In a stinging indictment of President Barack Obama, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor tells Newsmax that Obama’s approach is “not the optimistic American way.”
Asked during a Newsmax.TV interview what makes Obama tick, Cantor issued an unprecedented critique of the president.
Cantor notes that Obama’s approach to his work as a community organizer was, by his own description, to help people by “alleging wrongdoing by others” while “trying to basically even out the system” through wealth distribution.
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In Cantor’s view, Obama lacks a “belief that, if you work hard, you invest, you put capital at risk, and you play by the rules, you should be successful.” Obama’s attitude is “reflected in his policies, that maybe we shouldn’t trust the free market, and that what we should be doing is trying to correct a situation where some type of social injustice has been imposed upon others,” Cantor says.
“That’s just not the optimistic American way, and that’s what we want to see change here if we’re able to take the majority,” he says.
The Virginia Republican made the comments in a joint interview with Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California on publication of their book, “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders.” Young Guns are new Republican congressional candidates being pushed by House Republicans through the National Republican Congressional Committee to unseat Democrats.
Some Republican members of Congress are privately predicting that Republicans will pick up 60 to 70 seats in November. Assuming Republicans take back control, the three congressmen will be among those in the driver’s seat.
In their book, the three congressmen acknowledge that when Republicans were in the majority, “We lost our way,” Ryan says. “We need to own up to that...”
What “we’re doing with Young Guns is trying to go around the country and recruit men and women to come to Congress to help reclaim these conservative principles that built this country — a hopeful, optimistic, and conservative message,” Ryan says.
McCarthy, who is in charge of the recruitment efforts, says the number of new Republican candidates running for Congress is unprecedented. Since 1920, there have been 45 races for Congress. Only six times out of those 45 races did Republicans out-recruit the Democrats.
“This year, not only did we out-recruit the Democrats, there are more Republicans running than ever in the history of the Republican Party,” McCarthy says.
The latest results from the primaries reflects “the anger that the people have toward Washington,” Cantor says. “They are tired of the spending. They’re tired of the insistence that Washington should keep growing and trying to control more of their lives and, frankly, they’re tired of politicians making promises that they can’t keep...”
The sentiment comes not just from members of the tea party movement. It is “Republicans and Democrats alike that want to see accountability instilled back into the system,” Cantor says.
Cantor notes that, contrary to Obama’s position, Republicans and a growing number of Democrats are for extending the Bush tax cuts across the board to all income levels.
Groups of Democrats are “writing to their speaker insisting that she bring to the floor a bill that allows the staving off of these tax hikes, and that’s what we’re going to fight for,” Cantor says. “We’re going to use every tool we’ve got to insist that that happens...”
If Republicans take back the House, one of the first orders of business will be to repeal the healthcare law.
“We can go in and replace it with allowing free market ideas...” McCarthy says.
“Obviously,” Ryan says, “to repeal and fully replace it completely, you need a new president, and so what’s going to happen after this election, providing we get the majority and we can start setting the stage for this, is we’re going to have to ask Americans to make a choice in this country of what kind of government do they want: Do they want one that reconnects itself to those founding principles—liberty, freedom, free enterprise, self-determination, government by consent of the governed—or are we done with that and are we going the direction that the current administration, the current Congress, want to go which is to create sort of the European cradle-to-the-grave welfare state.”
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.
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