Rick Perry hired Austin Barbour via Gulflive
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry seems to have largely escaped the scrutiny recently directed toward Scott Walker for hiring establishment operative Brad Dayspring who aggressively lied about the Tea Party during the hotly contested Mississippi primary last year.
While Scott Walker, who this author has long suspected of as having establishment sympathies, has been appropriately getting heat for hiring a pro-Cochran thug, Rick Perry should also be called out for his “terrible hires,” including Henry Barbour (who previously worked for Perry), and should be “censured” and is “quite possibly the most despised campaign consultant in the entire conservative movement,” “McCain flunkie” Steve Schmidt (who believes that Sarah Palin “is filled with anger, has a divisive message”) and Austin Barbour (who also worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign) as senior adviser to three of Perry’s super PACs.
As reported at CNN Friday:
Two pro-Perry groups — Opportunity and Freedom PAC and Opportunity and Freedom PAC I — raised $12.8 million in the first half of the year. A third super PAC, which was created Thursday, collected a $4 million check from a single donor, bringing the full tally for the three groups to $16.8 million as of July 10, said Austin Barbour, the senior adviser to all three affiliated entities.
Last year, NBC reported that the pro-GOP establishment Barbour family had “palpable” anger toward Chris McDaniel, who threatened the establishment in Mississippi. In a nutshell, creepy Kate Cochran’s father Thad, through his evidently-coveted campaign staff, convinced black Democrats with robocalls and radio advertisements in the 2014 primary that the Tea Party is racist and would take away food stamps.
A pro-Cochran radio advertisement said in part,
“[B]y not voting, you are saying ‘take away all of my government programs, such as food stamps, early breakfast and lunch programs, millions of dollars to our black universities’…everything we and our families depend on that comes from Washington will be cut.”
A pro-Cochran robocall lamented:
“[I]f we do nothing, Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel wins and causes even more problems for President Obama.”
The conservative grassroots, i.e. those paying attention, universally recognize and abhor the words and deeds of the power-grabbing, Constitution-shredding establishment republicans. Just as one will never (ever) find these politically-savvy folks excited about the prospect of a Jeb Bush presidency; the patriot movement is also unified in their disdain for those who lied (also see here and here) to black voters in Mississippi in order to secure a primary victory for establishment incumbent Thad Cochran in 2014.