Tag Archives: Moderate

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RINO Richard Lugar loses Indiana Senate primary to Tea party candidate

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Central United States
Central United States

From the radically leftist NPR.

Excerpt:

The nearly four-decade career of Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar has come to an end. The Republican elder statesman, well known as an internationalist and as a moderate willing to reach across the aisle, lost his primary battle to state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, a conservative upstart backed by the Tea Party.

[…]Lugar becomes the latest incumbent to lose a re-election to a Tea Party candidate. The Washington Post reports that in 2010, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, from Alaska, and Sen. Robert Bennett, from Utah, also lost their primaries. That same year, voters also spurned GOP establishment favorites for Tea Party candidates in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada.

“Richard Mourdock’s victory truly sends a message to the liberals in the Republican Party: voters are rejecting the policies that led to record debt and diminished economic freedom, and they will continue to be rejected in elections throughout America,” Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth, which infused the Mourdock campaign with cash, told the Post.

The Tea Party Express, a political action committee, said it went after the longtime senator because he had “lost his conservative edge.” Lugar’s defeat, the organization said, is just the latest sign that the Tea Party movement is still going strong.

Mourdock will face Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly in November.

How liberal was Richard Lugar?

From Life News.

Excerpt:

Lugar’s relationship with pro-life advocates has been rocky during his time in the Senate. Lugar should be commended for supporting pro-life initiatives like the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Mexico City Policy, the de-funding of Planned Parenthood and the repeal of Obamacare. However, Lugar alienated pro-life advocates with votes in favor of embryonic stem cell research and his enthusiastic support for President Obama’s two pro-abortion Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Even before Sotomayor’s nomination made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lugar announced he would vote to confirm her. A year later, Lugar jumped at the chance to support Elena Kagan, becoming the first Republican not on the Judiciary Committee to support her confirmation.

National Review has more about Mourdock and Lugar.

Excerpt:

In 2010, only four Republican senators registered more liberal voting records [than Lugar], according to the American Conservative Union. In a separate analysis, National Journal ranked Lugar as the Senate’s fourth most liberal Republican. He’s a moderate to the core: a pro-lifer who voted to confirm both of Obama’s nominations to the Supreme Court, a hawk on farm subsidies who opposed the ban on earmarks, and a foe of Obamacare who has supported more federal spending on health care. Lugar also has favored stronger gun-control laws, minimum-wage hikes, and the DREAM Act, which would provide an amnesty to illegal aliens who attend college or serve in the military.

I don’t recommend throwing moderate Republicans out willy-nilly, but Lugar was a jerk.

We have a lot of good Senate candidates this year: Ted Cruz, Josh Mandel and Richard Mourdock. I hope they all win.

News

Top Romney aide: Romney can change his positions after primary, like an Etch-a-Sketch

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Finally, proof that Mitt Romney is a liberal masquerading as a conservative – from his own campaign spokesman.

Look:

ABC News has the raw story.

Excerpt:

For a candidate who has spent months battling the title of “flip-flopper,” perhaps the last thing he would want associated with his name is an Etch A Sketch, those do-over drawing boards that let you shake your scribbles away with the flick of a wrist.

Unfortunately Mitt Romney won’t be able to shake away this comparison any time soon. When his campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom was asked this morning on CNN how the GOP frontrunner would make the pivot to the general election, Fehrnstrom compared Romney’s primary campaign to an Etch A Sketch, a gaffe that spread like wildfire to Romney’s rival’s stump speeches.

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch,” Fehrnstrom told CNN’s John Fugelsang. “You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again. But I will say, if you look at the exit polling data in Illinois, you’ll see that Mitt Romney is broadly acceptable to most of the factions in the party. You have to do that in order to become the nominee…”

Within hours, Romney’s opponents seized on the comments, using them to reinforce the notion that the former Massachusetts governor will, as Rick Santorum said, “say anything to get elected.”

“We’re not looking for someone who’s the Etch A Sketch candidate,” Santorum said in a campaign speech just hours after Fehrnstrom’s comments. “We’re looking for someone who writes what they believe in stone and stands true to what they say.”

