WASHINGTON — Leaders of the anti-tax Tea Party are fuming about plans by some Republican strategists to tap the party’s wealthy donors and raise money to help “electable” candidates win primary races.
Jo nathan Co llegio, a spokesman for Conservative Victory Project, said in an e-mail Monday that Republicans lost some Senate races last year and in 2010 because of “undisciplined candidates running bad campaigns.” The new group “seeks to help elect the most conservative candidates in Republican primaries who can win in general elections.”
Leaders of the Tea Party and other Republican groups that oppose abortion and homosexual rights responded by calling Texas political strategist Karl Rove, a founder of the victory project, a “fake conservative” who had “ declared war” on the Tea Party.
The victory project also was attacked as “Orwellian” by Matt Kibbe, the head of the Washington-based Freedom-Works, which identifies itself as a “grass-roots” Tea Party booster.
Rove’s group “is created with the sole operating mission of blocking the efforts of fiscally conservative activists across the country,” Kibbe said, according to the Freedom Works blog.
The exchanges provide the first public glimpse of a power struggle inside the Republican Party after its November losses, including the presidential campaign. If neither side backs down, the rift could lead to more costly Republican primary fights with the victors forced to quickly recover as they confront Democrats in the general election.
Tea Party-supported Senate candidates in Missouri and Indiana, who lost support while explaining their opposition to allowing rape victims access to abortions, were defeated last year in contests that the party once viewed as certain victories. In 2010, Tea Party-backed candidates also stumbled in competitive Senate races in Delaware, Nevada and Colorado.
Steven Law, another founding member of the Conservative Victory Project, said the group, which will be organized as a super political action committee that will disclose its donors and spending, may get involved in the Iowa U.S. Senate primary next year. Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin is retiring, and one of the first names floated as a candidate to replace him was Rep. Steve King, a Republican and leading Tea Party voice in Congress.
King’s allies in the movement are rallying to protect their new found ability to sway the outcome of party primaries and promote candidates aligned with their small-government, low-tax philosophies.
“Their idea of the most electable presidential candidate was Mitt Romney, and before him John McCain and before him Bob Dole,” said Brent Bozell, the leader of For America, a social-media group that identifies its goals as promoting limited government, a strong national defense and Judeo-Christian values.
“These fake conservatives need to go away before they do more damage,” he said in an e-mail and blog post Monday, referring to those behind the victory project.
Rove was a top political strategist for President George W. Bush, and Bozell and others have argued that the Republican Party has suffered from its recent propensity to back “moderate”candidates such as Bush.
Jenny Beth Martin, cofounder of the Tea Party Patriots Inc., based in Georgia, wrote on Twitter on Sunday that Rove “wants to line pocket,” and that the Tea Party “bites back - never gives up!”
Teaparty.org, a social-media group that aggregates information about the anti-tax movement, posted a headline on its blog: “Rove Declares War on Tea Party.”
Rove helped build American Crossroads, a super PAC, and its companion nonprofit, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, into the biggest-spending outside group of the 2012 federal elections. The two groups invested more than $175 million in last year’s elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group that tracks campaign finance.
The Crossroads groups spent more than $127 million on 82,000 television spots to help Romney in his unsuccessful bid to topple President Barack Obama, according to Kantar Media’s CMAG, an ad tracker based in New York. In Senate races, 10 of the 12 candidates they supported were defeated and four of the nine House candidates they backed lost their races.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/05/2013