The White House
By Paul Bremmer
Donald Trump may still be leading most polls for the Republican presidential nomination, but after Monday night’s Iowa caucuses one longtime conservative activist believes the real estate mogul’s days as a frontrunner are numbered.
“He underperformed and I think his balloon has been punctured,” said Richard Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com and a direct mail fundraising pioneer. “The only person who has gone after Trump and has won is Cruz, and now I think others are going to be emboldened to do that.”
On the heels of Trump’s second-place finish in Iowa, Viguerie, the author of “Takeover: The 100-Year War for the Soul of the GOP and How Conservatives Can Finally Win It,” predicted Trump “probably won’t be a serious factor” by mid-March.
He doesn’t buy the idea that Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio will now become the leaders of the pack.
“People talk about a three-way race; I think it’s a two-person race, and it’s between the conservative and the establishment candidate – it’s Cruz and Rubio,” Viguerie asserted. “I think Trump will continue to fade. He’s a liberal running in a Republican primary and that’s not going to last very long.”
The veteran activist said conservatives should not be fooled into believing Trump is a conservative simply because he has come out strongly against certain Obama administration policies.
“Every position he takes now, probably with no exception, he had a different position five to ten years ago,” Viguerie said. “And after it becomes clear about his moral views and values, I think it’s going to be tough for conservatives to support him.”
Phyllis Schlafly, another longtime conservative activist, feels differently about Trump. While she told WND she has not endorsed Trump or any other candidate, she appreciates that Trump has brought immigration to the forefront of the national debate.
“I think Trump deserves a lot of credit for making immigration the No. 1 issue,” Schlafly said. “I believe it is. Look at how immigration has destroyed Germany. I thought Germany was tough, but apparently they were no match for the hordes of illegal immigrants coming in, and I’m afraid that would happen in this country if we don’t have somebody who stands up strong against these illegals.”
Schlafly, a WND columnist and author of “Who Killed the American Family?” said Cruz’s Iowa caucus win shows he has a solid following but is not decisive by any means, considering Trump still leads the polls in many states.
Viguerie, on the other hand, believes Cruz can translate his momentum from Iowa into something much bigger. He sees Cruz as more promising than Mike Huckabee in 2008 or Rick Santorum in 2012, the previous two Republican Iowa caucus winners.
“Cruz, unlike Huckabee or Santorum, is running a 50-state campaign,” Viguerie said. “Huckabee and Santorum put all their eggs in one basket, and there was no opportunity to have an encore when they got to New Hampshire. They were starting fresh in South Carolina. Not so with Cruz. He’s got the largest number of individual donors of any of the Republican candidates out there. He’s got more super PAC money than all the other [GOP] candidates except for Bush.”
In short, Cruz is running a much more solid campaign than Huckabee in 2008 or Santorum in 2012, according to Viguerie.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, saw the strong influence of the immigration issue in the Iowa caucus results. He noted Cruz, the winner, had received the backing of the House’s biggest immigration hawk, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. Trump, the runner-up, gained so much initial support largely because of his powerful immigration stance.
But rather than laud Marco Rubio’s third-place finish, as some media outlets have done, Krikorian opined that immigration actually hurt the Florida senator’s vote total.
“The fact that Rubio didn’t win or didn’t even place second was I think, partly, because of his immigration history, because Rubio otherwise is an attractive candidate,” Krikorian said. “Had he not gotten in bed with Chuck Schumer in 2013, he probably would be the favorite for the nomination now.”
Neither Cruz nor Rubio has been as staunch as Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions on immigration, Krikorian confessed, but there is a fundamental difference between the two. Whereas Rubio was a member of the “Gang of Eight” that sponsored the infamous immigration reform bill in 2013, Cruz fought against the bill and voted against it.
“That’s the bottom line,” Krikorian emphasized. “One voted against it, the other not just voted for it but did everything he could, including dishonest propaganda, to pass one of Barack Obama’s main second-term policy goals.”
Krikorian added Trump, for all his bluster, is not perfect on the immigration issue either, given that his positions have been “all over the map” in the past.
Among the three aforementioned candidates, Cruz stands closest to Krikorian’s ideal position on immigration.
“It’s not as though there is one candidate who really stands out as the perfect immigration hawk in the presidential field, but there’s no question that Rubio is not that person and Cruz is closer to that ideal than either Rubio or Trump, frankly,” Krikorian said.
Viguerie, for his part, believes Cruz’s appeal to subsequent primary voters will boil down to one thing – viability as a candidate.
“Cruz can be the next president if he just does one thing,” the veteran activist asserted. “He has one big challenge…. What the voters are focused on right now is making sure the Republicans nominate someone who can win in November. They don’t want to revisit Goldwater again.
“If Cruz can convince the primary voters, caucus-goers, that he can win in November, he’ll be the nominee.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/conservative-icon-trumps-balloon-has-been-punctured/
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