adapting to its tony ways — is going to come along and upset their well-stocked, perpetually refilled apple cart.

They are concerned only with themselves and their own perks and powers.  And just because they wear an R behind their name, or sport a flag lapel pin and mouth conservative pieties from time to time, doesn’t mean they are at all on the side of the people, of the Constitution, of individual liberty and autonomy.  In fact, the vast majority of them reject such antiquated principles and instead seek to have a more efficient Leviathan running the lives of the masses.  And that’s deplorable.

I cannot say that I disagree with any of the above. I believe the Republican Party has two choices here; reform and change, or die. Hopefully, they will choose wisely.

Others: Conservatives4Palin, Rush Limbaugh and The Camp Of The Saints