David Bossie, president of conservative advocacy group Citizens United, says Republicans shouldn’t change their conservative stripes just because of the GOP’s election defeats.
The idea that they should is “an overreaction, a misinterpretation,” he tells Newsmax TV’s Kathleen Walter. “It is a potential death knell for the Republican Party, a permanent minority status in America.”
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Bossie says he will personally hold candidates accountable for remaining true to the conservative cause. “Conservatives can’t become Democrat-lite and expect to win,” he says. “That’s what Mitt Romney tried to do. . . . We nominated a guy who couldn’t articulate a message that was a good one to beat Barack Obama.”
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So conservatism shouldn’t be blamed, Bossie says. This isn’t the first time the movement has lost an election, he points out. “Barry Goldwater got swamped [in 1964]. Reagan lost in ’76. We lost the House majority when President [George W.] Bush was in there. We don’t win every race. It happens, okay?”
The key is to rebound. “You have to find your resolve, understand the core values that the conservative movement is about and the Republican Party stands for and find those that can articulate it and find those candidates that can bring it to the American people and sell it. . . . We have a bright future if we stick to our principles.”
Citizens United was the successful plaintiff in the Supreme Court decision that allowed super PACs. Many Republicans are upset about how their party’s super PACs spent their money.
As for Bossie’s take, “I disagree with a lot of how the super PACs spent their money,” he says. “The ads weren’t very good, and we spent money in places we shouldn’t have. . . . But the facts are that if we did not have those Super PACs, we would’ve lost many more races. [That’s] because we would’ve been outspent dramatically where those Super PACs really kept it as a 1-to-one ratio.”
President Barack Obama spent about $1 billion on the election, and so did Romney. But approximately $400 million of Romney’s money came from super PACs, while much less of Obama’s did. “So you have to say they [super PACs] may not have done everything correctly, but without them we would’ve lost some more races and the presidential race wouldn’t have been so close,” Bossie says.
Republicans might have lost 12 to 15 seats in the House rather than the seven to nine that they actually did, he says.
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