The nation’s votes need to elect more “conservatives that are responsive to the people,” Matt Kibbe, president and CEO of FreedomWorks, told Newsmax.TV.
“We need to get away from the notion that a perfect president is going to solve our problems,” Kibbe, author of “Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government’s Stranglehold on America,” told Newsmax on Thursday. “It’s got to be a move from an imperial presidency like we have today to a more bottom-up governance that’s defined by the people, defined by the House and the Senate. That’s the way the Founders wanted it.
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We may be obsessed a little bit too much about finding the next Ronald Reagan, when in fact we should be electing more constitutional conservatives to the House and Senate, conservatives that are responsive to the people. This is what the Founders intended.”
He added: “This really is a struggle between the insiders in Washington, D.C. – and in that I would include, frankly, the establishment of both the political parties: The crony capitalists, the labor unions, all of the inside interests that have gotten comfortable, cozy, protected, by the current system versus the shareholders that have been shut out of the meeting and ignored by the people that supposedly work for them.
“This is the clash, between the bottom-up, between the people, and the insiders that are perfectly comfortable with the status-quo, even if the country is driving off a fiscal cliff,” he said.
For fiscal conservatives to be successful, Kibbe said: “We have to show up. That’s the lesson that we’ve re-learned with the emergence of the Tea Party. It’s a lesson that our Founders demanded of us when they created the Constitution.
“George Washington said that the sacred fire of liberty will not continue to burn bright unless the people hold their government accountable. This is something that we forgot at some point. We thought it was OK to send people to Washington and leave them to their own devices. That’s not going to happen anymore because we now have an ability – through the Internet, through competing sources of information – to find out what they’re up to and to more easily hold them accountable for their actions.”
And Kibbe believes the fiscal conservatives’ strategy of decentralized government will prevail over big money and big names in this fall’s elections.
“I’m very confident that the decentralized community that we call the Tea Party – people that love freedom, people that are willing to take a responsibility to bring their government back – that this model, this decentralized model, is far more powerful than all of the advantages that the insiders have,” Kibbe said.
“They have money, they have name ID, they have the party apparatus – but we know, from our understanding of free-market economics – that bottom-up decentralization works better than top-down planning.
“And we saw this tested in action just recently in Wisconsin. The best of the best of the Public Employees Union get-out-the-vote machine was beat by the citizens of Wisconsin. I think that portends well for the fall 2012.”
On other issues, Kibbe said that:
- President Barack Obama is presiding over “an imperial presidency: an unwillingness to be accountable to the legislative branch, an end-run around existing law, these are all signs that we’ve lost the constitutional moorings that our Founders created. They did not intend for the president to be a dictator. They did not intend for the president to have unlimited powers.”
- GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney is not likely to select Fla. Sen. Marco Rubio as his running mate because “in a lot of ways, Marco Rubio might overshadow the Romney campaign.” He added: “We’d be most excited about Marco Rubio, a member of the Tea Party class, the Senator from Florida that has been willing to challenge the status quo.”
- Minn. Gov. Tim Pawlenty won’t be named to the ticket, either. “It’s kind of a Mitt Romney part-two choice that doesn’t really add a new dimension to the ticket,” Kibbe said. “I don’t have a particular problem with Tim Pawlenty, but that’s not new excitement. Pawlenty is certainly not a member of the Tea Party class.”
FreedomWorks is preparing for its “Tea Party 3.0” meeting on July 26 at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. “We’re not a protest movement anymore. We’re not just a get-out-the-vote machine. We want to dig into the ideas. We want to build the community. We want to talk about moving into cultural space. We’re going to talk politics, we’re going to talk about values – and we’re going to bring in what I call a ‘World Tea-Party,’ with attendees expected from such nations as Greece, Japan and Australia.
“This is not just an uprising anymore,” Kibbe said. “We’ve become a global community.”
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