Gingrich Takes on Rove As GOP Looks Ahead
Gingrich accuses Rove of supporting a ‘Tammany Hall’ Republican machine
By Chris Moody, Yahoo! News
In the latest development in the ongoing battle over the future of the Republican Party, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accused top GOP strategist Karl Rove of building a Tammany Hall-style party machine in which candidates are chosen and financed by “a bunch of billionaires” across the country.
Rove has come under fire from tea party groups after he helped launch the Conservative Victory Project earlier this year, which will support candidates considered to be more “electable” than far-right tea party contenders.
Writing in Human Events, a conservative newspaper, Gingrich criticized Rove’s efforts to rebuild the party, calling it an “an invitation to cronyism, favoritism and corruption”:
I am unalterably opposed to a bunch of billionaires financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states. This is the opposite of the Republican tradition of freedom and grassroots small town conservatism.
No one person is smart enough nor do they have the moral right to buy nominations across the country.
That is the system of Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine. It should be repugnant to every conservative and every Republican.
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While Rove would like to argue his “national nomination machine” will protect Republicans from candidates like those who failed in Missouri and Indiana, that isn’t the bigger story.
Republicans lost winnable senate races in Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida. So in seven of the nine losing races, the Rove model has no candidate-based explanation for failure. Our problems are deeper and more complex than candidates.
Handing millions to Washington-based consultants to destroy the candidates they dislike and nominate the candidates they do like is an invitation to cronyism, favoritism and corruption.