Brand-new strategy to catch 'phony' Republicans

'We've invented a new RINO trap'

Leo Hohmann is a news editor for WND. He has been a reporter and editor at several suburban newspapers in the Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, areas and also served as managing editor of Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina.



Zach Werrell gets congratulated after the stunning upset of his candidate, Dave Brat, over former House majority leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 GOP primary

Nobody running for office on the GOP ticket wants to be called a “RINO.”


A “Republican in name only.”
A new book offers advice on how to identify these undercover operatives, expose them, and defeat them in next year’s congressional primary elections.
How to Bag a RINO,” by Zach Werrell and Gray Delaney hits the market as the filing season for congressional candidates begins to open across the U.S., running for roughly the next 30 to 60 days depending on the jurisdiction.
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/11/how-to-bag-a-rino-bookcover.jpg

Werrell and Delaney ran the campaign for Rep. Dave Brat’s 2014 stunning upset of Eric Cantor in Virginia. He and William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration or ALIPAC recently sat down together to plan a strategy that would offset the Chamber of Commerce’s targeting of conservative Republicans in next year’s elections.
The Chamber has amassed a $100 million war chest to defeat conservative, anti-establishment Republicans in districts across the U.S.
Werrell and Gheen are targeting the RINOs, those who say they are conservative but support mass immigration, secret trade deals, Obamacare or other issues offensive to the GOP base.
The problem is, you can’t get elected in red states without impressing the base, so the RINO is a clever animal. Whether male or female, the RINO will talk a good game and sound extremely conservative whether its in TV and radio ads or while giving the well-rehearsed stump speech.
Gheen and Werrell hope the new book, used in concert with ALIPAC’s “Cantor List” of amnesty-supporting Republicans, will serve as a playbook for replacing more Cantor-like RINOs and replacing them with anti-establishment conservatives willing to go to war for the people instead of the Chamber of Commerce.
Sen. Ted Cruz made the comment Wednesday night on Fox News that Republicans will give up immigration as an issue in 2016 if they nominate a presidential candidate who has embraced amnesty for illegals.
And that would have a disastrous effect not only on who wins the White House for the next four years, but who controls Congress, says Gheen.
image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/09/ted-cruz.jpg

