American Crossroads’ President and CEO Steven Law tells Newsmax.TV that President Obama’s new political machine is nothing more than a “brazen” attempt by the commander-in-chief to put the White House up for sale to the highest bidder.
“I really can’t think of anything that’s quite as brazen as what we’ve seen and it just portrays the president as a hypocrite on these issues,” said Law during an exclusive interview on Tuesday.
“The president at some point has to be an honest broker. He’s got to be somebody who can make deals with both sides and this is the first president, again, that I can think of in my political lifetime, who had a political machine on the outside that was basically designed to attack his opponents on Capitol Hill if they resisted what he wanted to do.”
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On Wednesday some of President Obama’s most devout supporters will pony up $50,000 to attend a fundraiser for the new organization — Organizing for Action — which was created by former senior campaign and administration aides.
White House press secretary Jay Carney has insisted that OFA is "a separate organization" but said Obama will meet "periodically" with members of the organization. He likened the group to any other organization that promotes public policy and said "any notion, as we've talked about, that there is a price set for a meeting with the president is absurd and wrong."
But Law countered: “I think It’s tremendously arrogant for this president, for Jay Carney, to assume that whatever the president wants is what America always wants and that’s almost certainly not the case on any number of issues — be it Obamacare, the stimulus, or on some of their proposals on the environment.”
Law predicted, however, that Organizing for Action, which grew out of the president’s re-election effort, will leave a bad taste with the American public.
“I think it’s going to make it much harder for him to get things done in Washington,” predicted Law, whose powerful American Crossroads organization was formed in 2010 with the help of Bush guru Karl Rove and former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie.
During the 2012 election, American Crossroads and its affiliate American Crossroads GPS, marshaled nearly $200 million in an attempt to defeat Obama.
Nevertheless, Law said that’s hardly the same as a sitting president lending his prestige to an organization such as Organizing for Action.
And Law dismisses charges by the left that Organizing for Action is a direct response to his powerful group.
“This is the president of the United States selling access to himself for a half million dollars a clip and having huge resources of the federal government — green energy grants, special contracts, other sorts of rewards in the policy arena that he can dispense to people who give him that money,” Law insisted. “We’re a private organization. We get no government support. People who support us are doing it just because they believe in the cause of trying to change the country and they have nothing that they get out of it other than the feeling that they’re doing some good for the country.”
Earlier in his career Law served as general counsel of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor, and executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for both the 1998 and 2000 election cycles.
“It’s important to point out the difference between what the president has said on the one hand about this kind of practice and what he’s actually doing on the other,” Law explained. “The other thing is that at some point the president is going to realize this is actually actively hurting him.”
With respect to the House GOP Budget proposal released on Tuesday, Law said that Republicans get points for coming up with a plan to start the dialogue toward a bipartisan solution.
“Obviously we’re going to need a bipartisan solution to these budget issues,” he acknowledged. “Meanwhile, we’ll be asking the Democrats, where’s your plan? Where’s the beef? Pretty soon the Democrats will have a plan of their own. We’re told it’s upwards of $1 trillion in new taxes. I don’t think that’s going to sell with the American people either.”
Law acknowledged that fellow Republicans are undergoing “some soul searching and wondering what we can do better” as a result of the disappointing November election result.
“My expectations will come out of that with a renewed sense of purpose and mission and unity. We’ve seen some things even recently with the Rand Paul filibuster and the fight over the sequester that’s helped unify us a little bit, giving us a sense that we can work together and we can push the administration back.
He said that Republicans overall will face a “better situation” in the upcoming election cycle than in 2012.
“We’re going to have to fight hard in the House. The Democrats and the president are going to make it their goal to take back the majority,” he said.
“On the Senate side, it is a reach to get the majority but we’ve got a pathway to get there, or at least probably there,” he said. “You’ve got six Democrats who are running in states in the Senate that Mitt Romney carried by 10 percentage points or more — six Democrats in states that are deep, deep red and we can have competitive races in each of those six.”
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He also predicted that the GOP has a “good chance” or defeating North Carolina incumbent Sen. Kate Hagan in her first re-election bid, and he said that some open seat contests “look attractive” in Michigan, Iowa, and West Virginia for possible GOP gains.
While his organization has received its share of criticism for its recently launched Conservative Victory Project, which seeks to weed out GOP primary candidates who are deemed unviable, Law maintains that the initiative has been mischaracterized.
“If we’re responsible for that in anyway, that’s unfortunate,” he said. “But the truth of the matter is our goal is to try to elect the most conservative candidate who can win in any state or district, and one of the things is that we’ve had a candidate quality problem on the Republican side this last cycle. And that’s not just true of very conservative candidates. It was also true of a lot of so-called establishment candidates.”
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