How the tea party can take back GOP

By Ed Hanks

You remember how you felt a year before the 2012 presidential election, don't you?

Conservatives were energized and passionately engaged. We were itching to throw President Obama out on his ear, along with Obamacare and all his other wrong ideas and abuses of power.

All the "conventional wisdom" indications were on our side. We had good, principled candidates lined up. We had thousands of cheering fans at our rallies. Obama had dozens at his.

It was a heady, exciting time!

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Right up to the point Mitt Romney ran away with the nomination.

It was like we were Charlie Brown, and Lucy's holding the football, and we're about to kick a game-winning field goal, and …

And all we got was "I'm not a conservative, but I play one on TV!"

Obama was Jimmy Carter 1980 all over again, and …

How did we lose?!

Maybe a better question is how could we not?

We had a statist pro-abort who authored the model for Obamacare running as a pro-life fiscal conservative who was going to repeal Obamacare.

He couldn't carry off a speech about how conservative principles were going to rescue this country because he didn't really believe his own talking points.

Millions of us held our nose and voted for him. One or two million of us couldn't. Just couldn't.

And that's not even a new experience. All too familiar, really.

Why does this keep happening to us?

Why is the party of Ronald Reagan nominating candidates for major offices who think Reagan's policies were extreme?

We conservatives have to come to recognize that our "Lucy" is the GOP Establishment. They've been training us to do as they want, using fear, shame and peer pressure to manipulate our actions.

"You have to vote for the lesser of two evils – the other guy's a disaster, and you don't want that, do you?" Or, "Even if the GOP nominee is a socialist, we have to support him in the name of unity." Or, "You can't vote third party – that's just a vote for Obama. You're throwing your vote away!"

In my new book, How to Train Your Politician," I lay out how the promise of the tea party got squandered on guys like Mitt Romney. How, in all sincerity, we've been accidentally encouraging the GOP to nominate people who don't even believe in the party platform.

How we've actually been teaching the party to ignore us, because they know we'll be there in November, and will vote for the lesser of two evils, so long as they're not quite as bad as the other guy.

We will always get more of what we are willing to vote for.

We in the conservative movement are contributing to our own annihilation!

The only way to stop the "battered wife" syndrome is to refuse to do it any longer. We have to put a stop to it, or get out.

Subtitled "Intentional Voting As a Path To Tea Party & Constitutional Victory," my book explains how we can use pressure politics to take our party back and restore conservative principles as the core values to be espoused by our candidates.

Failing that, I describe a Plan B to preserve our values in a new home, bringing the dusty Reagan portraits with us.

Topics discussed in the book include:

• How the GOP Establishment trained conservatives to vote for progressive socialists
• How "lesser of two evils" voting and compromised leadership undermine conservatism
• Special chapters about the tea party and Christian conservatives
• How third parties influence politics, even without winning
• Why Establishment candidates lose, and how elections are really won
• How we can train political parties to respond to our agenda instead

If there are never any consequence for bad behavior, it will continue and get worse. These nominees are testing us to see how far they can go before we put a stop to it. If they move left and get away with it, they'll just move further left.

Parents of willful children know this. Success in disobedience always encourages them to test the limits even further.

We have to end the cycle. We should be in charge of this party. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan from an early 1980 primary debate, "We paid for this party – we built it – and we're going to use it!"

Ed Hanks is a former speechwriter, press secretary and political consultant to campaigns and the pro-life movement. He is the author of "How To Train Your Politician: Intentional Voting As a Path to Tea Party & Constitutional Victory" (available on Kindle with a paperback coming soon). He blogs at lookontherightside.com and can be found also at Facebook.com/conservativechange and on Twitter @ReagansLegacy.