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas

He says ALIPAC has come up with a three-fold strategy to make sure Cruz’s worst nightmare doesn’t come to pass.
“What Cruz is saying is, if the Republican candidate is the same as the Democrat on amnesty for illegals like we had with John McCain versus Barack Obama, then that is going to hurt all of our down-ballot elections,” said Gheen.
“It will hurt our chances to win the White House, because there are many people out there like myself who will never pull the lever for a candidate who supports amnesty, but it will also hurt the down-ballot candidates.”
Obama said in 2014 he wanted the elections to be a referendum on his policies.
His most notable policies at the time were Obamacare and use executive decrees, since declared unconstitutional by two federal courts, to grant amnesty to 5 million illegals while at the same time catering to and encouraging the surge of illegal Central Americans at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The voters reacted by giving a historic, sweeping victory to Republicans in Congress. But some of those elected turned out to be closet RINOs, failing to back promises to defund Obamacare, granting Obama fast-track authority to negotiate a secret trade deal with Asian nations and re-affirming Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, as speaker.
“The problem is the Republicans went up there and blocked everything that countered Obama’s policies,” Gheen said.
After months of planning, Werrell has formed a new consulting firm to help anti-establishment, pro-American candidates take on and oust the establishment candidates who support mass immigration, Obamacare and secret trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership.
One of Werrell’s first clients is J.D. Winteregg, who is challenging Boehner in Ohio.
At the same time, Werrell hopes “How to Bag a RINO,” will inspire more anti-establishment types to run against the RINOs in next year’s primary, striking at the heart of the Chamber of Commerce establishment.
The final prong of the strategy is ALIPAC’s “Cantor List,” a comprehensive outing of every member of Congress who supports amnesty, Gheen said.
“Everyone wants to talk about the presidential candidates and illegal immigration, but none of that matters if we don’t change Congress,” he said. “We have got to change Congress by getting rid of these amnesty supporters. There are right now more than 100 on the Cantor List, there is nothing else like it. It is the most comprehensive list out there. It’s all documented with evidence.”
A lot of those 100 candidates, voters supported thinking they were going to oppose amnesty and the TPP, Gheen said, due to clever advertising and talking points.
“But they were actually Karl Rove candidates recruited by Rove and the Bush-Koch brothers-Fox News machine,” he said, referring to the establishment wing of the GOP.
“The new strategy we are circulating today is the only counter measure on the field that we are aware of,” he said. “It’s our new mouse trap. We’ve invented a new RINO trap and we’re hoping the American voters will beat a path to our door.”
That leads back to Cruz’s comment Wednesday night.
“I think Cruz is trying to make a point at how important the illegal immigration issue is to the base and at this point if any GOP primary candidate but Trump, Cruz or Santorum wins, the party will go with amnesty,” Gheen said. “But everyone is entranced by the presidential race, which won’t matter if we don’t change Congress. We need that energy focused on the congressional candidates with the filing period opening across the country and we must find quality candidates to fill all those races.”
Lessons from the Eric Cantor race
Werrell agrees with Cruz that the stakes are high.
His book is a how-to field guide told through the eyes of the Brat campaign, which unseated Cantor, who was the golden boy of the establishment anointed as the next speaker in waiting. Cantor outspent Brat 40-to-1.
“We wanted to make sure there are lessons drawn from that race that are universally applied for those who have a RINO problem,” Werrell said. “I have to say, not all RINOs are moderates, and not all moderates are RINOs. Being a RINO has to do more with cronyism, your involvement in cronyism, selling out, and duplicity on the campaign trail.”
Cantor, for instance, portrayed himself publicly as a true conservative all while secretly plotting to enact “amnesty,” Werrell said.
To demystify the candidates and prevent them from disguising their true positions on issues like immigration, Werrell is working on a formula that identifies a RINO in objective terms.
“Someone could have an 80 percent record with the Heritage Foundation but the three things they voted poorly on could be the most important things facing our republic,” he said. “You could score an 85 and have voted for full funding of Obamacare, raising the debt ceiling, and funding executive amnesty, because it doesn’t really weight the importance of the vote.
How to define a RINO
He said the makeup of each candidate’s district also must be considered.
“And so I’m working on a mathematical definition of a RINO, a formula or objective criteria that weights the average of your scores with various conservative reports, then compares it with the Cook Partisan Voting Index.
The best possible for each district. You can’t have a Dave Brat in Peter King’s district (in New York). But Peter is going to be a RINO because he committed crimes against conservatism.
He said the whole point of his work is to bring the Republican representation in Congress into line with the base of GOP voters, to get the ratio closer to reality.
“Right now RINO Republicans are far over-represented, when you look at the American people,” he said.
“So if some candidate says ‘oh no I’m not a RINO’ we can say, ‘well, based on this, this and this, you are a RINO.’
“At least we’ll be able to say you’re an anti-conservative Republican if not a RINO. Sometimes defining the shadow tells us enough about the object itself.”
There is no single issue that defines a RINO but if Werrell had to pick one, he said immigration would be it.
“William and I have slightly different definitions. He is a single-issue man,” he said. “I don’t fault him for that, so he’s helping me find candidates to run against amnesty supporters and generally if you support amnesty, yes, you’re probably a RINO.”
Werrell said his strategy will be non-traditional, employing the most successful tactics of the left and the right.
“Language is a weapon and we need to use it. The Marxists are very good at using language to emotionally charge everything,” he said.
An example is the migrant crisis in Europe. The media, teaming with leftist politicians, focused on one photograph, of a boy’s dead body washing up on a beach in Turkey.
“It was all they needed to emotionalize the issue. You want this? Then you are for dead children,” he said. “Language is not a neutral element. It is a weapon. And we need weaponize it.”
His new consulting firm, Sic Semper Strategy, is based in Richmond, Virginia.
“We’re the anti-consulting consulting firm and at the root level philosophically it is harnessing the tools the founders gave us in this country and the way we do that is by data driven, intelligent, low overhead strategies that conservative candidates can use against anybody,” he said. “We’re moving away from the Karl Rove model and mimicking the successes of the left.”


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