By Rick Manning
With friends like the National Republican Congressional Committee, who needs enemies? That must be the question Republican House candidate David Jolly is asking himself today. Fighting to win the special election to fill the seat of Bill Young who died earlier this year, Jolly is now having to spend the last days of his campaign dealing with self-serving public complaints from those in the NRCC who are attempting to shift any potential blame for a loss down to Florida.
The whining of the D.C. Republican establishment may be warranted, I don’t know, but it is revelatory that they have chosen to dump all over Jolly’s campaign before election day. It is this self-serving, anonymous leaking, nonsense that should make every Republican candidate wary of getting too cozy with the current crop of campaign geniuses.
After all, this is a group that lost to Nancy Pelosi in 2006, got destroyed by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, winning only in 2010 when outsiders under the Tea Party banner took the reins and won elections in spite of them. Now, this brilliant establishment is not only waging war on those who led them back into power in 2010, but also on any Republican candidate who is in danger of underperforming.
Republican congressional candidates across the nation should remember that those same smiling, earnest faces who greet them when they come to D.C. to make all the right connections are the same unattributed whisperers who will attempt to destroy your campaign when it suits their purpose. If you are fortunate enough to win, these same sycophants will call you sir or ma’am, while angling to put themselves or their friends on your staff to bring you into their orbit.
Of course, if you dare to resist the D.C. group think, expect the anonymous Politico whisperers to re-emerge slicing you to bits one paper cut at a time.
It is the D.C. self-absorbed Republican way. Pathetic, isn’t it?
Read the story in http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/david-jolly-alex-sink-florida-special-election-2014-104397.html
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is the vice president for public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government. He can be reached at rmanning@getliberty.org.
