Conservative leaders on Wednesday lashed out at Mitt Romney, saying his attempts to paint himself as a centrist and hide his principles cost him the presidency.
They vowed to wage a war to put the Tea Party in charge of the Republican Party by the time it nominates its next presidential candidate.
“The battle to take over the Republican Party begins today and the failed Republican leadership should resign,” said Richard Viguerie, a top activist and chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.
He said the lesson on Romney’s loss to President Obama on Tuesday is that the GOP must “never again” nominate a “a big government established conservative for president.”
Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots said Romney failed to make the kind of strong case for conservatism that would have won the election.
Of course it’s the Tea Party that probably cost the Republicans the Senate for the second election in a row.
Some are blaming Chris Christie because he was well, doing his job. Doug Mataconis:
It was inevitable that conservative activists and advocates would find someone other than Mitt Romney and the Republican Party to blame for the fact that Mitt Romney lost the election and succeeded in winning only two of the states that Barack Obama had won in 2008. After all, we can’t admit that the Republican Party is slowly but surely losing touch with a large segment of the American public, including its fastest growing minority group. We can’t say that four years of opposing the President at every turn while failing to offer a coherent alternative contributed to the GOP’s problem. Nobody’s going to admit that the fact that GOP still hasn’t come to terms with the legacy of the Bush years, or that it spent the better part of the winter and spring of 2012 alienating women, contributed to its electoral troubles. And, surely, it can’t be because the polls were right all along and the American people actually wanted to re-elect the President. No, a scapegoat must be found and, at least in this initial 24 hours after Election Night, that scapegoat appears to be the Governor of New Jersey.
If the Republican Party is going to survive it must come to recognize that their problem is their ideology. It’s simply not very popular. I was watching FOX News today and Shepard Smith left the ranch again. He was talking to some Republican hack who was talking about not increasing tax rates but eliminating deductions. Smith went ballistic and said that everyone is in favor of eliminating deductions as long as they are not their deductions. Once again poor Shep is telling truth to power – something Roger Ailes is not real happy about I would guess. Republican economics is always based on unicorns and fairy dust.
In 2008 I thought that Obama would be a one term President because there was no way he could fix the economy. What I didn’t count on was the Republicans would only be able to come up with a hapless field to challenge him. If Mitt Romney is the best the party can come up with the party is in big trouble.
Cross posted at Middle Earth Journal