Ronald Kessler Reporting from Washington, D.C. — The question on everyone’s lips at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is: Can President Barack Obama be defeated in November?
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, says yes.
“Obama will be defeated largely because he’s been a bad president, and he’s tried to move the country in the wrong direction,” Norquist tells Newsmax at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, where CPAC is being held.
“Now, we don’t know who the Republican nominee’s going to be, but we have Republicans in the House and Senate who have outlined fairly clearly where they want to go,” Norquist says.
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Grover Norquist speaks at CPAC
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“The Republicans have passed 25-plus bills to create a more open society and more growth. The Republicans in the House passed the Ryan budget, and the Senate signaled that they would do the same thing if they had majority in the Senate. So I think there’s a very good idea of where a Republican government would go,” Norquist says.
In contrast, “With Obama, they’ve been hiding where he wants to go,” he adds.
“They haven’t passed a budget out of the Democratic Senate in three years,” he notes. “Obama himself has not been putting out serious long-term budgets, and instead he gave a speech at the State of the Union about a bunch of things he says he wants to do, except we know one thing: None of it’s true, because he was president for two years and didn’t do any of those things.”
In fact, “He was president for two years with a Democratic majority in both houses, and his list of things he really thinks are very important are a list of things he didn’t do in two years,” Norquist says.
Obama was a very good candidate, says Norquist, who is the cover story in the February issue of Newsmax magazine.
However, “He has been a very bad president, an incompetent president,” Norquist says. “He really was president for two years, and then for the last year and the next year he’s been a candidate, not a president. So when he gives a speech it’s not about what he wants to do. You don’t give a speech saying I want to do these things if you’ve just spent three years not doing any of them, not even trying to do any of them.”
Instead, “His speech was a political speech,” Norquist says. “It consisted of items that Obama thought would help him politically.”
“We all know one thing,” Norquist says. “You’re not for the proposals, because you didn’t do them.”
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. Read more reports from Ronald Kessler — Click Here Now.
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