Former Council for National Policy executive director Steve Baldwin spoke to his fellow Romney critic Steve Deace this week, where they complained that conservative leaders didn’t heed their warnings about nominating Romney, and are now mourning that “America’s culture, America’s economy [and] America’s Christian history” were dealt a potentially fatal blow after Obama’s re-election.
Deace: Some of us spent the better part of our lives in the last year and a half telling everybody who mattered in this movement that we know, that this is what was going to happen if we nominate this guy. We risked friendships, relationships, radio affiliates, business relationships, trying to avoid the conversation you and I are having right now, and yet unfortunately most of these people for reasons—I don’t really care what they are anymore—they just didn’t want to listen, they just didn’t want to list to it. That’s what’s frustrating.
Baldwin: I’ve been warning people for ten years about this man and the more I warned the more people thought I was crazy. Now here we are, the worst loss I’ve seen in terms of impact on America’s culture, America’s economy, America’s Christian history. This loss is going to do so much damage to us, this was one of those campaigns that we have to get right and we didn’t get it right.
Baldwin later claimed that Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann all “could have won” in November. He also described a conference call he participated in with other conservatives about how leaders of the Religious Right, Tea Party and Ron Paul supporters need to unite for the 2016 election so the GOP doesn’t nominate a candidate like Romney.
Baldwin: With $1 billion, with maybe twice as much money as John McCain had, he got 2.5 million votes less, it would be difficult to perform worse than Romney, you would have to really try hard to do as bad as Romney did.
Deace: Do you think that any of the Republicans, any of the other alternatives to Romney in this primary, do you believe that any of them would have won this election, and if so—whom and why?
Baldwin: Oh yeah, I actually think every major candidate, from Gingrich to Santorum to Perry to Bachmann, I think any of them could have won. All they had to was tell the truth about Obama’s economy, his foreign policy, his attack on our culture, just tell the truth. Romney never told anyone anything about this guy.
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Baldwin: I had a long discussion with a number of conservative leaders on a conference call today and there was some agreement here that there needs to be some high level discussions that go on between the three major conservative branches of the Republican party, and they may not even like that term ‘Republican party.’ I’m talking about the Christian Right—the social conservatives—, the Tea Party conservatives, and of course there’s overlap here, and the Ron Paul conservatives, and all three groups have overlaps. But there are people respected as leaders within all three of those entities that I feel need to get together and have some discussion about how we can sing the same song sheet in the future and try to unite because there was a problem here, we conservatives were split up so many ways that Romney took advantage of that and strode right on in and clinched the primary, we can’t do that anymore.
