A few days ago,
Politico reported that a longtime aide to Newt Gingrich, one Rick Tyler, was joining Todd Akin's campaign. Tyler wrote a piece for the Daily Caller this past weekend--
Cowardice in Washington--responding to an establishment call for Akin to leave the race. Tyler begins by calling out a Republican operative:
Last week Curt Anderson called in these pages for Todd Akin to get out of the Missouri Senate race for comments Akin made in a television interview last month. If you go to the website of Anderson’s company, OnMessage, you can see that his clients include the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), whose chairmen have called on Akin to get out of the race and are increasingly angry he has decided to press on.
So Anderson is hardly a disinterested observer. Nor is he saying anything new. He’s simply expressing a new version of the same old Beltway cowardice.
In this proxy war between Republican operatives, Tyler notably distinguishes himself in his by-line as "Senior Adviser to Rep. Todd Akin". I think that adds to Tyler's credibility here while underscoring the gutlessness of Republican leaders inside the beltway.
Tyler continues:
...it was the NRSC that begged and pleaded with Marco Rubio to get out of the Florida Senate race in 2010 and let Charlie Crist be the Republican nominee. They almost succeeded.
The NRSC and the establishment crew just knew — apparently like they know now — that if Marco Rubio were the Republican nominee, he would lose.
We all know how that turned out. Pro-life Marco Rubio is now a U.S. senator from Florida and just last week delivered a stirring and powerful address to the Republican National Convention.
And what happened to Charlie Crist, the man the Washington party bosses were so convinced was the perfect nominee? Well, Crist is addressing the Democratic National Convention this week in Charlotte to support President Obama’s re-election.
Is it just me, or does it sometimes seem like "the intellect of the Democrat Party," Joe Biden, is running establishment Republican outfits like the NRSC? Conservatives clearly need to take over the NRSC.
Tyler concludes:
...Anderson doesn’t factor in the much larger damage that the Republican Party would inflict on itself by abandoning a good and honorable man because of a mistake for which he immediately apologized. Voters can smell establishment cowardice, especially socially conservative voters. Such cowardice is toxic. It’s discouraging. And it has the potential to depress Republican turnout all across the country this November unless it is soon corrected.
If the NRSC wants to leave their leftward heading and tack back to the right, they need to invest in conservative candidates like Todd Akin. The same goes for Karl Rove's Crossroads. Both organizations have squandered their credibility and now need to make amends.
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