{"id":5739,"date":"2005-11-04T10:16:04","date_gmt":"2005-11-04T15:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5739"},"modified":"2005-11-04T10:16:04","modified_gmt":"2005-11-04T15:16:04","slug":"what-the-gop-establishment-really-thinks-of-its-base","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/what-the-gop-establishment-really-thinks-of-its-base\/","title":{"rendered":"What the GOP establishment really<\/i> thinks of its base"},"content":{"rendered":"

This item has been making the rounds — I first found it at C&L<\/a> — but it bears repeating. In fact, the more conservatives who hear about this, the better.<\/p>\n

Salon’s Michael Scherer reported<\/a> yesterday on the Senate hearings into the fraudulent lobbying efforts of Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the “power duo stand accused of exploiting Native American tribes to the tune of roughly $66 million, laundering that money into bank accounts they controlled and then using it to buy favors for powerful members of Congress and the executive branch.”<\/p>\n

As part of a Senate committee hearing this week, an email surfaced from Scanlon, a former Tom DeLay aide, to the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, in which Scanlon described how he’d manipulate Christian conservatives into protecting the tribe’s gambling interests.<\/p>\n

“The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees,” Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. “Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them.” The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious “wackos” could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Remember, Scanlon isn’t just some random lobbyist with minimal understanding of internal Republican politics. He was a top staffer for Tom DeLay and the principal business partner for the most powerful GOP lobbyist in Washington. And as far as he’s concerned, the rank-and-file conservative activists — the ones who vote in primaries, volunteer for GOP campaigns, send money to support the conservative movement — are “wackos” who are easily manipulated and exploited.<\/p>\n

About a year ago, the DLC’s Marshall Wittmann, who lobbied for the Christian Coalition before leaving the GOP, wrote a poignant item<\/a> about the Republicans’ conservative base. “Perhaps some day it will dawn on the rank and file of social conservatives that they are being manipulated to serve another agenda by the hierarchy of the Republican Party,” Wittmann said. “Until then…the GOP will take them for suckers.”<\/p>\n

Perhaps James Dobson and his supporters might consider Scanlon’s email and wonder if Wittmann was right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This item has been making the rounds — I first found it at C&L — but it bears repeating. In fact, the more conservatives who hear about this, the better. Salon’s Michael Scherer reported yesterday on the Senate hearings into the fraudulent lobbying efforts of Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the “power duo stand accused […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}