Rove´s plan is a tough sell when rank and file republicans are sick and tired of all the sell out establishment republicans. We need more Cruz´s,Rubio´s and rand pauls but there too outspoken for the hapless establishment to stomach.

Sure the teaparty people made some bad choices the last couple years but nobody thought they´d be openly stupid with foot in mouth disease.

Liberals lose elections all the time but nobody puts a microscope on something stupid they said or did.

Republicans want tea party voters without them having a voice at the table on policy.

Rove had tons of money this past election and didn´t get any senate members elected that I know of,except shoo in types.

i don´t like Eric Erickson or the Redstate crowd who ousted sen,Lugar and handed that seat to the dems.Purity tests are fine until you look down and you´re missing both feet.There has to be some pragmatism involved.

On the other hand the tea party should never have hired Dick Armey,an establishment type,through and through.The more unknown tea party leaders are,the better.The left can´t pull an Alinsky on them.

Podhoretz, like other establishment Republicans, is simply a gas that conservatives are actually leaving the Republican Party. Podhoretz is one of those people that´s just cannot separate Republican and conservative. They are two different things.

The GOP has been bleeding conservatives ever since 2008 and probably even before that. I know they lost me in 2008. Their solution? Move to the left.

Now they are broadcasting it to us – we are moving to the left. And we just cannot understand why you don´t want to move to the left with us. It´s all about winning, not about principles.

Podhoretz can wallow on the trash pile along with the rest of them as far as I´m concerned.

Podhoretz is hugely mistaken. Ignore the Tea Party and there will be a Third Party. Better get used to it now.

Podhoretz has it exactly backwards and is missing information. Rove and the estab. lost at least 10 Senate races in 2012. That´s more than a few. The new group of Rove´s is just the latest in a long string of events. The NY Times is the GOP´s new best pal, Rove gave them the scoop on his new group. Boehner gave the Times 2 articles after the election including private, insider discussions among newly chastened GOP´s who realized Obama won, and they must give him what he wants. This NY Post article showcases Akin of course and incorrectly describes him as a Tea Party candidate. Akin was a sitting congressman, the primary uniquely had a number of candidates running close together. Sarah Palin endorsed one of the candidates in the primary but not Akin. If Podhoretz had listened to Mark Levin Monday evening he would´ve heard a detailed account of how Rove and the establishment gave away the Senate and the House during the Bush years. Podhoretz doesn´t note we gave the GOP House an historic landslide in 2010 which all sides agreed the GOP didn´t deserve. The GOP barely existed after the 2008 election. Right after the 2010 landslide, Trent Lott told the media it was imperative for the establishment to co-opt the new people. Which they did. Rove and the establishment elected Obama twice and are fine with him, are big government fans so are comfortable with democrats. Right of center Americans deserve a 2 party system and we don´t have one.

Podhoretz misses the point, which he rarely does. The problem with "establishment" Republicans has been their willingness - no, their abject eagerness - to "compromise" with the socialists, thus advancing the socialist agenda, step by step (the only difference being the socialists would move it along faster). Given that, being against the socialists means necessarily being against the now incorrigible GOP "establishment", which accepts about every premise the Democrats put out there. People are sick of being duped and betrayed, is all.

First, I am a member of Tea Party Patriots so I am not anti tea party. Second, Podhurst is correct that the New Establishment (as he calls it) considers the Old Establishment its enemy and is prepared to fight it tooth and nail and destroy it. They go about it with insults belittling and contempt. This is not right and I have, in my small way, tried to say so to the founder of my tea party. Who has a head like a rock.

Two thoughts on the article--

First, demonizing the "tea party" is going to eventually lead to the creation of a third party of those who believe in original Constitutional principles about the proper role of government because the "old bulls" as Mark Levin calls them, are trying any and all desperate measures to hold on to their "power".

Second, it is impossible to create and follow a cult of followers of a person because people are human and can fail.

Many in the Establishment ranks of the party, want us to coalesce around a candidate for national office instead of the candidates for national office being believers in limited government. MORE Government cannot solve the problems we face, and this "big tent" philosophy that Establishment republicans "can do it better than demonrats" is dead wrong.

If that is the case, then what difference is there between the opposition and the republican party? Rather than say republicans can run government better, why not return to our roots and say less government is better?

The country clubbers of the Establishment are quite out of touch with what is wanted.

The author is spot on. The party needs to grow, not shrink. These conservative ´purity´ tests by the Tea Party are nuts. If you can´t work successfully with people who agree with you 75% of the time, then how in the world can you expect to govern a country where 50% agree with you maybe 10% of the time?

It would be wise for the Tea Party to figure out how to get along with other Republicans before making big plans.

We start winning when Karl Rove disappears. Not one day sooner.

This will be a short post...unlike the previous nine.

What fabulously wealth people does Karl Rove intend to fleece in 2014 after losing with candidates like Rick Berg, Denny Rehberg, George Allen, Heather Wilson, Tommy Thompson and Linda Lingle? Wealthy donors don´t get to be wealthy wasting money as they did in 2012. I think Karl´s roadshow may be on permanent hiatus soon.

This Rove effort is a Rove planted story. He was such a systemic failure in the past cycle that he has to try to shift the blame so that his funding continues. If people want a real story, find out how much Rove owned companies made from American Crossroads. They are now avoiding calling him the "Architect" because of what he just built.

If you are a wealthy person that gave Rove a lot of money in the last cycle in return for progress reports that proved to be Cr*p, would you give him funds? That´s his problem.

