Enough Infighting, the Radical Obama Agenda Is an Opportunity for GOP Unity

Karl Rove talks in his mobile phone as he walks across the floor before the second session of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2012.Credit: AP

The war between moderates and conservatives for the future of the GOP continues to rage. It’s no secret that Karl Rove and his band of moderate Republicans have not endeared themselves to Tea Partiers in recent weeks. However, recently, Rove was subjected to a vicious slur that, quite frankly, has no place in politics. The kind of slur, unfortunately, that Democrats use against Republicans all the time.

A national Tea Party group with whom we are not associated recently sent out an email with a photo-shopped picture of Karl Rove as a Nazi SS officer. That organization promptly issued a statement denouncing the picture as inappropriate and laid blame on an error made by an outside vendor.

Whether this is true or not, the fact remains that this is a moment from which we can all learn. Rove and his fellow moderates do not possess the ideological bent as those of us who are more conservative, but as we tear each other apart, this expended effort is not going towards fixing the massive problems being created by the Obama Administration and the leftists in Congress.

This is a wake-up call to all who would claim to identify with the “right.” If we are going to take back the Senate and strengthen our position in the House in 2014, we must start working together and rowing in the same direction. And unless we want Joe Biden or, dare-I-say-it, Hillary Clinton to be the successor to the worst president ever to ascend to the Oval Office, we are going to have to keep that momentum going until 2016.

In short: it’s going to take cooperation that starts right now.

First, the moderates need to stop discussing the “electability” of their candidates. The track record of those candidates who we were promised to be “electable” has not been great even in times with less-formidable political machines than the Obama Campaign that just seems to never end.

Let’s stop pretending that a candidate’s worth is only his or her ability to say the “safe” things that fails to inspire fiscal conservatives that make up the base of the GOP. We need candidates who believe what they say. Though we on the right certainly do not agree with him, we can at least admit that Obama believes that which he advocates and it shows.

We need to unite- all of us. That means moderates, Tea Partiers, entrenched Republicans and Libertarians. We need to unite behind a core principle that America was once better and can be that way again. Our economy needs a lot of work, our foreign policy is a joke and our government no longer even tries to hide the fact that they are uninterested in being accountable to the people.

Our nation is slipping and we are in a position to save it if we can just steer clear of the infighting that threatens to distract us from the real work that needs to be done.

Let’s re-tool the Republican campaign machine and do more to reach out to people. Democrats, for too long, have operated by giving the people the proverbial free fish and we have not done enough to show the attractiveness of learning how to fish for themselves. Republicans come around every four years and tell people that we are looking to improve the economy by lessening the punishing tax burden, and once that message has been run through the liberal media, it translates to, “Republicans only care about the rich.” Let’s stop relying on the mainstream media to tell people what we stand for and let’s start showing them ourselves.

As Republicans, Tea Partiers, Libertarians and other fiscal conservatives, let’s focus more on that which we can agree and spend less time fighting each other on the small variances on which we disagree.

The principles of the Tea Party Movement are unifying principles: We all support the Constitution; we all advocate free markets and limited government involvement in our lives; and we all advocate for personal responsibility for citizens.

Obama’s radical agenda, as awful as it is for America, is an opportunity for unity for the right. Let’s get to work.