Both the Santorum and Newt Gingrich campaigns made pit stops at the toy store to pick up Etch A Sketches of their own, deploying their new visual aids at speeches and rallies in Maryland and Louisiana today.

Conservative Republican Rick Santorum reacts to this clip. (H/T Robert Stacy McCain)

Excerpt:

This morning on CNN, senior advisor to the Romney Campaign, Eric Fehrnstrom, admits his candidate and their campaign is based on the “etch-a-sketch” model when asked by if the positions he’s taken in the Republican primary have been too conservative.

Hogan Gidley, National Communications Director, said: “We all knew Mitt Romney didn’t have any core convictions, but we appreciate his staff going on national television to affirm that point for anyone who had any doubts.  With the two year anniversary of the signing of ObamaCare upon us, can voters really believe that the man who urged the President to use his healthcare plan in Massachusetts as a model would really repealObamaCare?  Or is that promise just something they would ‘shake up and restart’ with when Romney hits the general election.

Voters can trust that Rick Santorum will say what he believes, and do what he says.  They may not always agree with Rick Santorum, but they can trust him because they know he is a man of principle.  Clearly, the same cannot be said of Governor Romney.”

Do you think Mitt Romney is a conservative? If you do, check out the links below.

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Mitt Romney’s record as governor is pro-abortion and pro-socialized medicine

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Byron York explains Mitt Romney’s liberal record as governor of Massachusetts.

Excerpt:

To win election as a Republican in Massachusetts, and then to govern effectively, Romney had to align himself with the left side of the GOP. And to do that, he adopted positions that haunt him still.

Perhaps the most fateful was on abortion. Romney’s reputation as a “perfectly lubricated weather vane” — to use the memorable phrase of former rival Jon Huntsman — comes from his decision to run for Senate in 1994 and governor in 2002 as a strongly pro-choice candidate, and then to run for president in 2008 as a strongly pro-life candidate.

According to a new book by Boston journalist Ron Scott, when Romney was planning that ’94 Senate run, he commissioned polling that showed a pro-life candidate could not win statewide election in Massachusetts. So Romney, who said he was personally pro-life, became politically pro-choice.

And not just pro-choice, but ardently pro-choice. “I am not going to change our pro-choice laws in Massachusetts in any way,” Romney said in an Oct. 29, 2002, debate. “I will preserve them. I will protect them. I will enforce them. I do not take the position of a pro-life candidate. I am in favor of preserving and protecting a woman’s right to choose.” When The Boston Globe said there was not a “paper’s width” of difference between Romney and his Democratic opponent on abortion, Romney proudly quoted the paper.

If Romney had chosen a less liberal state to live in, he would not have had to do that — and, of course, he would not have had to switch back to a pro-life position in 2004-2005, as he formed a political action committee and began working toward a run for the Republican nomination for president.

As a candidate for office in Massachusetts, Romney also had to take positions on guns, global warming and gay rights that later caused him difficulties in Republican presidential politics. He even had to renounce Ronald Reagan — an extremely unwise thing to do in today’s GOP. “Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush,” Romney said in a 1994 debate with Sen. Ted Kennedy. “I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.” Now, of course, Romney sings Reagan’s praises at nearly every campaign stop.

If he hadn’t run in Massachusetts, he wouldn’t have had to bash Reagan in the first place.

But, after abortion, the most devastating consequence of Romney’s choosing Massachusetts has been the issue of universal health care. In extending coverage to everyone in the state, Romney helped fulfill a long-time liberal goal; just look at the love-fest with Kennedy at the bill’s 2006 signing ceremony. But Romney did not effectively control rapidly rising health care costs. And he could not have anticipated how deeply unpopular universal coverage schemes would become with the Republican base after Obamacare.

In the campaign, Romney has blamed the Democratic Massachusetts legislature for Romneycare’s problems and denied vigorously that he believes his bill would be a good model for the nation. It’s a difficult position to take on his signature achievement in office. And it would not have happened had Romney not chosen to run in Massachusetts.

We can’t afford to run a moderate against Barack Obama – Obama is going to win because he will just point out that Romney agreed with him on everything when he was governor of Massachusetts. Republican voters are pro-life and we oppose government-run health care. we need to elect someone who has a Republican record.

 

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