The Tea Party is a movement not an organization and is evolving with each election. Locally, they are getting smarter as they become more successful in local elections. They insert themselves into larger races on a local basis but are not organized enough yet to have a major impact absent a more charismatic candidate like Ted Cruz.

You will find that Mr. Rove will not get the Funds he seeks and the Tea Party Movement, national organizations excepted, will move forward. The Old Republican Party is an empty husk.

Semper Fi

I agree the article is optimistic blather. There are only TWO political forces in the U.S. today. One,the Leviathan of Big Government, consisting of two ostensibly adversarial parties, who disguise this system by occasionally trading roles of good cop/bad cop as they harass and target: Two---the blighted, beleaguered, non-wealthy, AND importantly, NON politically connected (neither by influence and protection purchased by great wealth, nor by membership in a protected-status "victim" category) taxpayer plebs.

I´m not a republican just conservative but we´ve got to unite or were doomed, I´m sick of the infighting. Were undermining our cause with big help from Obama and the media.

Sure it´s easy to say no more losing candidates, were not focused on winning elections when we come apart at the seems.

The key difference right now is that the Old Establishment is obsessed with expanding the number of voters who’ll pull the lever for Republicans

The important point left out there is that that obsession has driven the ´Old Establishment´ to abandon the original principles of the Party in order to entice those new votes. That makes the Old Establishment, technically, the New Establishment and, yes, they are acting illegitimately.

What Mr. Podhoretz wants to call the ´New Establishment´ is reallly an attempt by the grass roots to re-establish the party´s original moorings. There would be no need to ´seize control´ of the Republican Party had its principles not been usurped by the Old/New Establishment in the first place.

By the way, if the Old/New Establishment is really concerned about Democrats deciding who the winner is in a GOP primary, then they should get off their Old Established butts and close the primaries in states like Michigan, where the Democrats have been deciding the winners of the GOP primaries for quite some time now.

The real problem that the Tea Party has is that it is not supported by extremely wealthy people. It is supported by "We the People" who are just trying to make by and send donations to individual candidates as we can afford to.

The Republican establishment is full of wealthy, elitist individuals who want to retain power. They stand around talking about the donations they make to organizations that help the world, ie, donating cows to South America. I wanted to throw up. All I could think about was how much better spent that money would have been going to Wounded Warrior Project.

The Dem elites are no different, except they want to destroy this country.

On some levels Obama isn´t wrong, except that the class warfare is the elites, Dem and Reps, against the middle class, and the entitlement class against the middle class. Those of us in the middle class are fighting for our survival against the Republicans, Democrats and the entitlement class. We are nothing to them except tax dollars.

Although I am a social and financial conservative and believe strongly that the two are linked, my understanding is that the Tea Party (only party I will respect with capital letters)is a financially conservative party. If nothing else, that suggests to me that we have at least one sane political party. I´ll support them. The republicans need to either fully join the dems (in essence they have)or disappear from the elections.....they are no longer relevant.

Lemme fix that last paragraph for ya, John.

"The key difference right now is that the Old Establishment is obsessed with expanding . . . the Republican party.

While the "New Establishment" is so consumed with putting an Oedipal stake in the heart of vampiric taxation and deficit spending that it seems actually to prefer a return to Constitutional principles.

Which is nuts to the Establishment power brokers."

There ya go.

i just marvel at the republican kool-aid drinkers on this site.

we got $16 trillion in debt and they dont understand that the repugs are as complicit as the Dimms.

those who like the kool-aid need to study history a bit more. go back and look how they (establishment repugs) treated Reagan in 1976 and 1980. look what Bush Sr did to the Reagan revolution. The bushes and Rove have destroyed the republican party´s reputation.

time to put this party on the scrap heap of history.

I saw no sanity in John Podhoretz´s article--what I saw was backing for continuation of the ´go along to get along´, cave to the Democrats at anytime and let them have their way.
Rove´s comments about Gov. Palin´s endorsements not being worth Snot--hmmmmmmmph, it was her "snot" endorsements which accomplished in getting the three (3) New Senators elected. Now, why should we listen to Rove? I don´t recall hearing he has been made the defacto leader of the Republican party.

During the Cold War there was a saying, "Better Red than dead." It meant that it was better to compromise with Communism than to be killed by it. This appealing little phrase missed the hard truth that it was quite possible to end up Red AND dead. You could compromise with Communism and be killed by it. Millions were.

The Rovers are putting forward a false choice: Compromise and settle on our candidates or lose elections. As that great Establishment hope, Mitt Romney, reminds us, you can compromise and still lose.

If you want conservative policies, you have to nominate conservative candidates. If you pick establishment moderates, you´ve already lost that central principle. And there´s a good chance the establishment moderate will lose the election in any case. Karl Rove attacked his employer, Fox News, on election night for reporting what most of us had already figured out: Mitt Romney had lost to weakest incumbent in American history. And these are the "sane" people we need picking our candidates next time? Talk about suicide. Talk about nuts.

I blame the Old GOPers for the failures of Tea Party candidates. Had they embraced & trained them on how to manage the press, supported them with ads, they would have succeeded.

Rove is trying to answer the threat of Obama´s election miscreants now formed as a 501C. They are targeting GOP stars at the local level... trashing them & getting them to drop out before even running. They ran 2 out of politics just last week.

The death of the Tea Party has been promoted every year since 2010. I do feel a 3rd party is inevitable, as the old GOP is ashamed of our values, morals, Christianity and support of the constitution. I do think they greatly underestimate the # of TPers.